News Release

Ancient World Mapping Center awarded $390,000
from National Endowment for the Humanities

CHAPEL HILL -- The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $390,000 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ancient World Mapping Center to create a multilingual, online workspace for updating and expanding information about ancient geography.

The Ancient World Mapping Center, based in the College of Arts and Sciences, promotes cartography, historical geography and geographic information science through innovative and collaborative research, teaching and community outreach.

Through the two-year NEH-funded project, "Pleiades: An Online Workspace for Ancient Geography," the center will assemble an international community of scholars, teachers, students and enthusiasts to update information assembled for the "Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World." The atlas’s 99 maps recreate the world of the Greeks and Romans, from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent and into North Africa, from around 1000 B.C. to 640 A.D.

Dr. Richard Talbert, professor of history and classics at UNC, was the editor of the atlas and will be the principal investigator for the Pleiades project. Dr. Tom Elliott, currently the center director, will become the Pleiades project director. The project’s steering committee includes faculty across disciplines at UNC and at universities such as King’s College and University College in London, Duke University, Tufts University, Middlebury College, Ohio State University, the University of California at Merced, Trinity College in Connecticut and the University of Kentucky.

In Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas, so the project exemplifies the "next generation" of using technology as a tool in preserving ancient humanities reference works, Talbert said.

"We want to spread the value of this information. The research continues, and there are more discoveries being made. No matter where you are in the world, you should be able to tap into this system and add to the discussion," he added.

Initially, the online workspace will focus on the geographic area of western and central Asia Minor, where Talbert said new discoveries have been made since the publication of the hard-copy "Barrington Atlas." The online workspace will be built using the open-source, Plone content management system. Public hosting for the project will be provided by the Stoa Consortium at the University of Kentucky.

The NEH awarded the competitive grant to UNC in part because of the possible adaptability of the Pleiades project for preserving other large humanities reference works, Talbert added.

"One of the increasing concerns in the humanities is how you keep major reference works current," he said. "Key reference works in the humanities – particularly geographic ones – are increasingly prone to obsolescence."

For more information, visit the Web sites of the mapping center, Plone and the Stoa Consortium at http://www.unc.edu/awmc, http://plone.org and http://www.stoa.org.

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College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093 or spurrk@email.unc.edu