On January 31, 2008, Dr. Tom Elliott is to end his employment with UNC’s Ancient World Mapping Center in order to take up the permanent position of Associate Director for Digital Programs in the prestigious new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, effective February 1. For the past two years Tom has been the Center’s Director of the NEH-funded Pleiades Project, and with ISAW support he will continue in that capacity. The Project itself welcomes ISAW as a third institutional partner, alongside the Center and the Stoa Consortium. With Sean Gillies continuing as Pleaides software developer, the Project expects to complete a major upgrade of content and features on schedule during the first quarter of 2008.
Tom has been at UNC since 1995. First, as a graduate student with a Morehead Fellowship, he completed his MA and PhD in the History Department’s ancient field program. While still ABD, he headed the Interactive Ancient Mediterranean Project, and played a critical role in producing the gazetteer for the Barrington Atlas and the CD-ROM version of its accompanying Directory, published in 2000. He was then appointed the first Director of UNC’s newly established Ancient World Mapping Center, developing its research and instructional missions, as well as its public outreach worldwide, in extraordinarily creative ways using the latest digital technology. At the same time he served as system designer for the UNC Digital Library Project, web information co-ordinator for the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, and organizer of EpiDoc Collaborative.
Tom rose to the challenge of securing NEH support for the Center’s Pleiades Project, dedicated to building an online workspace for ancient geography with the capacity to expand and update indefinitely all Barrington Atlas data. Early in 2006 – based now in Alabama as a UNC ‘teleworker’ – he assumed full-time leadership of Pleiades. His pathbreaking initiatives over the past decade have made UNC a world leader in the emerging innovative field of digital humanities as it relates to ancient geography and epigraphy in particular. His departure is a grave loss, therefore. We owe him an immense debt of gratitude, and shall sorely miss him, while recognizing that his latest appointment is a tribute to the importance and value of everything he has achieved here. It is clear, too, that the unique range, security and visibility of his position at the new Institute will enable him to build further upon the foundation laid here at UNC. This prospect is to the longterm benefit of everyone who engages with antiquity.
16 January 2008: Elizabeth Robinson
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