Session 3: Geography 1: Gazetteers

Date: Thursday, October 13, 2016, 16h00 (UK time)

Session coordinators: Valeria Vitale (King's College London), Usama Gad (Ain Shams and Heidelberg) and Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/QlB0w0_2dso

Slides:

• [Modelling geographical information in Pleiades] (https://github.com/valeriavitale/Sunoikisis3D/blob/master/ICS03_pleiades.pdf)
• [Linked Open Data and Ancient Places] (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zkCKJUnsSYpKG22wZPRgRBrzTYc8ynMa9nqm4Batdho/present)
• [Introduction to CALCS project] (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MdU3q75Mskf4uxM_dJcoP2lOuFVm1fn7PalDuC2Od9E/present)

Outline

In this session we shall present the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient world places, and the geographic information model behind it. We will then discuss the Linked Ancient World Data ecosystem, and in particular the role within it of the Pelagios project and Recogito annotation tool. Finally we will introduce CALCS, a pilot project adding Arabic and Ottoman names to formerly classical sites in Pleiades and making maps and documents available for annotation in Pelagios.

Required reading

• Elliott, Tom & Sean Gillies (2009). "Digital Geography and Classics." DHQ 3.1. Available http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000031/000031.html
• Simon, Rainer, Elton Barker, Leif Isaksen & Pau de Soto Cañamares (2015). "Linking Early Geospatial Documents, One Place at a Time: Annotation of Geographic Documents with Recogito." ePerimetron 10.2, pp. 49-59. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/43613/1/Simon_et_al.pdf

Further readings

• Bodard, Gabriel and Valeria Vitale (2016). "Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites: including Arabic names in the Greco-Roman atlas." Pelagios Commons. Available: http://commons.pelagios.org/2016/08/cross-cultural-after-life-of-classical-sites/
• Vitale, Valeria (2016). "CALCS: notes on a journey into and through Arabic place-names" Pelagios Commons. Available: http://commons.pelagios.org/2016/10/calcs-notes-on-a-journey-into-and-through-arabic-place-names/
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Essay title

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Practical exercise

1. Create an account on the Recogito platform and send your username to Valeria so that we can share some map images with you.
2. Choose one or more of the maps in the shared set (either in Arabic, if you are able to read that, or Latin/Greek) and annotate at least 20–30 places (more if you like!) within it. For each place, offer a transcription, and if possible a georesolution to Pleiades or another gazetteer.
3. Download the data as "CSV" (comma separated values) format, and open it in a spreadsheet tool (e.g. Excel, GoogleSheets, Libre Office, Numbers). Study the data and see if you can understand what all the columns represent. Keep the CSV file, as you will use it in a later class.