Ancient World Mapping Center

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER

Through the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Departments of History and Classics, the National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant Program and foundation and private donors, the Center continues to mature, enhancing its capacity to assist scholars and students around the world with cartographic and geographic projects. What follows here is a brief summary of the year’s highlights.

The Center has secured the agreement of Princeton University to conduct an “audience test” of digital versions of maps prepared for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. The test is intended to further our goal of producing a Digital Barrington Atlas. The Center will report its recommendation for this product to the Press and to the American Philological Association in the first part of 2005.

During the first quarter of 2004, the Center added twenty-eight new maps relating to central themes in Roman history to its “Maps for Students Map Room.” These maps are available for free download and free reproduction and redistribution for non-profit personal and educational reasons. The maps were prepared to accompany the new book by Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola and Richard J.A. Talbert, The Romans from Village to Empire, Oxford University Press, 2004 (ISBN: 0-19-511875-8).

Prof. Richard Talbert and Dr. Elliott have submitted a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund creation of the Pleiades Project: a functioning, international community of scholars, teachers, students and enthusiasts who will collaborate in updating the expansion of the spatial and historical reference information assembled by the Classical Atlas Project and taken over by the Center.

The Center’s impact in the Carolina classroom continues to expand. Prof. Talbert’s graduate seminar, co-taught with Prof. Grant Parker of Duke University, drew eleven motivated students from UNC-CH, Duke, UNC-Greensboro and North Carolina State University. Dr. Elliott’s undergraduate seminar on “Roman Roads and Land Travel” drew nine talented undergraduates, who were equally successful in their explorations of related questions, as well as the use of aerial photography and geographical information systems.

The coming year is critically important for the success of the Center’s endowment drive, part of the Carolina first campaign. $700,000 in contributions and pledges must be secured in order to an additional $175,000 in matching funds from the National Endowment from the Humanities. Success in reaching this goal will secure perpetual support for the position of Center director and for basic budget needs such as phone and postage.

Tom Elliott, Director

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER

The 2002-2003 ancient year has been a busy and successful one for the Ancient World Mapping Center. Several efforts have seen significant advancement including our Maps for Students Project, which publishes free educational maps via the world-wide wide (www.unc.edu/awmc/downloads) and our collaboration with the Department of Computer Science to develop a multimedia map use system for the visually impaired (www.cs.unc.edu/Research/assist/bats). New features have also been added to the AWMC website including a weekly “books received” section. Web site traffic statistics indicate that web-publication is effective: the site receives an average of 200 substantive visits (5 or more pages viewed) per day, with 60% of those users spending more than 5 minutes on the site.

We continue to make good progress in establishing an infrastructure for the maintenance and regular update of the information originally published in the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. The Center’s website now provides nine substantive update notices. Some thirty more are in preparation. The Center is now capable of preparing digital images of the Barrington Atlas maps with a high degree of color fidelity and with significantly smaller file sizes that improve system performance. The Center has also been successful in registering these images for use in geographic information systems (GIS). We are presently working with Princeton University Press and the American Philological to plan for the release of a Digital Barrington Atlas. We have recently begun the conversion of the Atlas Project’s bibliographic records and the transfer of Map-by-Map Directory information to a database, with completion expected by the end of summer 2004.

The Center is also contributing to Carolina’s teaching mission. Maps for Students maps are in use in a number of History and Classics courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We provided a customized map of Roman Spain for use in a graduate epigraphy course in Fall 2002. In the spring term of 2004, Professors Talbert and Grant Parker (Duke University Classics) will be teaching a concurrent research graduate seminar on the theme Space and Place in the Ancient World. The Center’s director, Tom Elliott, will also be teaching an undergraduate research course on “Roman Roads, Itineraries and Land Travel,” partially funded by the Department of History.

We continue to make good progress in developing an endowment to support the Center’s core operations and staff. Major gifts this fiscal year were provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and UNC-CH alumnus Mark Clein. We also received the second installment in a three-year pledge from the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation, as well as numerous smaller donations. We are grateful for their essential support. Next year’s target is the largest yet: $750,000. Reaching this target will release an additional $187,500 from our National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant, and these funds together will permit the Center to operate the following year without direct support from the College. Donors and supporters at all levels are eagerly sought. Interested parties may contact Tom Elliott at awmc@unc.edu or (919) 962-0502.

More information about the Center’s activities and fundraising efforts may be found on the website at www.unc.edu./awmc.

Tom Elliott

ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER

The past year has been an excellent growth year for the Ancient World Mapping Center with important advances made in several areas.

Institutional and private donations have brought our endowment total to within $7,000 of our first-year goal of $83,000, and we are confident of closing that gap by 31 July 2002. The goal for 2003 (essential to secure matching funds through an NEH Challenge Grant) is much higher: $400,000. Information about our endowment drive and how to make contributions can be found on our website (see below).

A collaborative effort between the Center’s Director, Tom Elliott, and Professor Gary Bishop, Department of Computer Science, has led to the creation of a computer system that makes historical maps accessible to the blind using touch, sound and synthesized speech. The prototype system was developed by undergraduate students in a software engineering course, working closely with Tom, Gay and Jason Morris, a blind Classics graduate student assigned as a research assistant to the AWMC for academic year 2002-2003. The project, which used geographic data derived from the Barrington Atlas, edited by History Professor Richard Talbert, was so successful that the Facilities Services Division is now assessing the feasibility of using it to provide up-to-date maps of campus construction zones for the benefit of blind students, and faculty. The project has also gained the attention of researchers at the Microsoft Corporation, who have provided a gift of $24,000 to the Computer Science Department to continue work over the summer. We are now seeking funding for academic year 2002-2003 to enhance the device and develop more historical maps–keyed to UNC undergraduate courses–for use in the system. A story about the project appears in the University Gazette (June 13) (http://gazette.unc.edu/research.html#fy).

We are also hard at work developing procedures for the digitization of maps, bibliography, and other materials assembled under Richard Talbert’s direction by the Classical Atlas Project. We have overcome a number of technical challenges and now believe that we are in position to begin the work in earnest. Summer and Fall 2003 will be spent refining methods and developing proposals to secure funding to support this important initiative. Once the digitization project is complete, the Center will be able to respond quickly to requests for specialized maps for courses and research, and to manage effectively the essential effort to maintain an up-to-date record of research into ancient historical geography.

Visit the AWMC on the web at: www.unc.edu/awmc. Contact via email: awmc@unc.edu

Richard Talbert

ATLAS OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD

In May, project director and editor Richard Talbert joined two experts from MapQuest.com and a designer from Princeton University Press to oversee the press run for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World at Eurografica’s printing plant near Vincenza, Italy. Since the presses run 24 hours a day, with a new ‘form’ emerging for inspection every two hours on average, this task permitted little sleep for a week, but the high quality of presentation achieved for all 180 folio map pages is evident in the finished product. The Atlas was published in September, and has been received with acclaim; press coverage locally, nationally and internationally proved extensive. With its mission completed, the Classical Atlas Committee of the sponsor, the American Philological Association (chaired by Richard Talbert), held its final meeting in January. In February, the Atlas volume won an award for professional/scholarly publishing from the Association of American Publishers. In less than a year, the print run of 5,000 is selling out, and a reprint has been ordered. The printed two-volume set of the accompanying 1,400-page Map-by-Map Directory has likewise sold faster than anticipated (this is an optional extra to the CD-ROM version automatically supplied with every Atlas). The H.W. Goldsmith, A.W. Mellon and Joukowsky Family Foundations each contributed $25,000 to meeting the project’s final costs.

As the Barrington Atlas neared completion, it became clear to everyone involved that the tremendous step forward represented by the Atlas was, in fact, just the critical first step toward an exciting array of teaching and research opportunities that now lie open for investigation, thanks to ongoing advances in technology, historical scholarship, and archaeological survey. The missing component was a permanent academic center chartered to promote cartography, geographic information science and historical geography as essential disciplines within the field of ancient studies. In 1998 Prof. Talbert first outlined to APA his vision of such a Center. The Association’s Board of Directors was eager to be involved with the initiative, but was not in a position to take the lead in establishing it. By contrast, when the possibility was raised, the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-CH enthusiastically offered to take this lead. With additional financial and administrative support from the Department of History, the Ancient World Mapping Center was established in August 2000. Under the leadership of Director, Tom Elliott, the Center occupies ideal rent-free space on the fifth floor of Davis Library, specially renovated and equipped for the purpose. The Center is already embarking on an exciting array of research and outreach activities, which are summarized on its web site at http://www.unc.edu/depts/awmc. Plans for providing training support to college and secondary teachers are proceeding in cooperation with the History Department’s Project for Historical Education and the North Carolina Classical Association.

In October, Professor Talbert and Mr. Elliott made a joint presentation on the development and production of the Barrington Atlas at the North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting, Knoxville, TN. In November, Risa Palm, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences hosted a celebration in Wilson Library to mark the successful publication of the Barrington Atlas and the establishment of the AWMC. This celebration, supported by the Departments of History and Classics, featured remarks by Chancellor James Moeser, Dean Palm, and Professor Talbert. April saw the preparation of a proposal to the Challenge Grant program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The AWMC is seeking $500,000 from the NEH to form the cornerstone of a $2.5 million endowment; if approved, the funds will be released to the endowment at a ratio of one dollar to every four raised from other sources. The goal of the endowment is to secure permanent, non-appropriated funding for the core staff, operations, and outreach activities of the Center, thereby insulating it from fluctuations in annual appropriate budgets and freeing College funds for other initiatives. The AWMC received excellent support from the College in preparation of the proposal and has a commitment from Dean Palm and the Arts and Sciences Foundation for the fundraising effort. To learn more about the endowment drive, please contact the Center’s Director at awmc@unc.edu

Richard Talbert

ATLAS OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD

For information on this project and on how to order the publications now available, please visit its Web Page at http://www.unc.edu/depts/cl_atlas. In what has been the most stressful of its 12 hectic years to date, the project has now finally achieved completion. Relief at attaining this elusive goal has been tempered, however, by feelings of loss as several staff members moved on to new challenges. After handling all second proof corrections as ably as ever, map editor Dr. Joann McDaniel left during the summer for an appointment at the Inter-Collegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy. Susan Jenny also left then, having served as project manager since the establishment of the office in February 1992. It would be hard to overstate what an immense benefit her dedication and efficiency have been throughout. Brian Lund left for Washington, DC, at the end of January, after making an exceptionally valuable contribution to the Map-by-Map Directory which accompanies the Atlas. With the fulfillment of the major individual donor’s million-dollar pledge, it was confirmed that the volume will be entitled Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in accordance with his wishes. Front matter for it was delivered to Princeton University Press in December. Early in February the cartographers (MapQuest, Mountville, PA) completed delivery of final film and discs for the printing (in May) of all 180 folio map pages by Eurografica, Vincenza, Italy. In February, too, the project office was able to deliver to Princeton the gazetteer which forms the final component of the atlas volume. Even this simple listing of all the names appearing on the maps runs to 43 pages in five-column format. Its compilation was primarily the work of Tom Elliott. From February onwards he likewise played a major (and outstandingly creative) role in preparing the Directory both as a CD-ROM and as a file for printing. It was delivered at the end of April, and in print will comprise two volumes totaling 1,400 pages. All purchases of the atlas automatically receive the CD-ROM Directory with it.

Director Richard Talbert exhibited maps from the atlas at the 18th International Conference on the History of Cartography in Athens, Greece, during July, and offered both a paper and an exhibit at the 11th International Conference of Classical Studies in Kavala, Greece, in August. He exhibited the entire 102 maps for the atlas at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association and Archaeological Institute of America in Dallas, TX, during December, and likewise at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Knoxville, TN, in April. He gave a keynote retrospective address on the project at the University of New Brunswick’s (Fredericton, Canada) 7th Annual Ancient History Colloquium in March, and lectured on various aspects of his mapmaking to the UNC Scholarly Communication Working Group (November), the University of Florence, Italy (March), and the Washington Map Society at the Library of Congress (April). An article by him in Mercator’s World (November/December 1999) discusses the project’s goals and development.

Concern that the work of the project should not simply cease with the publication of the atlas has been met by plans for establishment of a permanent center to extend, update, and disseminate what has been achieved so far. The College of Arts and Sciences has made a generous commitment to provide the basic funding for this unique new Ancient World Mapping for three years, and to house it in the Davis Library from Fall 2000. The Partner’s Fund and the American Philological Association are also contributed initial funding.

Richard Talbert

5-1-2016 to 4-30-2017

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

Yet again this has been an extremely active year at the Center, with the production of multiple commissioned maps, the completion of several projects initiated by the Center itself, and the formation of a new partnership to apply historical mapping technology to the public good.

The level of commissioned work reached an all-time high.  Notably, the Center produced three maps for Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society (ed. Brian Turner and Jessica Clark), six maps for Damian Fernandez, An Invisible Class in a Silent Land: Aristocracy and Statehood in Western Iberia, three maps for Simon Pulleyn’s edition of Odyssey, Book I, and two maps for James O’Hara’s commentary on Aeneid, Book VIII.  Illustration of Richard Talbert’s Eitner lecture at the David Rumsey Map Center called for the delicate task of identifying and marking routes attributed to named travelers on sample sheets of Richard Kiepert’s Karte von Kleinasien.

The Center continued its longstanding collaboration with the Pleiades Project at New York University, developing partnerships with several individuals and organizations to expand the focus of the Pleiades gazetteer both spatially (into the Middle and Far East) and temporally (into Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages).

After several years of work by five successive directors of the Center and many others, it has finally been possible to release the magnificent wall map Asia Minor in the Second Century C.E. (1:750,000).  This is a larger-scale successor to the painstaking map by John Anderson (1903) and to its partial revision by William Calder and George Bean (1958).  Offered as a free digital download, the wall map has gained wide interest among archaeologists, cartographers, historians, and scholars of religion; it may also be printed (80 x 50 ins full-size).  The Center has now taken the further step of establishing a new series entitled Maps for Texts: it is designed to provide accurate, high-quality maps for a variety of ancient writings which merit that enhancement (although probably in most cases this was always lacking).  The series has been inaugurated with four maps to accompany Ptolemy’s Table of Important Cities; two of the four adopt Ptolemy’s own projection using a base kindly shared by Alfred Stückelberger and colleagues, who drew it for their 2006 Basel edition of the Geography.  All four maps are offered as free digital downloads.  Next in the series, and close to completion, is an interactive web-map of Hierokles’ Synekdemos,  Further texts due to be mapped in the series include Arrian’s Periplus of the Black Sea, the geographical books (2–6) of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the Parthian Stations of Isidore of Charax, and the papyrus record of the journey of Theophanes.

This year the Center launched a new partnership for scholarship in the public interest, focusing on the role of mapping in protecting cultural heritage from human destruction.  Working with the United States Committee for the Blue Shield, the Center expanded and developed “no-strike lists”, inventories of cultural heritage sites (such as schools, libraries and archaeological excavations) in active or potential war zones.  USCBS coordinates with the United States and allied militaries to protect these sites from inadvertent or malicious destruction.  The hard work of Alexander Griffin, in his senior year the Center’s first Cultural Heritage Protection intern, was indispensable to developing this partnership in collaboration with the History Department.

The work of the Center’s other staff members has also been excellent – two graduate students (Lindsay Holman and Peter Raleigh), and two undergraduates (Daniel Hawke and Laura Roberson).  After two years as assistant in the Center, Daniel is now graduating, and will be much missed.  So, too, will former Director Ryan Horne, whose continuing expert assistance during his postdoctoral fellowship has been invaluable; Ryan is moving to a similar position at the University of Pittsburgh.  Gabriel Moss, having most successfully completed a second year as Director, is now stepping down in order to return to the classroom.  He will be succeeded by Lindsay Holman.

Gabriel Moss

Richard Talbert

5-1-15 to 4-30-16

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

For 2015-2016, the seemingly routine annual claim that the past year has been busier than ever is no exaggeration for sure.  Not only did an exceptional number of commissioned maps achieve completion, but the Center also made substantial headway on several research projects as well as mounting its first conference.

Particularly significant among completed commissions is a set of nine maps for the fifth edition of the much-used Oxford Classical Dictionary, the first of its editions to be digital-only, and the first to include any maps!  The set – designed by Center Director Gabriel Moss – ranges from the spread of Greek colonization to the administrative divisions of Constantine’s empire.  Graduate assistant Alexandra Locking produced ten maps for Mercury’s Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World, a collaborative volume co-edited by Fred Naiden and Richard Talbert, due for publication by Oxford University Press in 2017.  Other notable commissions included maps for the first-ever English translation and commentary on Dionysius of Byzantium, Anaplous Bospori (Thomas Russell, Oxford University Press); for Brill’s Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean (ed. Timothy Howe and Lee Brice); for a display of ancient coins at the University Museum, Oxford MS; and for Civitates, a board game designed for high-school students learning Latin.  Plans developed last year with the Bible and Gospel Trust, UK, led to the production and delivery of a dozen maps to illustrate the bible.  Trevor Bryce’s Atlas of the Ancient Near East and Persia from Prehistoric Times to the Roman Imperial Period, for which the Center made 130 full-color maps last year, has now been published by Routledge, an impressive volume.

In April the Center held its first conference, on the theme Mapping the Past: G.I.S. Approaches to Ancient History.  This well-attended occasion – with keynote address by the Center’s first director, Dr Tom Elliott (NYU) – provided a productive forum in which twelve speakers from North America and Europe shared approaches and techniques for using geography and digital tools to study the ancient past.  The technology training workshop G.I.S. for Historians organized in connection with the conference filled to capacity.  All presentations were filmed and are publicly available on the Center’s new YouTube channel: (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEr92C0pVw6-CeM9krzNs2Q)

Two ongoing research initiatives were advanced: the map of Hispania at 1:750,000 scale, and digital manipulation of Forma Urbis Romae fragments in collaboration with Prof. Ryan Shaw and graduate assistant Will Knauth in the School of Information and Library Science.  Further initiatives were launched, in particular the creation of digital maps to add a cartographic dimension to Ptolemy’s Table of Important Cities and to the Synekdemos of Hierocles.   Maps to illustrate travel accounts were also started, among them Egeria’s pilgrimages and the journey of Theophanes from Hermopolis in Egypt to Syrian Antioch.

The Center’s partnership with Pleiades at New York University (Pleiades.stoa.org) remained active; this project has embarked on a new phase with the award of further support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The Center’s two publicly available mapping resources, the Antiquity-A-La-Carte platform and the Ancient World Map Tiles, continue to be in great demand from scholars and educators.  Former Center director Dr. Ryan Horne designed both, and has maintained them: the platform now has approaching 2,000 registered users, while this year alone the tiles have been viewed nearly one million times.

The Center’s assistants have proven as dedicated and talented as ever.  It is a blow to be losing both graduate students: Will Knauth has completed his MLS, and Alexandra Locking has won a fellowship which requires exclusive focus on the completion of her dissertation.  Among undergraduates, Ashley Cloud graduated after two years of dedicated work for the Center.  Michael Heubel continued for a third year, and was joined by three excellent recruits Sabrina Cheung, Daniel Hawke, and McKenzie Hitchcock.  It is the Center’s good fortune that Gabriel Moss, after an outstandingly successful year as director, will continue in that position for 2016-2017.

Gabriel Moss

Richard Talbert

5-1-14 to 4-30-15

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

This has been another very productive year for the Center.  Its publicly accessible map tiles, released last year, were significantly refined by the incorporation of OpenStreetMap data into the layers for coastlines, rivers and lakes.  Featuring some of the most precise geographic information available, OpenStreetMap data provides a new level of detail far superior to previous maps made from a VMAP0 base.  Because OpenStreetMap is primarily focused on contemporary conditions, it has been necessary for the Center to remove all modern manmade features from the Mediterranean and other coastlines, painstaking work typically to be done at very large scales.  This immense task was completed by the end of the year; the revisions will soon be incorporated into a new version of the Center’s map tiles and offered for download on the Center’s site.

A challenging, but instructive, major project which took the entire year to complete was the production of as many as 130 maps, battle-plans and site-plans in full color for The Routledge Atlas of the Ancient Near East and Persia from the Bronze Age to the Roman Imperial Period by Trevor Bryce and Jessie Birkett-Rees at the University of Queensland and Monash University respectively, Australia. This work was undertaken principally by Gabe Moss and Ray Belanger.  It hardly needs stressing that in terms of chronology, culture and geography the scope of this atlas is vast, and not surprisingly some of the plans in particular (Troy, for example) proved very demanding to draft.  A further important large project for which planning in collaboration with Oxford University Press has begun is a substantial range of maps of various types to illustrate the Oxford Classical Dictionary: in the revised, rethought online edition now being developed, this standard reference work is to include maps for the first time.

Other commissions fulfilled by the Center included seven maps for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions edited by Eric Orlin, as well as one map for the first English-language edition of Bertolt Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, and another for Federico Santangelo’s biography of Gaius Marius (both Bloomsbury Publishing).  Many maps were made for Oxford University Press works: four for Luca Grillo’s commentary on Cicero, De Provinciis Consularibus; three for a monograph on Sophocles by Oliver Taplin; one for a monograph on Roman historical drama by Patrick Kragelund; and several, together with plans, for Richard Talbert’s Roman Portable Sundials: The Empire in Your Hand.  Further maps and plans were produced discreetly for Talbert’s surprise Festschrift Aspects of Ancient Institutions and Geography (Brill).  Plans for a set of maps to illustrate the bible were developed with the Bible and Gospel Trust, UK.  Cambridge University Press has now published the online map made by the Center to accompany Duane Roller’s translation of Strabo’s Geography.  As usual, the Center licensed a number of its previously published maps for reproduction, sometimes in modified form.

The Center’s wallmap of Asia Minor in the second century CE at 1;750,000 scale has been completed.  It is to be published with the volume of proceedings arising from the Ankara conference Pathways of Communication: Roads and Routes in Anatolia from Prehistory to Seljuk Times, to which Talbert has also contributed a chapter entitled “The mapping of classical Asia Minor and its routes: Progress and prospects from Richard Kiepert to Global Positioning Systems.”  Talbert and Center Director Ryan Horne presented the next wallmap in early draft – Hispania, also at 1:750,000 scale – at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans, LA, where it was well received.  Two invitations to discuss the Center’s work were accepted – by Horne at the Wake Forest University Digital Humanities Kitchen, and by Talbert at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.  Talbert also taught a class on the Barrington Atlas by Skype for a Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire course at Radboud University, Netherlands.  Horne delivered the keynote address, focusing on digital mapping, for the UNC/King’s College London Transatlantic Conference.

At the graduate level, two students were recruited to the Center, Will Knauth (School of Information and Library Science) and Gabe Moss (History), while Ray Belanger unexpectedly proved able to continue working after graduation.  Ashley Cloud was recruited at the undergraduate level, joining Michael Heubel who continued.  While all have done excellent work, a special note of appreciation for Ray is in order as he leaves for a second time; the remarkable skill which he developed in drafting plans will be hard to replace.  The greatest loss by far, however, is that of Ryan Horne, who has capped five years of extraordinarily dedicated and creative work at the Center by serving as Director.  Most recently, Ryan’s continued commitment to the upgrading of the Antiquity-A-La-Carte tool and to furtherance of the Center’s partnership with the Pleiades project at New York University (pleiades.stoa.org) has been quite invaluable.  It is hard to thank him enough for all these efforts, which will continue to have longterm impact worldwide.  He is to be congratulated on his appointment as post-doctoral fellow at UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative.  Ryan’s successor as Director is Gabe Moss.

Ryan Horne
Richard Talbert