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

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Part of the research of the Pleiades project, therefore, has been to determ<strong>in</strong>e how best to turn digital
resources such as their gazetteer <strong>in</strong>to repurposeable knowledge bases. 301 Elliott and Gillies (2009b)
predict that <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly those who hold geographic data and wish to make it freely available onl<strong>in</strong>e
will provide access to their data through a variety of web services.
Despite their desire to make all of Pleiades content available to be remixed and mashed up, these
efforts have met with some obstacles:
In our web services, we employ proxies for our content (KML 302 and GeoRSS 303 -enhanced
Atom 304 feeds) so that users can visualize and exploit it <strong>in</strong> a variety of automated ways. In this
way, we provide a computationally actionable bridge between a nuanced, scholarly publication
and the geographic discovery and exploitation tools now emerg<strong>in</strong>g on the web. But for us, these
formats are lossy: they cannot represent our data model <strong>in</strong> a structured way that preserves all
nuance and detail and permits ready pars<strong>in</strong>g and exploitation by software agents. Indeed, we
have been unable to identify a standard XML-based data format that simply and losslessly
supports the full expression of the Pleiades data model (Elliott and Gillies 2009b).
To provide a lossless export, they plan to produce file sets composed of ESRI shape files with attribute
tables <strong>in</strong> CSV, a solution that, despite the proprietary nature of the ShapeFile format, does allow them
to download time-stamped files <strong>in</strong>to the <strong>in</strong>stitutional repository at New York University. Although they
would prefer to use only open formats, Elliott and Gillies argued that the ShapeFile format is used
around the world and can be decoded by open-source software, a fact that gives it a “high likelihood of
translation <strong>in</strong>to new formats <strong>in</strong> the context of long-term preservation repositories.” The experience of
Pleiades illustrates the challenges of want<strong>in</strong>g to create open-access resources while hav<strong>in</strong>g to deal with
the limits of open formats and long-term preservation needs.
Nonetheless, the open-access nature of Pleiades and the ability to l<strong>in</strong>k to <strong>in</strong>dividual places with<strong>in</strong> it
makes it a natural source to <strong>in</strong>tegrate with other digital classics projects <strong>in</strong> numismatics, epigraphy, and
papyrology, or any digital resource that makes extensive use of historical place names with<strong>in</strong> the
ancient world. Indeed, Pleiades is actively work<strong>in</strong>g with other projects through the Concordia <strong>in</strong>itiative
to <strong>in</strong>tegrate its content with other digital projects and “develop standards-based mechanisms for crossproject
geographic search.”
The HESTIA Project
While smaller <strong>in</strong> scale than Pleiades, the HESTIA (Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imag<strong>in</strong>g-
Archive) 305 project provides an <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g look at how digital technology and spatial analysis 306 can
301 The gazetteer data created by the Pleiades project has served as one key component of the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization
(http://medievalmap.harvard.edu/icb/icb.dokeyword=k40248&pageid=icb.page188865), which “offers a series of maps and geodatabases bear<strong>in</strong>g on
multiple aspects of Roman and medieval civilization <strong>in</strong> the broadest terms” and makes extensive use of the Barr<strong>in</strong>gton Atlas of the Greek and Roman
World. The recently announced “Google Ancient Places” project is also utiliz<strong>in</strong>g the data made available by Pleiades
(http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/fill<strong>in</strong>g-<strong>in</strong>-some-gaps-<strong>in</strong>-gap/).
302 KML, formerly known as “keyhole markup language,” was created by Google and is ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed as an open standard by the Open Geospatial
Consortium (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml/). KML is an “XML language focused on geographic visualization, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g annotation of
maps and images” and is used by a number of open-source mapp<strong>in</strong>g projects. (http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/mapsSupport.html).
303 GeoRSS (http://www.georss.org/Ma<strong>in</strong>_Page) is a “lightweight, community driven way to extend exist<strong>in</strong>g feeds with geographic <strong>in</strong>formation.”
304 Accord<strong>in</strong>g to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)), the name Atom applies to two related standards, while the Atom Syndication
Format is a “XML language used for web feed” (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt), the Atom Publish<strong>in</strong>g Protocol is a “HTTP-based protocol for
creat<strong>in</strong>g and updat<strong>in</strong>g web resources.”
305 http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/<strong>in</strong>dex.html
306 The HESTIA project hosted a workshop <strong>in</strong> July 2010 entitled “New Worlds Out of Old Texts: Interrogat<strong>in</strong>g New Techniques for the Spatial Analysis of
Ancient Narratives” that brought together numerous projects that are us<strong>in</strong>g spatial-analysis techniques <strong>in</strong> various classical discipl<strong>in</strong>es (http://www.artshumanities.net/event/new_worlds_out_old_texts_<strong>in</strong>terrogat<strong>in</strong>g_new_techniques_spatial_analysis_ancient_narratives).