Pleiades: News and Views

I can recommend Patrik Svensson's article "The Landscape of Digital Humanities" in Digital Humanities Quarterly as a good read. My comments here are about the internals of handing DHQ's paragraph based citation scheme.

Quick intro to the issue: DHQ is an online journal. It doesn't have pages to provide a physical solution to the need to make references to specific points in an article. So the html version numbers each paragraph. So far so good. As a reader I can note the paragraph number and cite it in a future publication.

But I'm not sure DHQ has quite the right implementation of this good idea. I'm arbitrarily picking the paragraph numbered 118. The one that starts, "Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities."

Note that I don't include a link directly to that paragraph. That's because I can't. Looking at the HTML source, I see:

<div class="counter">118</div><div class="ptext">Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording...

That's somewhat unfortunate. It would be great if the '<div class="ptext">' were changed to read '<div id="p118" class="ptext">. Then I could mint a URL of the form:

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#p118

It would be even cooler if the <div class="counter">118</div> also read:

<div class="counter"><a href="#p118">118</a></div>

I've wrapped the paragraph number in a link to the paragraph. That way a user can right/control-click on the link and copy-and-paste it into an e-mail or other work. Easy self-reference to an internal citation structure.

I'd also like to see the paragraph numbers represented in the XML source. Again, taking a snippet of that, the start of the paragraph numbered as 118 in the html, appears in the xml as:

<p>Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities...

Unless I'm missing something, the published citation scheme isn't represented in the archival version. I think it should be. Even if DHQ considers the paragraph number ephemeral, I think there's a valid scholarly need for them to be persistent.

I'm a big fan of DHQ so this is constructive criticism. And I'm sort of hoping that I've mis-understood something and that those paragraph numbers are more meaningful than they seem after one looks under the hood.

It's late August so my mind is on other things, like the next stretch of split-rail fence that I need to put in. But I do find it interesting that Heather Baker has used Academia.edu to distribute a corrected version of her paper "The layout of the ziggurat temple at Babylon" that first appeared in Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 2008.2 (Juin). Feel free to be similarly and vaguely inspired about issues of versioning, "scribal error", reference, etc.

Shapely's had a shape() function that makes geometric objects from GeoJSON-like mappings for some time. Now, by popular request, is the inverse: mapping():

>>> from shapely.geometry import Point, mapping
>>> m = mapping(Point(0, 0))
>>> m['type']
'Point'
>>> m['coordinates']
(0.0, 0.0)

The new function operates on any object that provides __geo_interface__ [link]. This release also fixes a major bug involving GEOS versions < 3.1 introduced in 1.2.2. You can download an sdist from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Shapely/. Windows installers should be coming soon.

As I like to remind people every few releases, major portions of this work were supported by a grant (for Pleiades) from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov).

Update (2010-08-22): Win32 and Win-AMD64 installers have been uploaded to the locations above.

We've added KML and GeoRSS links

I'm very interested in finding ways through Pleiades and other ISAW digital projects to support the efforts of Leif, Elton and Eric on the "Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus" project. In particular, I'd hope we can integrate this into the web interfaces for our projects:

ECS will work on a Web Service and Web Widget [that] will make it possible for Webmasters to add links to the ancient texts [in Google Books] within their websites, enabling the public and researchers to search for them easily.

I've just posted a new screencast that, in less than 5 minutes, shows you had to draft a new, rudimentary place resource in Pleiades without recourse to Google Earth or other external tools. Let me know what you think.

Today we've published two updates to the content in Pleiades.

Sean Gillies has contributed updated coordinates and descriptive information for the so-called Pont Julien, a Roman bridge (ancient name, if any, unknown), located to the west of Apta Iulia (mod. Apt) in France. It had been indicated on Barrington Atlas Map 15 E2). The point coordinates Sean provides, as you'll see from the KML if you've got Google Earth, are more precise than the BAtlas map could provide given its scale of 1:500,000 (+/- 930 meters). Their derivation from Google Earth and Geoeye imagery is described in the associated accuracy assessment.

With help from Brian Turner and Richard Talbert, I've remedied an oversight in the Barrington Atlas: the omission of the Στροφάδες/Strophades islands. We'd originally addressed this oversight back in 2003, when I still worked for the Ancient World Mapping Center, having been alerted to the problem by Rick LaFleur. After Sean loaded the legacy information associated with BAtlas Map 1 into Pleiades, I started working on a place resource as well. In so doing, I dug a bit deeper and discovered the ancient tradition of an alternate, earlier name for this peculiar island group: Πλωταί/Plotae. Once again, Google Earth provided us with better coordinates, although not this time without some confusion (see the associated accuracy assessment and the map on the main resource page). I was also able to exploit the greater flexibility provided by Pleiades to enumerate all the attested name variants (including an ethnikon asserted by Stephanus of Byzantium), in their original orthography, and to provide citations of most of the relevant attestations of same in ancient literature.

It's great to see Pleiades moving closer to full-spectrum use. We're no longer just bringing material forward from the Classical Atlas Project, we're also publishing new, more accurate and complete information. I hope that soon you'll be seeing more of this sort of thing, with contributions by a widening community. You can be part of this community, if you're interested: here's how.

Thanks to all, including our editors, who helped get these resources ready to publish.

A thread on classics-l led to a request by Daniel Riaño that we should release the code we use in Pleiades to transliterate Greek. This code also can be used to verify that a string contains only valid UTF-8 characters for Greek (and also for Latin), prior to running the transliteration. Thanks to Sean's help, it's now released on pypi under a BSD license. Coptic's next.

Share and enjoy!

Map directories 100-102 have been imported successfully

Including the Aegaeum Mare

Here is ISAW's Associate Director for Digital Programs (my boss), Tom Elliot, on collaboration between Pleiades and DARMC [Ramping up Pleiades 2]:

Meanwhile, we've been in dialog with Michael McCormick, Guoping Huang and Kelly Gibson at Harvard. They're the driving force behind the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, with whom we're collaborating under the new grant. Our aim is to collate and share the datasets assembled by both projects and to cross-link our web applications. This will bring more accurate coordinates for many features into Pleiades, as well as a number of new features that will expand our time horizon into the middle ages. You'll get a choice of display and map interaction modes and, eventually, the ability to move back and forth between both resources. We'll keep you posted as the timeline for this portion of the work is refined.

Last March, I alerted readers to the great news that NEH had elected to fund a second round of work on the Pleiades project. We're picking up steam.

Sean Gillies, our chief engineer, has been adding more legacy content inherited from the Classical Atlas Project. We're nearly at the half-way point, with features associated with 48 of the 102 Barrington Atlas maps now represented as Pleiades resources (you can keep score on the Pleiades Content wiki page or monitor the Pleiades news feed for announcements as new content appears). Sean's also introduced a number of improvements to the web application and the user interface, and has been blogging about our data model.

Brian Turner (my co-managing editor) and I have been getting ready to start working on adding some new content that wasn't included in the Barrington, including a number of obscure features from the so-called Peutinger map that turned up during Richard Talbert's work to prepare a new scholarly edition of the map (forthcoming from Cambridge UP). Nico Aravecchia, a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW, has been working on new Pleiades resources for a number of poorly published and recently excavated Coptic sites in Egypt that also did not appear in the Barrington. We'll start publishing these new resources during the next month as they clear editorial review.

Meanwhile, we've been in dialog with Michael McCormick, Guoping Huang and Kelly Gibson at Harvard. They're the driving force behind the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, with whom we're collaborating under the new grant. Our aim is to collate and share the datasets assembled by both projects and to cross-link our web applications. This will bring more accurate coordinates for many features into Pleiades, as well as a number of new features that will expand our time horizon into the middle ages. You'll get a choice of display and map interaction modes and, eventually, the ability to move back and forth between both resources. We'll keep you posted as the timeline for this portion of the work is refined.

We also aim to make things easier for early adopters to get started. We're starting to script some more screencasts to show you how to suggest changes or additions to content. We've also been planning improvements to our data portability story: our commitment to open access dictates that we make it easy for you to export our complete content for external reuse elsewhere. Making specific plans for that is on the agenda for next month as well.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to submit them as comments here. If you'd like to give Pleiades a spin, follow the instructions for requesting an account.

Map directories 49-51, 53-54 (Greece) have been imported

Map directories 17-19 have been imported

Map directory 16 has been imported

Map directories 13 and 14 have been imported

To be published, pending review.

Map directory 13 has been imported without problems.

Sure, Academia.edu is far from perfect. But I continue to be psyched when I see people who have uploaded a bunch of papers or a book.

• Matthew Canepa
• Florin Curta
• Carlos Fabião
• David Gill
• Luca Girella
• Yannis Hamilakis
• Robert Maier. Particularly Glossarium Culinarium Latinum

Just a brief "thanks" to those who have added to my collection of digital offprints.

Map directory 12 has been imported and reviewed