Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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<strong>in</strong>ternational collaboration that led to the publication of the Barr<strong>in</strong>gton Atlas of the Greek and Roman
World. In fact, the creators of Pleiades see the website as a permanent way to update <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> the
Barr<strong>in</strong>gton onl<strong>in</strong>e. The creators of Pleiades consider their publication model as <strong>in</strong> some ways close to
both an academic journal and an encyclopedia:
Instead of a thematic organization and primary subdivision <strong>in</strong>to <strong>in</strong>dividually authored articles,
Pleiades pushes discrete author<strong>in</strong>g and edit<strong>in</strong>g down to the f<strong>in</strong>e level of structured reports on
<strong>in</strong>dividual places and names, their relationships with each other and the scholarly rationale
beh<strong>in</strong>d their content. In a real sense then Pleiades is also like an encyclopedic reference work,
but with the built-<strong>in</strong> assumption of on-go<strong>in</strong>g revision and iterative publish<strong>in</strong>g of versions
(Elliott and Gillies 2009b).
Rather than us<strong>in</strong>g toponyms or coord<strong>in</strong>ates as the primary organiz<strong>in</strong>g theme of the website, they have
used the concept of place “as a bundle of associations between attested names and measured (or
estimated) locations (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g areas)” (Elliott and Gillies 2009b). These bundles are called “features,”
and they can be positioned <strong>in</strong> time and have scholarly confidences registered to them. The ability to
<strong>in</strong>dicate levels of confidence <strong>in</strong> historical or uncerta<strong>in</strong> data is an important part of many digital classics
projects.
As the sheer amount of content is far beyond the scale of <strong>in</strong>dividual project participants to actively edit
and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>, the Pleiades project has “pushed out” this responsibility to <strong>in</strong>terested members of the
classics community and beyond, through the collaboration model described above. Another important
feature of Pleiades is that it uses only open-source software such as OpenLayers, 297 Plone, 298 and
zgeo. 299
In addition, the Pleiades project promotes the use of their gazetteer as an “authority list” for Greek and
Roman geographic names and their associated locations. All Pleiades content has stable URLs for its
discrete elements; this allows other digital resources to “refer unambiguously to the places and spaces
mentioned <strong>in</strong> ancient texts, the subjects of modern scholarly works, the m<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g locations of co<strong>in</strong>s, and
the f<strong>in</strong>dspots of <strong>in</strong>scriptions, papyri, and the like” (Elliott and Gillies 2009a). The difficulties that
historical place names with<strong>in</strong> “legacy literature” present for named entity disambiguation, geopars<strong>in</strong>g,
and automatic mapp<strong>in</strong>g techniques with<strong>in</strong> the field of archaeology was previously documented by the
Archaeotools project, and Elliott and Gillies (2009b) also report that such place names present similar
challenges for classical geography. 300 They detailed how many historical books found with<strong>in</strong> Google
Books have <strong>in</strong>formation pages that <strong>in</strong>clude Google Maps populated with place names extracted from
the text; classical place names such as Ithaca, however, are often assigned to modern places such as the
city <strong>in</strong> New York by mistake. While there are algorithms that attempt to deal with many of these
issues, they also argue that:
This circumstance highlights a class of research and publication work of critical importance for
humanists and geographers over the next decade: the creation of open, structured, web-fac<strong>in</strong>g
geo-historical reference works that can be used for a variety of purposes, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g
of geo-pars<strong>in</strong>g tools and the population of geographic <strong>in</strong>dexes (Elliott and Gillies 2009b).
297 OpenLayers is an open-source JavaScript library that can be used to display map data <strong>in</strong> most Web browsers (http://openlayers.org/)
298 Plone is an open source content management system (http://plone.org/).
299 http://plone.org/products/zgeo.wfs
300 The use of computational methods and customized knowledge sources for historical named-entity disambiguation has an extensive literature that is
beyond the scope of this paper. For some useful approaches, see Smith (2002), Tob<strong>in</strong> et al. (2008), and Byrne (2007).