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

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Simile Timel<strong>in</strong>e 558 and Exhibit 559 ). Even more important, they are provid<strong>in</strong>g consistent “cool URLs”
so that these data can be l<strong>in</strong>ked to and widely reused <strong>in</strong> other applications. Only a limited number of
the 3,000 attested place names <strong>in</strong> the LGPN currently have KML downloads s<strong>in</strong>ce this format requires
latitude and longitude for locations, but the LGPN is work<strong>in</strong>g with Pleiades (as part of the Concordia
<strong>in</strong>itiative) to f<strong>in</strong>d these places <strong>in</strong> the Barr<strong>in</strong>gton Atlas and utilize the geolocation <strong>in</strong>formation found
with<strong>in</strong> this atlas. All these formats, Matthews and Rahtz expla<strong>in</strong>ed, are created by a simple series of
XSL transformations on the TEI XML file. Through the use of consistent standards, therefore, the
LGPN was able to demonstrate the potential of l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g their data with many other digital classics
projects.
As this overview of prosopographical and onomastic resources illustrates, there are a number of
prosopographical resources onl<strong>in</strong>e, although far fewer than for other classical discipl<strong>in</strong>es. It appears
that none of the projects reviewed other than the LGPN has plans to provide XML versions of their
data, or <strong>in</strong>deed to provide any access to their data at all other than through the <strong>in</strong>dividual websites.
However, the <strong>in</strong>formation found with<strong>in</strong> these databases, particularly the lists of personal names and
their variants, could be extremely useful as tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g data <strong>in</strong> the development of named-entity
disambiguation algorithms for historical texts. Similarly, as many of the resources used <strong>in</strong> the creation
of these databases (e.g., published collections of documentary texts papyri, <strong>in</strong>scriptions) are <strong>in</strong> the
public doma<strong>in</strong> and may have been published onl<strong>in</strong>e (e.g., <strong>in</strong> Google Books or the Internet Archive),
<strong>in</strong>dividual name records could likely be l<strong>in</strong>ked to a variety of onl<strong>in</strong>e sources of their attestations.
THE USE AND USERS OF RESOURCES IN DIGITAL CLASSICS AND THE DIGITAL
HUMANITIES
While this review orig<strong>in</strong>ally <strong>in</strong>tended to <strong>in</strong>clude a survey of studies that exam<strong>in</strong>ed how scholars made
use of specific digital classics projects and how well these projects met their needs, no such overview
studies were located. 560 A number of digital classics resources <strong>in</strong>cluded extensive bibliographies 561
that listed research that had made use of the analog sources (e.g., pr<strong>in</strong>ted collections of <strong>in</strong>scriptions or
papyri, published editions of classical texts), but none seemed to <strong>in</strong>clude studies that specifically
exam<strong>in</strong>ed whether or how the digital resources were be<strong>in</strong>g used for scholarship. 562 There are many
studies that <strong>in</strong>vestigate the <strong>in</strong>formation-seek<strong>in</strong>g habits of humanities scholars, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g how they f<strong>in</strong>d
electronic resources or search on the Web, but many of these studies have focused on “traditional”
electronic resources such as databases subscribed to by libraries or the use of general search eng<strong>in</strong>es
such as Google. 563 One notable exception that focused specifically on humanist use of primary
558 The SIMILE Timel<strong>in</strong>e is an open-source “widget” that can be used create <strong>in</strong>teractive time l<strong>in</strong>es (http://www.simile-widgets.org/timel<strong>in</strong>e/), and LGPN
made particular use of TimeMap (http://code.google.com/p/timemap/), a javascript library that was created to “help use Google Maps with a SIMILE
timel<strong>in</strong>e.”
559 Exhibit (http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/) is an open-source publish<strong>in</strong>g framework created by the SIMILE project that can be used to easily
“create web pages with advanced text search and filter<strong>in</strong>g functionalities, with <strong>in</strong>teractive maps, timel<strong>in</strong>es, and other visualizations.”
560 While some research has been conducted <strong>in</strong>to the use of the Perseus Digital Library, none has been conducted <strong>in</strong> the last 10 years or <strong>in</strong> terms of the
current website (Perseus 4.0). For earlier research, see, for example, Marchion<strong>in</strong>i and Crane (1994).
561 See, for example, the bibliography of publications related to Projet Volterra, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history2/volterra/bibliog.htm
562 For some collections such as the APIS, relevant bibliography of how an <strong>in</strong>dividual papyrus has been used or published is <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>to records for the
papyri.
563 A synthesis of major f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs from over 12 recent studies <strong>in</strong> this area (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g faculty, researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates from
various discipl<strong>in</strong>es) has been created by Connaway and Dickey (2010) while Palmer et al. (2009) have offered an analysis of studies that have focused
more exclusively on the scholarly practices and <strong>in</strong>formation use of faculty onl<strong>in</strong>e dur<strong>in</strong>g the past 20 years. See also the literature review found <strong>in</strong> (Toms
and O’Brien 2008). For two sample recent exam<strong>in</strong>ations of how humanists search for <strong>in</strong>formation on the Web and work with library electronic resources
see (Am<strong>in</strong> et al. 2008) and (Buchanan et al. 2005).