Ancient World Mapping Center

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New Host for Maptiles

June 23, 2022 in E-resource, Interest, News

Warmest thanks for this message from Professor Sarah Bond, University of Iowa:

As many of you know, the Mapbox servers previously used for hosting the AWMC maptiles have been down for a number of months as we figured out a better way for them to be hosted and funded. Digital preservation is one of the hardest parts of any DH project. This has caused much disruption with digital projects that rely on these as maptiles as base maps for interactive, spatial components. As such, we want to announce that the AWMC maptiles have been migrated to a server at the University of Iowa libraries within The Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio. You can download or use the maptiles in a number of formats: http://cawm.lib.uiowa.edu/index.html

Below you can see more about the official licensing (still a CC BY 4.0) and attribution. We are calling this spinoff CAWM (the Consortium of Ancient World Mappers), but it is still made up of many former heads of the AWMC (e.g. Ryan Horne, Richard Talbert), Pleiades editors (e.g. me) and Pelagios partners. We hope these freely available maptiles will be used widely and that the stability of their provision will be relied upon as you rebuild or create new digital projects with spatial aspects. http://cawm.lib.uiowa.edu/#tiles/ol3

In addition to the digital tiles, we are working on new versions of Antiquity à-la-carte to help people to make their own accurate maps for articles and books. In the meantime the older version is still up and able to be used to create maps for analog publications: http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/alacarte/

We are all excited about this new venture with amazing partners, and have huge gratitude for the original AWMC mapmakers who created these tiles in 2014.

Questions about these maptiles or future pedagogy workshops with Pelagios on how to use them can be directed at me. I also want to give a huge thanks to Jay Bowen, our GIS specialist at the Studio, for his aid in coming up with a solution for hosting the maptiles from Iowa.

 

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2021-2022 Annual Report

June 13, 2022 in Report

5-1-2021 to 4-30-2022

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER (http://awmc.unc.edu)

Boosted not least by restored access to the Center itself in August after 16 months of remote working, this has been a year of achievement and optimism.  Two most challenging major projects are now all but completed, and the availability of two widely used resources offered by the Center should be restored soon.  In addition, favorable prospects for securing the Center’s future have emerged at last.

Commissioned cartography included one map for Jamie Kreiner’s Battles of the Brain (Liveright), another by Paul Cartledge for the Cambridge World History of Genocide, vol. 1, and five for Pliny the Elder’s World: Natural History Books 2-6, a translation by Brian Turner (former Center Director) and Richard Talbert, forthcoming imminently from Cambridge University Press.  However, by far the largest, most complex commission was 28 maps for a further Cambridge publication, Geographers of the Ancient Greek World edited by Graham Shipley (University of Leicester, U.K.).  This is a massive collaborative translation and commentary for which the Center contributed modest emergency funds last year to ensure timely completion of the text.  The specifications for its varied cartography proved very demanding, with numerous issues of layout and design to be resolved, but the outcome has been highly approved.  Of the 28, only the map (with inset) for Dionysios of Byzantion, Anaplous Bosporou, now awaits completion.    Licences which the Center issued for reproduction of its own previously published maps included one for Jessica Peritz’s article “The Castrato Remains – or, Galvanizing the Corpse of Musical Style” in the Journal of Musicology, and another for a forthcoming exhibition in the Luxembourg Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art about restoration of the Roman mosaic found at Vichten. 

The other most challenging major project now all but completed is the revised Routledge Atlas of Classical History, co-edited by Richard Talbert, Lindsay Holman and Benet Salway (University College London, U.K.).  All 142 full-color maps ranging in size from quarter-page to doublespread and including battle- and city-plans – the work of 30 expert contributors worldwide alongside the co-editors – are now ready.  Only some (overdue) accompanying texts and recommended readings are awaited [these fortunately arrived early in May; by its end the atlas was not just in the publisher’s hands, but also cleared for immediate production].  All four of the Center’s assistants gained the opportunity to revise or draft these maps, Hannah Shealy continuing from last year, now joined by Safiatou Bamba, Bryanna Ledbetter and Rachel Sarvey.  Bryanna also continued her preparation of gazetteers for completed maps.  At the same time Hannah skillfully drafted many of the maps for Geographers of the Ancient Greek World.

With classroom needs further in mind, the Center has initiated a new online Maps for Texts project to equip readers of Livy’s Roman history from the Second Punic War onwards with a 1:750,000 map, building on the recent edition and translation by John Yardley for the Loeb Classical Library; Rachel Sarvey has taken the lead so far.  The Center has also welcomed a request from the American Classical League for collaboration in making map materials available to the teachers nationwide that it represents, and in developing more.

Work has resumed to prepare for release – in the Center’s Maps for Texts series – Miguel Vargas’ map (1:750,000) that plots the spread of Catholic and Donatist bishoprics across North Africa by the early fifth century CE.

The Center has organized Richard Talbert’s extensive collection of maps of Asia Minor/Turkey made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Ottoman, British, German, Greek, Italian, Russian especially) to form the basis of an exhibition (primarily virtual) Late Ottoman Turkey in Princeton’s Forgotten Maps, 1883-1923 to be hosted in fall 2022 by Princeton University Library (which holds much of this scattered material, but far from all).  The pathbreaking synergy of this joint initiative promises to have lasting value.  The principal cartographers featured, Heinrich Kiepert and his son Richard, were very preoccupied with classical antiquity, and their long-lasting impact has escaped notice outside Turkey.  The Center’s preparations have notably benefited from Safiatou Bamba’s rare ability to read and translate Ottoman Turkish.

There is now good reason to expect that the frustrating dysfunction of two of the Center’s major digital resources relied upon worldwide is about to be overcome.  Generous efforts by a team at the University of Iowa to provide a fresh basis of support (at least temporarily) for Map Tiles are now at the testing stage; results seem most promising.  A web developer in Belgium has likewise devised a replacement support base for Map A on the Peutinger Map site; its test version too appears to operate soundly.  Restoration of both these resources will be a huge relief.

Because a viable plan has still to be settled for the Center’s future after June 30, 2022 – when Richard Talbert was due to step down – he has agreed to remain in post as part-time research professor for an additional year, encouraged by most supportive discussions with the History Department chair, Senior Associate Dean, and Dean of the College.  All three have committed to urging the new Deans (from June 30, 2022) to authorize an immediate search for a faculty member in History who will both teach ancient history and take charge of the Center.  The Department has ranked this position its top preference for searches in 2022-2023.

Meantime Lindsay Holman – who graduated PhD in August – has been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University, Erie, PA, and so is stepping down as Center Director after a remarkable five-year term in this increasingly demanding position.  It is impossible to express adequate thanks for the outstanding service she has so ably rendered throughout as cartographer, organizer, colleague and mentor.  Her departure is a blow, but it should be no surprise that her talents and record attract attention elsewhere.  Also to be thanked warmly are this year’s assistants Bryanna, Hannah, Safiatou and Rachel, the first three of whom are graduating.  For 2022-2023 – envisaged as primarily a year to prepare for transition – Richard Talbert remains in charge, to be assisted by Rachel Sarvey.

Lindsay Holman

Richard Talbert

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Call to Help Update the Peutinger Map Viewer

August 30, 2021 in E-resource, Interest, News

The Ancient World Mapping Center, in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, seeks Expressions of Interest from freelance and contract web developers interested in a small project to replace an online viewer for the so-called “Peutinger Map” of the Roman World. The current HTML+JavaScript web application has been in production on the Web since 2011, providing a seamless “pan and zoom” interface to a raster image of the map, with switchable SVG layers highlighting thematic features. Raster tile services were implemented in the application using the free and open-source Djatoka server application, which is now defunct.

We seek a developer or small team to replace the application with a new software stack that makes as much use as possible of off-the-shelf, free and open-source code as possible, and that leverages applicable widely-used standards like the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

Interested parties should email ISAW’s Tom Elliott (tom.elliott@nyu.edu) — not later than 6pm US Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 — in order to indicate their interest in learning more about the scope of the project and its technical aspects. Elliott will organize a prospective vendor teleconference or other forum for questions during the month of October, after which AWMC will solicit proposals for completion of the work. Meantime, the code has been posted to GitHub for review by interested parties.

This call supersedes that made on September 21, 2020.

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2020-2021 Annual Report

May 28, 2021 in Report

5-1-2020 to 4-30-2021

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER (http://awmc.unc.edu)

The year will be remembered for an exceptional mix of developments: on the one hand, impressive productivity achieved remotely in the face of Covid’s continuing impact; on the other, the emergence of serious obstacles beyond the Center’s control that impair its effectiveness.  To be sure, these were only to be expected sooner or later, and can even be regarded as a tribute to the Center’s success.  Nonetheless they pose tough challenges to overcome.

The quantity and range of commissioned mapping undertaken for monographs and articles proved very high.  Requests fulfilled included one map and two plans for Mary Boatwright’s Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context (Oxford University Press), four maps for Mark Thatcher’s The Politics of Identity in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy (also Oxford UP), two for Judith Barringer’s Olympia: A Cultural History (Princeton UP), three for Fred Naiden and co-editors, A Companion to Greek Warfare (Wiley Blackwell), as well as one or two maps each for Hilary Becker, Edmund Thomas and Everett Wheeler.

There was equally strong demand for acquiring and reproducing the Center’s own maps (still free of charge for non-commercial use).  Notably, Stanislav Doležal was licensed to reproduce several Roman Empire maps in his Konstantin: Cesta k moci (Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích). The many requests for Asia Minor in the Second Century C.E. came from users in Germany, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey and US.  The seven Wall Maps were sought by educators and students at all levels in Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, United Kingdom and US for display in classrooms or use in presentations.  Requests were also met for incorporating data into educational and commercial projects.  In particular, the Center partnered with Barnard College’s Empirical Reasoning Center to provide shapefiles for students taking its course “Society and Environment in the Ancient World.”  These shapefiles were used in QGIS workshops to create maps of the ancient landscape.  Roman roads data was supplied to Roman Podkolzine for integration into his Time Travel Rome mobile app.

There has been intensive effort to prepare revised maps and plans, along with accompanying texts, for the Atlas of Classical History in its new form co-edited by Richard Talbert, Lindsay Holman and Benet Salway (University College London), with the involvement of contributors old and new.  Drafting was again ably undertaken by Coleman Cheeley, joined this year by Hannah Shealy and Faith Virago; Bryanna Ledbetter prepared gazetteers for completed maps.  To illustrate progress, Holman and Talbert offered a presentation “Ancient History Course Maps Transformed by Advances in Cartography” for the poster session of the Archaeological Institute of America (virtual) annual meeting; viewers reacted very positively, and shared helpful observations.  The goal now is to deliver all materials to Routledge ready for production by December 2021.

Miguel Vargas completed the project he began last year to create a map (1:750,000 scale), with directory, that plots the spread of Catholic and Donatist bishoprics across North Africa by the early fifth century CE.  This addition to the Center’s Maps for Texts series is due for release once its review is concluded.

With the collaboration of experts and of IUPUI students, Prof. Elizabeth Wolfram Thill has continued to organize the scans of Great Marble Map of Rome fragments made in partnership with the Center and the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, Roma Capitale, for online presentation in a format acceptable to the latter.  Naturally, under present circumstances no further teamwork in Rome itself was possible.

To overcome serious unforeseen delay arising from Covid, the Center granted modest emergency funds to the University of Leicester, U.K., enabling Prof. Graham Shipley to complete and deliver to Cambridge University Press – by fall 2020, as planned – his pathbreaking, long-awaited Geographers of the Ancient Greek World, 35 texts translated by 14 scholars, with commentary.  Because of Covid’s onset Shipley was suddenly recalled to the classroom early, and could not then expect to resume the final stage of editing before 2022.  His work is of exceptional value for a clearer understanding of the ancient landscape.

During the year, two resources offered by the Center ceased to function as they should.  The Djakota tool which is vital for Map A on the Peutinger Map site is now considered outmoded by its provider and thus no longer maintained.  For similar reasons Mapbox has ceased to support the landscape base on which the Center’s Map Tiles depend.  Any map using Map Tiles is affected in consequence, including the one being prepared to accompany the translation of Pliny the Elder’s geographical books (Natural History 2 to 6 and more) by Brian Turner and Richard Talbert, now due for publication by Cambridge University Press in early 2022.  Work on this map has been suspended while the Center strives to identify and install satisfactory replacements for both resources affected.  How soon that can be achieved, however, is as yet impossible to predict, and the delay is made all the more regrettable by the extensive reliance placed on both by users worldwide.  Fortunately, the Center’s Antiquity-A-La-Carte remains unaffected, although it cannot form the basis of an interactive map.

Special thanks are due to all – and to Director Lindsay Holman in particular – for maintaining the Center’s momentum undaunted throughout a year when no physical access to it was possible.   Bryanna, Hannah and Faith – who is graduating, as is Coleman – have never set foot there.  They, and Miguel, have all performed excellently from remote locations, and those not returning will be truly missed.  Thanks are owed to the History Department for temporarily assigning the Center an office which could be used for some meetings and for storing materials.

Lindsay Holman continues as Director, with Richard Talbert remaining in charge as research professor.

 

Lindsay Holman

Richard Talbert

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Help Update the Peutinger Map Viewer

September 21, 2020 in E-resource, Interest, News

The Ancient World Mapping Center, in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, seeks Expressions of Interest from freelance and contract web developers interested in a small project to update components of an online viewer for the so-called “Peutinger Map” of the Roman World. This HTML+JavaScript web application has been in production on the Web since 2011, providing a seamless “pan and zoom” interface to a raster image of the map, with switchable SVG layers highlighting thematic features. Raster tile services were implemented in the application using the free and open-source Djatoka server application, which is now defunct. We seek a developer or small team to replace the raster tile functionality with a modern, maintainable open-source solution, and to repackage the entire application for easier server-side deployment, but with minimal modification to the rest of the software stack.

Interested parties should email ISAW’s Tom Elliott (tom.elliott@nyu.edu) — not later than 6pm US Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, October 1st, 2020 — in order to indicate their interest in learning more about the scope of the project and its technical aspects. Elliott will organize a prospective vendor teleconference or other forum for questions during the month of October, after which AWMC will solicit proposals for completion of the work. Meantime, the code has been posted to GitHub for review by interested parties.

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2019-2020 Annual Report

June 18, 2020 in Report

5-1-19 to 4-30-20

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER (http://awmc.unc.edu)

This year remained an impressively active one throughout for the Center, above all because mapmaking could still continue remotely during the campus lockdown from mid-March onwards.   Preparation of the revised edition of the textbook Atlas of Classical History saw accelerated progress, and there was expansion of the scope of the working partnership with Rome’s Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.

A variety of maps were made on commission as usual, not only for monographs and articles, but also for the Ishtar Gate exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Commissions included a map of Judaea for Anthony Keddie’s Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels forthcoming from University of California Press, and one of India and Bactria for Alexander Meeus and Kai Trampedach’s volume on Alexander the Great in the Steiner series Studies in Ancient Monarchies.  The number of requests for acquiring and reproducing the Center’s maps showed a marked rise this year.  In particular, the seven Wall Maps – which continue to be offered in digital format without charge for non-commercial purposes – have been in high demand from instructors and students at both school and college levels worldwide, most notably in Australia, Denmark, Italy, United Kingdom and US.

Miguel Vargas joined the Center to implement a project envisaged last year for the Maps for Texts series and now well advanced by him: a map, with directory, that plots the spread of Catholic and Donatist bishoprics across North Africa as documented in the record of the Carthage ‘conference’ in 411 CE.  To date, maps by others for this purpose (notably by Serge Lancel) have all been kept unsatisfyingly small-scale by a print-only format, in grayscale moreover.  The Center’s map in color on a physical landscape base at 1:750,000 – scale chosen to match that of Asia Minor and Black Sea in the Maps for Texts series – offers distinct improvement; its extraordinary elongation creates no obstacle for digital production and presentation.

The interactive map in preparation by Gabriel Moss and Ryan Horne to accompany the forthcoming translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History Books 2 to 6 and more by Brian Turner and Richard Talbert is close to completion.  Meantime the translation itself of these ‘geographical’ books and passages has been delivered to Cambridge University Press for expert review.

After lengthy discussions, agreement was reached that Lindsay Holman and Benet Salway (University College London) should join Richard Talbert to co-edit the substantially revised edition of the Atlas of Classical History.  It is to be published by Routledge, with the maps all remade digitally in color, using the Center’s Map Tiles as base.  Contributors to the original edition are being invited to review the fresh drafts of their maps; at the same time new contributors have been recruited, in most instances for plans of cities that could not be accommodated previously.  So much mapmaking has provided exceptional opportunities for student assistants to gain training and experience.  Hania Zanib has specialized in drafting city- and battle-plans with precision.  Peter Streilein, Tyler Brown and Coleman Cheeley have concentrated on maps of the Near East, Aegean and Roman Empire. Ross Twele has begun to compile the gazetteer.

As Richard Talbert’s collection of maps made of Asia Minor (Turkey) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries continues to expand in size and complexity, Ross Twele has also worked towards organizing its presentation online.

A supplement negotiated to the partnership agreement made last year with the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, Roma Capitale authorized a three-week initiative in Rome to proceed during September–October.  Within this period a joint Italian–U.S. team made 3D scans of all 823 incised fragments of the Great Marble Map (Forma Urbis) to an accuracy of approximately 0.05 mm; because several of this formidable total were dispersed across Rome, visits to various museums were required (Museo dell’Ara Pacis, for example).  The number scanned far exceeded even the most optimistic estimate of what might be achieved in the limited time available.  Such success was due not least to the efficiency of the four 3D handheld structured light scanners used – three Creaform Go!SCAN and one Creaform Spark 3D.  Derek Miller (Center for Digital Scholarship, IUPUI) brought these scanners and oversaw their operation throughout.  Prof. Elizabeth Wolfram Thill (Classical Studies, IUPUI) again took a leading role.  She and Dr. Riccardo Montalbano in Rome (partially funded by the Center) have now begun the arduous work of organizing the scans for online presentation in a format that will enable a further agreement with the Sovrintendenza to be reached, one granting public access to this remarkable material.   In January Prof. Wolfram Thill outlined the recent progress made by the partnership, as well as future prospects, at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Washington, DC; the stream of questions following her paper attests to the high level of interest generated.  A potentially rewarding further goal – which in current conditions must remain on hold – is to scan likewise the neglected mass of uninscribed fragments; their number has been greatly increased by finds from recent tunneling for a new metro line in the area where the Map was displayed.

Once again this year it was the Center’s good fortune to have an outstanding workforce: three graduate students – Gabriel Moss, Ross Twele, Miguel Vargas; and four undergraduates – Tyler Brown, Coleman Cheeley, Peter Streilein, Hania Zanib.  All three graduating at the year’s end – former Director Gabriel Moss (PhD), Tyler Brown and Peter Streilein (both BA) – will be greatly missed.

A further word of sincere appreciation to all, including Director Lindsay Holman, is called for this year because of the pandemic crisis.  In mid-March, during the last hour before the sudden closure of Davis library, Lindsay brilliantly reconfigured the Center’s machines for remote working.  In consequence, everyone gained, and seized, the welcome opportunity to continue working and communicating from home – at a somewhat slower pace, to be sure, and with certain technical limitations, but overall almost as productively as before.

Lindsay Holman continues as Director, and Richard Talbert (after his retirement from all other duties) remains in charge as research professor.

 

Lindsay Holman

Richard Talbert

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2018-2019 Annual Report

June 4, 2019 in Report

5-1-2018 to 4-30-2019

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER (http://awmc.unc.edu)

This has been a very productive year for the Center in a notable variety of ways.  Two especially satisfying highlights were a conference co-organized with departments at Duke University, and the implementation of a working partnership with Rome’s Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.

Maps were produced on commission for publication in articles and monographs across an unusually wide range this year. The six maps for Jamie Kreiner’s Legions of Pigs: Ecology and Ethics in the Early Medieval West (Yale University Press) extended the Center’s regular timeframe to 1000 C.E., and its spatial frame to Scandinavia and Iceland.  The frame was also tested by the map of pre-modern south India produced for Leah Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World.  Challenging in other respects were six maps for two volumes on ancient warfare and sieges edited by Jeremy Armstrong, one map and two city plans for John Friend’s The Athenian Ephebeia in the Fourth Century B.C.. and two maps for a biography of Theodosius I by Mark Hebblewhite.

Special effort was made to complete three static maps in the Maps for Texts series, all released online between June and December 2018. The most taxing of these, and the largest (85 x 50 ins), is The Black Sea Described by Arrian around 130 C.E., produced at 1:750,000 scale to match the Center’s Wall Map Asia Minor in the Second Century C.E., together with a directory of places marked.  Because of the focused geographic coverage, a far more generous scale (1:100,000) was feasible for the map Dionysius of Byzantium, Anaplous of the Bosporus.  By its very nature, the map tracing Theophanes’ Journeys between Hermopolis and Antioch in the early fourth century C.E. (detailed in Rylands Papyri) is more schematic.  As the next addition to the series, the Center is considering a map that plots the spread of Catholic and Donatist bishoprics across North Africa as documented by the record of the Carthage ‘conference’ in 411 C.E.  Gabriel Moss and Ryan Horne have continued their work on an interactive map to accompany the forthcoming translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History Books 2 to 6 by Brian Turner and Richard Talbert.

Work for a revision of the latter’s Atlas of Classical History increased in volume and variety.  Kimberly Oliver and Peter Streilein both drafted maps of regions of the Roman Empire, while Hania Zanib developed city- and battle-plans.  With Lindsay Holman’s mentorship all three students gained impressive mastery of cartographic skills.  Their results demonstrate how rewardingly the pre-digital maps of the Atlas can now be enhanced.

Richard Talbert’s book Challenges of Mapping the Classical World was published by Routledge.  Preparatory work for his study of the mapping of Asia Minor during the late 19th and early 20th centuries continued.  Leah Hinshaw completed the formidable task of identifying and annotating the changes of many kinds introduced for each edition (up to four) of all twenty-four sheets of Richard Kiepert’s Karte von Kleinasien.  Peter Raleigh made good progress in matching those sheets with the bewildering mass of derivative maps produced by the British, Greek, Italian and Ottoman military authorities.

When the work accomplished for the United States Committee for the Blue Shield reached a suitable stopping-point in the fall, the decision was taken to halt there because this heavy commitment could no longer be sustained satisfactorily along with other initiatives.  The Center maintained its ongoing collaboration with the Pleiades Project at New York University (pleiades.stoa.org); both Lindsay Holman and Gabriel Moss continue to serve on the project’s editorial board.

Stock of the Center’s seven Wall Maps for the Ancient World is exhausted, and the publisher Routledge reluctantly decided against reprinting because the cost for such large sheets has become prohibitive.  With the rights consequently reverting to the Center, it has made all seven available online, after minor revision to one, The World of the New Testament and the Journeys of Paul.

The weekend conference Digital Cartography: New Maps, Ancient History – co-organized with Duke’s Departments of Classical Studies and of Art, Art History and Visual Studies – fulfilled the hope of attracting graduate students and junior faculty at multiple institutions (US, Canada, Czech Republic) to discuss the integration of GIS technology and cartography into their research and their teaching.  Lively, thought-provoking interchange developed about the ethical and practical implications of using this technology in the field.

The academic and technological contexts from which the Center sprang originally, and within which it functions today, featured prominently in the wide-ranging panel “Mapping the Classical World Since 1869: Past and Future Directions,” which Richard Talbert was invited to organize for the Society for Classical Studies 2019 sesquicentennial meeting in San Diego, CA.  He, together with Lindsay Holman and former Director Tom Elliott, were among the speakers; the texts of all the panel papers may be read on the Center’s website.  For the Archaeological Institute of America at this jointly held meeting Lindsay Holman and Richard Talbert also contributed “Maps for Texts: An Expanding Ancient World Mapping Center Resource” at the poster session.

At UNC the tour of the Center and overview of its initiatives which Lindsay Holman was asked to offer participants in Raleigh 400: A Conference on Sir Walter Raleigh Four Hundred Years After His Death (September 2018) gained an enthusiastic reception.  In April 2019, for a Digital Humanities Round Table at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands), she delivered an invited paper exploring the applications and limitations of using digital cartography for the study of the ancient world with particular reference to the Center’s Maps for Texts.

Under the terms of the partnership agreement made with the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, Roma Capitale, the Center commissioned a Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada) team headed by Prof. George Bevan to create the first-ever ultra high-resolution photogrammetric image of the wall in Rome on which the Great Marble Map (Forma Urbis) was mounted in the Severan period.  Despite the intervention of successive obstacles great and small (by no means all forseeable), this remarkable fundamental step towards transforming productive study of the Map was successfully accomplished.  The collaboration of Prof. Elizabeth Wolfram Thill (Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis) for the purpose was invaluable (see further her paper for the “Mapping the Classical World Since 1869” panel mentioned above).  Thereafter the quality of the wall-image soon demonstrated how essential it is also to create 3-D images of corresponding quality for each of the approximately 1,200 surviving Map fragments.  As a further dimension of their partnership, the Center anticipates securing the Sovrintendenza’s authorization to commission this major advance, which should again involve Elizabeth Wolfram Thill as well as expert IUPUI colleagues.

This year the Center’s workforce of two graduate students (Gabriel Moss, Peter Raleigh) and four undergraduates (Leah Hinshaw, Kimberly Oliver, Peter Streilein, Hania Zanib) performed so ably that the three departures on graduation now imminent cause severe and much regretted loss – Peter Raleigh (PhD), Leah Hinshaw and Kimberly Oliver (both BA).  Fortunately, Lindsay Holman will continue as Director for 2019-2020.

Lindsay Holman

Richard Talbert

 

 

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Mapping the Classical World Since 1869: Past and Future Directions, SCS Annual Meeting 2019 Panel Online

February 12, 2019 in Conference, Presentation, Publication

SCS Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, January 4, 2019

 

Invited Sesquicentennial Panel

 

Mapping the Classical World Since 1869: Past and Future Directions

 

Organizer & chair: Richard Talbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

1 Greek and Roman Mapping   Georgia Irby, College of William and Mary, VA

 

2 Modern Mapping Before Digitization   Richard Talbert

 

3 What Difference Has Digitization Made ?   Tom Elliott, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University

 

4 What Has the Ancient World Mapping Center Done for Us ?   Lindsay Holman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Center Director)

 

5 Rome’s Marble Plan: Progress and Prospects   Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis

 

 Panel Overview

A 1980 APA/SCS committee report (Research Tools for the Classics) was correct on both counts to declare cartography at that date “an area of extremely great importance, where the state of our tools is utterly disastrous.”  The panel briefly discusses the disappointing lack of progress made during the previous past century, and advances reasons for its limitations (Papers #1, 2).  The main focus of the five papers, however, is on the transformation successfully achieved since around 1980, and still ongoing.

Three shifts may be identified as the keys to this transformation.  First, as Paper #1 explains, the more open, culturally sensitive approach to pre-modern cartography generated by the geographers Brian Harley and David Woodward has unlocked a fruitful, far-reaching re-appraisal of the purpose and value of ancient maps which is by no means yet exhausted.  Second, Paper #2 recalls the decisive insistence by the 1980 APA committee that, in view of the inadequacy of existing efforts worldwide to produce a major classical atlas or equivalent, the APA itself should take the lead in sponsoring one.  After initial failure, a decade-long international collaborative project to create such a reference work was successfully launched and funded, resulting in the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World by Princeton University Press in 2000.  Third, the fortuitous transition from film-based mapmaking to digital during the 1990s made it practical to convert the Atlas and its data – with the use of digital technology – into a far more flexible and versatile resource than previously envisaged.

This technology, which has itself continued to develop, has given cartography a scope, complexity and richness unimagined in 1980.  Paper #3 in broad terms appreciates and illustrates this capacity for the advancement of the ancient field.  Paper #4 does likewise, but with specific reference to the expanding range of the Ancient World Mapping Center, the first institution of its type to be established (in 2000) for promoting cartography, geographic information science and historical cartography in the ancient field.  The Center was an unforeseen, visionary outgrowth of the project to create the Barrington Atlas, one which has amply fulfilled its promise.  Paper #5 offers an outstanding instance of how state-of-the-art digital technology can now bring to the study of a Roman monument a depth of insight unattainable until recently.  Moreover, this exciting new work on the Forma Urbis Romae fragments and the surviving wall to which they were once attached is a model of collaboration between Rome’s Musei Capitolini and the Ancient World Mapping Center.

The coherent, logical sequence of the panel’s five papers demonstrates to SCS not only that cartography today remains more than ever of extremely great importance to the ancient field, but also that the state of tools for it has now changed from disastrous to extraordinary, with further creative developments to be confidently anticipated.

N.B.  Because of more or less certain difficulties in obtaining permissions, the images shown at the panel to accompany each paper are not included here. 

 

 

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5 Rome’s Marble Plan: Progress and Prospects, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill

February 11, 2019 in

Exploring the Forma Urbis Romae Fragments: A New Approach

E. Wolfram Thill, IUPUI

       The scope and complexity of the Great Marble Map of Rome make it an unparalleled resource, but also complicate attempts to work with its immense volume of fragmentary data. Originally covering an area of over 2,500 square feet, it depicted the architectural footprint of every ground floor room in the city, from the Colosseum cavea to the interior of sprawling apartment structures. It has been recovered in around 1,200 known fragments, some subsequently lost. Making sense of this data would be difficult in the best of circumstances, but the logistics of dealing with the sheer mass of marble involved has drastically limited access to the map. Imagine a puzzle where you have an estimated 10-15% of the picture, broken into 1,200 mostly non-contiguous pieces, each of which weighs dozens of pounds in cut marble.

Various technological revolutions have improved access to the map. Drawings on vellum of select fragments were superseded by expensive but comprehensive printed-plate volumes. The internet and three-dimensional scanning opened new possibilities for documentation and access. Now we are launching a new undertaking: the Great Marble Map of Rome Project. This project will use newly available technology to take the next steps in research on this unique and invaluable artifact.

The Great Marble Map, or Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan (more on that in a second), has always presented particular challenges for access, challenges that have shaped scholarship. Up to this point scholars’ primary interest in the map has been to piece it together, and to identify and connect depicted buildings with structures known from the historical or archaeological records. These approaches tend to engage with the monument at the level of the fragment or individual depiction. To some extent this is a product of access, since it has been difficult to study more than a few fragments at a time. While topographic inquiries are certainly worthy pursuits, scholars have pointed out that such approaches downplay the original display context of the map. The majority of the depicted buildings are generic, unidentifiable structures that would have been difficult even to see, given that the original dimensions of the map were a staggering 18 x 13 meters, or around 60 x 43 feet.

The newest approaches to the Great Marble Map move beyond focus on individual buildings, to look at what can be learned from the plan as a whole. Such approaches require better access to both the fragments and their original context. It is here that the Great Marble Map of Rome Project has taken up the torch. The project is sponsored by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in partnership with the Musei Capitolini and Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali in Rome. The mission of our project is to use new technology to achieve several goals. These are:

1)      To give wide and comprehensive virtual access to all aspects of the map

2)      To advance scholarship on the map and to take it in new directions

3)      To encourage public engagement with the Great Marble Map, particularly with regards to the actual fragments in Rome

Our primary means of achieving these goals will be a new website and online database that makes available three-dimensional scans of all 1,200 fragments and their original context.

 

Our first, inaugural enterprise for the project has been a photogrammetric scan of the wall on which the Great Marble Map was once mounted. The wall that now forms the north exterior face of the Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano was originally an interior wall of a room within the Temple of Peace. Although the majority of the marble was robbed in the Middle Ages, pieces were excavated at the foot of the wall, confirming its association with the monument. The wall was divided into two zones, an upper section on which the map was mounted, and a tall socle below. The 150 or so marble slabs that once made up the map were fastened to the brick wall with metal clamps. The holes for many of these clamps are still preserved in the wall, despite modern interventions such as the insertion of windows. Since many marble fragments also preserve corresponding clamp marks on their back face, it should be possible, in theory, to align the clamp marks on the fragments with the clamp marks on the wall, reconstructing the original position and alignments of fragments. Previous attempts to do so, however, have been uncertain and slow, since they relied on working with the actual fragments and scale drawings of the wall. Three-dimensional models of all the fragments, however, were produced around 2002 by the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project. What was needed was a corresponding model of the wall.

Our project’s solution has been to make a three-dimensional scan of the wall itself using Fan Photogrammetry. Generally speaking, this type of photogrammetry works much like a stereoscope. The process produces a series of overlapping but offset images that, viewed through the appropriate two-toned glasses, create a three-dimensional effect. Modern camera techniques and capabilities mean that this can be accomplished at an amazing level of detail over large areas and from considerable distances.

Mission Wall Scan was launched in May 2019, when a team traveled to Rome to take the necessary photographs for building the three-dimensional images of the wall. The research division of our team consisted of Dr. Richard Talbert of the Ancient World Mapping Center, Dr. Francesca De Caprariis of the Musei Capitolini, and myself from IUPUI. We were joined by a technical team from Queen’s University, Ontario led by Dr. George Bevan, assisted by Kristen Jones and Dr. Daryn Lehoux.

I am indebted for all technical descriptions of this process to Kristen Jones, who kindly provided more specific understanding than my “and then we took pictures of the wall.” The Queen’s University team employed a fan photogrammetry technique, shooting at seven Gigapan stations with their camera mounted to a fence along the sidewalk of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, approximately 50 meters away from the face of the wall. Scale was achieved using custom-coded scale bars, two in a right angle L configuration, and two more in windows across the wall. This allowed the team to imitate aerial-photographic mapping techniques. The Queen’s team shot 30 images at each of the seven stations using a telephoto lens with a 1.5 mm ground pixel size. To deal with the variable weather, Dr. Bevan and his team shot four sets of photographs over three days. This method allowed them to capture the part of the wall where the map was mounted. In order to capture the socle zone, primarily for conservation purposes, Dr. Bevan photographed the area by hand from a distance of 5 meters, shooting straight on for one set of photos and then upwards at a 45 degree angle to link the images with the larger dataset of the whole wall.

Our initial product is a three-dimensional record of the wall that once held the Great Marble Map. It is so precise that, despite being shot from 50 meters away, you can zoom in and see the textures of individual bricks. With the appropriate glasses, the effect is surreally three-dimensional. Given the right software, you can measure the space between holes and even the depths of the holes themselves within 1 mm of accuracy. In addition, Kristen Jones was able to use the merged high-resolution orthophoto to trace individual features of the wall using 3DM analyst and AutoCAD. Her end production is a series of precisely scaled drawings that highlight the clamp marks on the wall.

The next step will be to make these images of the wall available online as part of our new website. In the final presentation researchers will be able to directly compare the three-dimensional models of the fragments with the clamp marks on the wall scan. This should not only facilitate reconstruction and new joins among fragments, but will allow researchers to gain a clearer understanding of the physical setting of the Great Marble Map. What sort of distance, for example, separated various depicted structures? Are the sizes of inscriptions related to position on the wall? How is the work of different carvers distributed throughout the map and along the wall, and what does this suggest about the logistics of carving? These are just some of the questions we hope our new presentation can encourage and investigate.

 

The second initiative undertaken as part of our project is to further facilitate research on the Great Marble Map fragments. Because access to the fragments has been limited to a close circle of specialists mostly working with identifiable depictions, basic issues such as nomenclature and referencing systems have never been fully addressed. For example, there is no standardized system for referring to features represented on a given fragment. While this is not a problem when referencing structures such as the Colosseum, it becomes problematic when wanting to refer to, say, individual rooms around an unidentified peristyle. This will become more of an issue as scholars increasingly ask research questions that depend on generic, unidentified structures.

Even the name of the monument itself needed updating. Without going into too much detail here, we rejected anything pseudo-Latin, overly technical, or otherwise unintelligible to a broader public. Instead we decided to stick with the basics: the Great Marble Map of Rome. I therefore used this name for this presentation, in the belief that if you say it enough, you can induce others to use it too.

We are still working on a system for numbering the individual fragments and features, but as I will show, modern technology can make the presentation of a system much simpler. New software makes it easy to color-code and annotate three-dimensional models, rendering them more understandable for map experts, researchers new to the map, and the interested public. I am indebted here to my colleagues Jenny Johnson and especially Derek Miller at IUPUI Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. With Derek’s help I was able to paint a pilot model using Mudbrick and to display the finished project via Sketchfab, without either process actually changing the underlying data. The original model shown here was produced as part of the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project and is under the copyright of the Sovrintendenza. All models are to carry the Sovrintendenza’s watermark, but I am not yet sufficiently skilled to embed it (or to demonstrate familiarity with other tools).

What you see here is a section of the map currently known as 3ab. This section was drawn in the Renaissance as one large piece in a sketch now preserved in a Vatican Codex. Sometime later part of it was lost and replaced by a cast. Here is the newly painted model. I have marked inscriptions in red, commercial structures in yellow, columns in green, and arcades in blue. Crucially you can still manipulate the model, spinning it to check possible joins and clamp marks (this one doesn’t actually have clamp marks, so was a poor choice for my pilot model perhaps). One methodological problem that can arise when working with the Great Marble Map is that it is often not obvious to non-specialists what is actually extant. The next view of the model has the cast part dimmed to highlight the distinction between what is marble and original and what is not. This third view goes further, removing all markings from the cast to really emphasize what is actually preserved.

Sketchfab also opens up great potential for annotating models. Previously one of the challenges in creating a numbering system was a basic inability to display any such system in a legible form. Sketchfab can make presenting a numbering system less cumbersome. In this mock-up, I have added reference numbers to each feature. Feature 3.1 is an inscription, 3.2 the street, 3.3 the colonnaded courtyard, and 3.8 a commercial room. Crucially, you can toggle the annotations off and on as needed.

Another potential for annotation is to open the audience for the models. In the version shown here, I have annotated the model for the Roman specialist. The cast has the full reference number for the codex drawing, and the inscription has its official epigraphic transcription. In the next version, I have modified the annotations for the interested non-specialist, say an amateur historian. The cast annotation explains the history of the fragment, and the inscription annotation explains the transcription. My favorite possibility, however, is that the model can be annotated in order to develop curricula for students of various ages. In this version I have written the annotations for a grade-school audience. The cast annotation spells out the history more plainly, and the inscription annotation teaches vocabulary such as the term “inscription.”

We hope these new forms of presentation will help to uncover not only new physical, but also conceptual, links across fragments. In terms of physical joins, by clarifying what each puzzle piece represents, the color coding should make it simpler to see what we are searching for in a match. In this case, for example, we are looking for a commercial peristyle building along this edge, or more simply, a yellow and green building above a red inscription. In a more theoretical vein, this presentation holds great potential for researching into the representations of architecture. How are domus represented? What features of temples are emphasized? What can the depictions of public leisure parks tell us about how such spaces were conceptualized?

The most exciting aspect of the website, however, is that its ultimate goal is to facilitate work with the extant fragments themselves. Previously this would have been a vain hope, since the map fragments were inaccessible in storage. But there is a new, as yet unnamed, museum being prepared in Rome as part of the Musei Capitolini. The brainchild of Dr. Francesca De Caprariis, this museum will house all the map fragments in the Sovrintendenza’s care. Indeed, our team was privileged to see all of them in their new home during our work in May. Many fragments will be on display in a permanent exhibit dedicated to the Great Marble Map. The other fragments will be easily accessible for visiting researchers.

The location of the new museum has great potential to engage a wide public audience. Located in a former gymnasium for Mussolini’s Fascist Youth, the museum is within sight of the upper tiers of the Colosseum. An attached garden will house an epigraphy museum showcasing numerous architectural membra that were deposited there in the large-scale excavations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And a service building will eventually house the most important features of Roman culture, a gelateria and caffè.

The website will thus serve as an international gateway for the new museum. Scholars can develop hypotheses online, and then test them against the actual fragments in Rome. Study abroad groups planning to visit Rome can start a curriculum about the Great Marble Map in the classroom, and then continue it in the new museum and on the streets of Rome. For example, a student could prepare a presentation on the Colosseum fragments in the classroom, deliver it in the museum utilizing the actual fragments, and then continue the presentation at the Colosseum itself.

 

All of this is early days for our project. But our goals are in progress and achievable. We want to use new technology to make the Great Marble Map more accessible. We want to advance research and take it in new directions. And we want to achieve a wider audience beyond academia.

Less specifically as yet, we dream of making new scans of all the fragments, in particular to improve the underlying models and to speed their painting and annotation. Although at the cutting edge at the time, the Stanford scans reproduce only the basic outline of a fragment. They are also in a fossilized .ply format, meaning they must be individually converted to a more accessible .obj format and UV wrapped, a time-consuming and error-prone process. New laser scanning can quickly produce a paintable model that captures color and texture, as well as more precise contours.

In terms of public engagement, we want to develop an extended set of curricula that will allow students of all grades to engage with the Marble Map online, with the ultimate culmination being a visit to the museum in Rome. We want to develop an app that would allow tourists to take the Marble Map out with them into the streets of Rome and juxtapose it against the ancient monuments. We want to develop a virtual reality experience that would allow a viewer to walk around the reconstructed walls of buildings represented on the Marble Map. We want to maintain a database that is continually updated to represent advances in the field. We want to have a crowd-sourcing feature, where interested participants can work to find joins between fragments.

Not all of these dreams will be immediately attainable. But we are already bringing undergraduate students into our project through an IUPUI Digital Scholarship Fund. Graduate students in the Ancient World Mapping Center, as well as UNC’s School of Information Science, are ready to contribute too. We have the drive, we have the ideas, and we have a plan.

 

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3 What Difference Has Digitization Made?, Tom Elliott

February 11, 2019 in

What Difference Has Digitization Made ?

Tom Elliott, New York University

 

It’s customary in talks about the digital classics to start the era with David Packard’s concordance to Livy, published in four printed volumes in 1968. This work — although deliberately unoriginal in its conception and delivery mechanism — nonetheless demonstrated conclusively that computational methods were both ready and appropriate even then to apply to philological research and reference work.

 

Packard’s Livy started after, but appeared before, another watershed achievement in philological computing: Roberto Busa‘s monumental Index Thomisticus. First conceptualized in the 1940s, and supported for years by IBM, this comprehensive lemmatization and concordance of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas was prepared using punch cards and published in 56 print volumes in the 1970s. A web-based version was published in 2005 and work continues to build on its foundations, employing treebanking and other modern methods of natural language processing.

 

       Classics has struggled over the subsequent half century to embrace computing in a way that evenly recognizes its practitioners as equal partners in scholarly endeavor. But despite this difficulty, there can be no denying that computing has changed the field irrevocably. Indeed, Marianne McDonald’s proposal for “the creation of a computerized databank of Greek Literature” closely followed Packard’s concordance in 1971, eventually bringing forth the earth-shaking Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (a project in which Packard and McDonald both played significant roles). The TLG is a uniquely pivotal work, resetting both expectations and methods field-wide, even though its full potential has been blocked by the aggressive enforcement of its restrictive license.

 

       But other flowers — increasingly varied in both beauty and function — have spread more freely across the intellectual landscape, products of both radical experimentation and patient gardening. Digital publications and research tools in epigraphy, numismatics, papyrology, philology, history, archaeology, and geography have proliferated (for a sampling, see the Digital Classicist Wiki and its list of Projects. And new ones — and new ways of using them — continue to emerge. The program for our present meeting illustrates this fact. Some naive word-searching turns up 35 unique abstracts that include terms like “digital,” “computer,” and “on line.” I’ll assert that the number of papers that depend on computation for data collection, record management and analysis is even higher, though the use of same has become so ubiquitous as not to merit mention in many an abstract.

 

       But if you want to come to close quarters with where classics has got to by way of digital methods in philology, and the places it might go from there, you must make plans to attend this afternoon’s session on “reconnecting the classics,” organized by the Digital Classics Association. The session features eight important voices in the digital classics, considering everything from the latest tools in computational philology to the challenges and opportunities presented by current crises in the undergraduate curriculum and classics praxis.

 

       Another session worthy of your attention has been organized by the Publications and Research Committee and scheduled for Sunday morning. It focuses on the Digital Latin Library, a joint initiative of the SCS, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America, that has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five papers in this session will highlight the ways in which the DLL blends traditional Latin philology with new approaches from the field of digital humanities.

 

       Early digital philology and its progeny constitute but one of the paths that leads to digital geography in the classics. For a fuller picture, we have to reach back earlier, to the antecedents of computing itself. Ada Lovelace‘s 1843 diagram for the computation of Bernoulli numbers is considered by many to be the first published algorithm intended to run on a computer. The computer in question was the so-called analytical engine envisioned by Charles Babbage, Lovelace, and their collaborators. Although the machine was never built, and so Lovelace’s algorithm was never implemented, it is one of the earliest antecedents of everything that happens today on your phone, tablet, laptop, or other device that includes a microprocessor.

 

       It then took a hundred years or so, but by the mid 20th century, an explosion of computing innovation was imminent. The explosive had been compounded of such volatile ingredients as the enlightenment science that Babbage, Lovelace, and their contemporaries inherited; and the wealth imbalances, state actors, and corporate powers that had emerged from colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, the new imperialism, capitalism, and industrialization. To these were added other ingredients like the mechanized armies and industries that had been spawned by World War II and subsequently turned their attention and resources to a global Cold War of unprecedented technological complexity.

 

       Mathematicians like Dorothy Vaughan, Grace Hopper, and Margaret Hamilton were writing the first machine-language programs to calculate rocket and artillery trajectories; developing the first symbolic programming languages that would make software more versatile and maintainable; and coding the software that made it possible — 50 years ago this July — for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land on the moon and return safely to earth, thereby demonstrating (among other things) that the US had the technological and industrial capacity to deliver nuclear warheads anywhere on the earth with speed and precision. It was the space age, and the information age was swelling in its head, ready to leap forth into the fields of war and commerce.

 

       And into mapping for the classics, as it turns out.

 

       Let’s chart our return to the subject of this panel by way of our sibling discipline: geography. More specifically, let’s consider the gift that our metaphorical information-age Athena has bestowed upon that field, namely: Geographic Information Systems. The story starts in 1962 with Roger Tomlinson and the Canada Land Inventory. This project, overseen first by Canada’s Department of Forestry and Rural Development, and later by the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, compiled maps and other information indicating the capability of land to sustain agriculture, forestry, recreation and wildlife. Given the way I’ve characterized the development of the information age, you’re probably not surprised that I’d identify the modern nation state as the primary actor in GIS and that its focus would be land management and inventory of exploitable resources. This theme dominates the early decades of GIS and remote sensing, which saw the introduction of a series of open-source and commercial software packages built to serve the interests of the nation state and of private commerce. Key domains of interest included not only land use and natural resource management, but also census, navigation, military planning, utilities and infrastructure, emergency response, and city and regional planning. The passage of the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act of 1974 in the US added cultural resource management and archaeological impact assessment to the GIS menu, quickening its adoption as a standard tool in archaeological work.

 

       I’ve included on the slide you see the infamous “GIS Layer Cake” illustration. It will be familiar to those of you who have had occasion to learn GIS in a formal environment or to consult standard textbooks or help documentation. The illustration is here to help me point out one of the key legacies that GIS received from conventional cartography: the idea of layers. Richard Talbert has already mentioned the process whereby maps were composed photographically from layers of film. Most of these layers were thematic, dividing the map’s content into manageable groupings that required common visual treatments such as shaded relief, elevation tint, drainage line work, cultural symbology, labeling, and so on. Thematic layers made for intuitive data structures and associated interaction artifacts on-screen, and so they made their way into GIS. But GIS transcends its cartographic forebears in part by putting these layers to work for more than cartographic representation. The constitution of a map — its bounds, extent, projection, final scale, color scheme, labeling — can be deferred, revised, and iterated upon throughout a production or analysis project. Layers can be created by computation against the content of other layers and used solely as a data source or interstitial calculation result that never itself appears in the final map.

 

       But a final map is often not really the goal anymore. Most of the features provided by GI systems and most of the time spent working with them involves geospatial information management and spatial analysis, not cartographic production. That is, GIS is used to test hypotheses and answer research questions that are geographic in nature. Maps are incidental to the process: data visualizations well suited to human supervision of the analysis and illustration of its results. To be sure, the rhetorical power of an authoritative map remains strong when the goal is to convince others to adopt a course of action or accept an argument, but we should think of GIS as much more than a tool for map-making. Many other tasks that, in an earlier age, would have preceded map production – or that would have occurred afterwards in one or another use context – have been bundled up with the strictly cartographic functionality into a single software environment augmented with additional capabilities and complexities that would have been beyond the reach of pre-computational geographers.

 

What are we doing with all this? Geographic information systems have put unprecedented analytical capabilities in the hands of classicists. Geospatial information structures and their attendant computational methods let us analyze visibility of features in a landscape, interrogate cost surfaces to estimate travel times, construct networks of places mentioned in literary works, calculate Thiessen polygons to approximate the extents of linguistic or administrative regions, and more.

 

       We can also use GIS to create spatial datasets for use by others. Among the many achievements of the Ancient World Mapping Center in the 18 years since its founding is the creation of spatial datasets suitable for a variety of analytic and cartographic purposes. These datasets are being used by others not only because of their uniqueness and quality, but also because they are distributed free of charge under open license. We may get to hear a bit more about this shortly in Lindsay Holman’s paper.

 

       I would be remiss if I did not mention, in this of all sessions, that the AWMC owes this heritage of successful open-access publishing to the Society for Classical Studies. For, although we identified openness as a core value for the new Center, it was the SCS that granted permission for the reuse of the Classical Atlas Project’s compilation materials without charge for the benefit of the field.

 

       And so the SCS helped bring to life another of the AWMC’s data publications: the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. I think that Lindsay will probably speak about Pleiades as well, but I hope she’ll forgive me if I say a few words about its design and about the current state of geospatial data work in ancient studies, which depends heavily on gazetteers like Pleiades. For a gazetteer is a thing that any mapmaker wants, whether working in analog or digital media.

 

       What is a gazetteer? Basically, it’s a geographic reference work: a big bucket full of reasonably consistent information about places. In traditional print, a gazetteer takes the form of a list of placenames, together with their known variants, associated spatial coordinates, and other distinctive attributes such as feature type (for example, city, temple, or forest). They have sometimes contained additional information, or even longer descriptive or historical narrative, blurring the lines with things we sometimes call almanacs or geographic dictionaries. At the simple end of the spectrum, they can serve as indexes into a map or group of maps. Such a bare-bones gazetteer appears at the back of the Barrington Atlas.

 

       The notion of a digital gazetteer solidified in the information science community of the 1980s and 90s. As the idea of digital libraries began to take shape, gazetteers were re-conceived as controlled vocabularies of placenames that could be used to facilitate activities such as automatic document linking, geoparsing of texts for named place references, and for regularization during data entry. The geospatial data included in digital gazetteers could be used to enable spatially aware search functions and to map arbitrary collections of content produced, for example, by a search engine. Influential pioneers in this area included Linda Hill and Ruth Mostern for the Alexandria Digital Library project at UC Santa Barbara, and David Smith and Greg Crane for the Perseus Digital Library project at Tufts University. Crucially, the complex spatial analysis and cartographic visualization capabilities of GI systems were not seen as components of a digital gazetteer. One might use GIS in the development and maintenance of a gazetteer. One might also load the contents of a gazetteer into one or more layers in a GIS to combine with other data for map-making or analysis. But the gazetteer itself was thought of as a database or dataset, together with a few computational services meant to support its use in another digital system.

 

       In deciding to take the Atlas Project’s information digital and on-line, we eventually concluded that this idea of a digital gazetteer better fit our data and our mental model than a GIS.

 

       One particular constraint of most GI systems was inimical to our data: the expectation that every feature of interest should have a well-defined spatial geometry (a point, line, or polygon). The limits of horizontal accuracy and the numerical precision of spatial coordinates can be codified in GIS (usually at the layer level), and even topological relationships with other features can be modeled, but features whose locations are wildly uncertain must nevertheless be represented with bounding boxes or representative points if they are to make an appearance in the GIS at all. The compilers and editors of the Classical Atlas Project reflected both the ancient sources and modern scholarship in giving us tons of such places. In the Barrington Atlas you’ll find them grouped in special sections labeled “Unlocated” in the Map-by-Map Directory volumes.

 

       Further considerations multiplied quickly. Many types and degrees of uncertainty obtained in our data. To take one example: how confident are we that a toponym appearing in an ancient witness is to be associated with a particular archaeological site or presumed locality? Richard and I enumerated such concerns in a paper that first appeared in 2002. It has now been reprinted in Richard’s “Challenges” book.

 

       We also envisioned a body of spatial information that might be under periodic revision at the individual place level. New archaeology, new texts, new analyses might all necessitate updates or corrections. Volunteer fieldwork with hand-held Global Positioning System receivers might contribute coordinates with more precision than the limited scale of the atlas maps had provided. New work with better satellite imagery might someday do the same. In this regard, our information-age Athena played more tricks on us. The chief agent of disruption this time was Google, whose relentless pursuit of on-line ad revenue led them to invest in the spatial aspects of digitally mediated commerce, giving away masses of map data and aerial and satellite imagery together with information about the locations of commercial entities and the way-finding services necessary to reach them. We’ve all paid for this apparent largesse, of course, by submitting our related behaviors to Google’s scrutiny, analysis, and monetization schemes. Another, less creepy, source of surprise was the OpenStreetMap community, which has dedicated itself to producing a user-created map of the world whose content is free and open by design. It has made a lot of progress, and Pleiades relies increasingly on their work.

 

       The gazetteer model has proved flexible enough to accommodate all these eventualities and more. Our commitment to openness complemented this flexibility by freeing us from the responsibility to reinvent and maintain GIS functionality on line for our users. If you want to do spatial analysis that involves Pleiades data, download the data and pull it into your GIS of choice. That’s what it’s there for.

 

       Identification as an open digital gazetteer also positioned Pleiades to play a leading role in reconfiguring the notion of digital gazetteers themselves. Pleiades serves not just one particular, curated digital library, but instead multiple arbitrary tools and publications distributed across the world-wide web and maintained by a variety of third parties. Providing the catalyst this time was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, whose thoughts on stable identifiers and Linked Data influenced us significantly. I’ve spoken recently about Linked Open Data, scholarly digital publication, and the value of the computationally actionable citation that results. The text of that talk is on my website, so I won’t go into much detail here. Suffice it to say that scores of digital scholarly publications around the world are aligning the geographic aspects of their content to a growing number of general and specialized digital gazetteers that are also aligning themselves to each other. As a result, the probability is growing that the data a classical scholar assembles to begin or augment a particular study will already be collated along geographic lines. You won’t have to sort out whether the inscriptions cataloged in one dataset you downloaded are from the same Alexandria as those in another dataset. Both datasets will cite a relevant gazetteer entry, leaving the ambiguity of textual reference behind. This method is already expanding beyond geography to other facets of relevance like prosopographical identity, named time periods, calendrical dates, and cross-language technical terminology.

 

       If I’ve timed my talk right, I should be coming to the end of my 20 minutes. I’ll conclude with one more advertisement for another session. If you’d like to learn more about the difference that digital practice is making in classics scholarship, then on Sunday morning you should attend the session on “geospatial classics” organized by two other Mapping Center veterans: Gabriel Moss and Ryan Horne. Papers in this session will explore specific applications of geospatial techniques to the research and pedagogical challenges of the Classics. Every person presenting in this session is an innovative and thoughtful scholar whose paper should not be missed.

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