We are delighted to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities has fully funded our $390,000 proposal for the creation of Pleaides: An Online Workspace for Ancient Geography. Its two-year development period is supported through the NEH’s Preservation and Access Research and Development program.
Please note: for the latest updates and information, please see the new Pleiades project page.
Organization of the Project
Creation of positions and personnel assignments are currently working their way through the routine channels here at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Subject to final approval by the University, the organizational structure will be as follows:
Prof. Richard Talbert will serve as Principal Investigator for the Pleiades project. With the enthusiastic support of NEH and the University, Dr. Tom Elliott will relinquish the AWMC Director’s position to serve full-time as Pleiades Project Director for the two-year duration of the grant. After an appropriate interval for consultation with the Center’s Advisory Board and others, the University (subject to funding) will move to name a new Director for the Center. Dr. Elliott will be assisted in the realization of the Pleiades Project by a full-time Software Applications Analyst and a Graduate Research Assistant (both to be named later), as well as an expert Project Steering Committee.
Public hosting of the Pleiades Workspace will be provided during the term of the grant by the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities under the direction of Prof. Ross Scaife, and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky, under the co-direction of Scaife and Prof. Jurek Jaromczyk.
Description of the Project
The Ancient World Mapping Center is responding to NEH’s call for innovative research and development projects that produce new mechanisms and models for the creation, maintenance and long-term functional preservation of important humanities reference works. The Center’s Pleiades project will establish a functioning, international community of scholars, teachers, students and enthusiasts to collaborate in the updating and expansion of the spatial and historical reference information assembled by the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project. To underpin these efforts, the project will create a web-based, multi-lingual, spatially-enabled collaboration support system, built using the open-source Plone content management system. Customizations and extensions developed by the project will be made freely available for reuse by others. Within the Pleiades Workspace, the Center and its collaborators will define and enforce a flexible hierarchy of user roles and responsibilities, permitting each member of the community worldwide to contribute additions, corrections, observations and improvements to any placename, geographic location, date, bibliographic reference or explanatory essay in the Atlas Project dataset, while facilitating a rigorous process of communal and subject-expert review, preparatory to publication in print and open digital formats.
Reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date reference works are essential tools in all fields of humanities research and teaching. It was in realization of this basic truth that during the 1980s the American Philological Association began to redress a century-long neglect of cartographic tools for the study of antiquity, ultimately culminating in the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World by Princeton University Press in 2000 (Richard J.A. Talbert, ed.). A similar recognition, combined with an appreciation of the tremendous enabling potential of new digital technologies, led UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences to establish the Ancient World Mapping Center as a permanent successor to the Classical Atlas Project. A central element of the Center’s mission is the constant updating and diversification of the material marshaled for the Atlas in response to new scholarship, fresh discoveries and breakthrough technologies. Pleiades is the technological and procedural framework through which the Center will fulfill this mission. NEH funds will support the implementation and elaboration of the collaboration environment (a.k.a. the Pleiades Workspace), as well as the initial launch of the community itself through efforts focused on the geographic area of western and central Asia Minor, where significant new discoveries have been made since the publication of the Atlas. Members of the Project Steering Committee will serve as the initial users of the system. Future announcements will invite additional membership once basic software components are in place and tested.
Key reference works in the humanities – particularly geographic ones – are increasingly prone to obsolescence even as rapid developments in the nation’s information infrastructure increase their value in linking, contextualizing and analyzing primary and secondary materials of every type. The Pleiades Project aims to address this problem at a critical stage, before it becomes a damaging liability for the scholarly community. Pleiades will create free, standard-compliant tools and tested procedures for applying a web-enabled, publicly collaborative approach to the creation and enhancement of humanities reference publications. NEH investment in Pleiades unlocks far-reaching innovations essential to preserving key reference works: their relevance will be maintained, and their value enhanced, for scholars, students and the general public.
As the project matures, additional information will be made available via the website of the Ancient World Mapping Center (www.unc.edu/awmc).
