Sean Gillies Blog

If you're interested in a historian's take on Wikipedia and the impact of the Wikipedia process on scholarship, check out Roy Rosenzweig's excellent essay: Can History be Open Source? (via The Stoa Consortium). It was the talk of the History blogosphere around the middle of June after appearing in The Journal of American History, but I missed it due to my newness on the scene and preparation for our first Pleiades meeting. The essay is enormously relevant to the Pleiades project, and we'll be disseminating it to all our potential users.

After a brief history of Wikipedia and an analysis of its accuracy (pretty good) and prose (generally mushy), Rosenzweig considers what a Wikipedia-like peer production process might achieve with the participation of professional historians:

If the Internet and the notion of commons-based peer production provide intriguing opportunities for mobilizing volunteer historical enthusiasm to produce a massive digital archive, what about mobilizing and coordinating the work of professional historians in that fashion? That so much professional historical work already relies on volunteer labor -- the peer review of journal articles, the staffing of conference program committees -- suggests that professionals are willing to give up significant amounts of their time to advance the historical enterprise. But are they also willing to take the further step of abandoning individual credit and individual ownership of intellectual property as do Wikipedia authors?

The AWMC wants to preserve individual credit. Absolutely. But it's still going to be tricky. We'll need a lot of finesse to deal with perceptions about the big step.

Since I have no academic background in GIS or Geography (was all Physics), I've been skeptical about GIS or map librarians (such as mapz). To me, this position seemed a bit mythical -- like the jackalope or sasquatch. But then recently I met Celia Pratt, maps librarian at http://www.lib.unc.edu. What's more, since I'm telecommuting to the AWMC's office on the 5th floor of the UNC library and working on the data model for a major reference work, I'm getting pretty close to map librarian territory myself. The intersection between Geography and the Humanities is a fine place to be.

The figure in the photo is not a map librarian.

Congratulations to Ross Scaife et al. EDUCE is funded by the NSF. Ross is the host of the Pleiades project web infrastructure.

More on Google Book Search maps at The Stoa Consortium: Google Maps and Millions of Books.

Slowly, but surely, I'm catching up on the other Web and GIS projects in the Digital Humanities. One of these is the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology's MAGIS, which provides simple MapServer-based map search for archaeological projects.

I'm off on vacation for a few days after finishing the latest Pleiades site migration and release. Our master KML file is now at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/nwlink. That's 304 places in ancient Lycia and Pisidia (southwest coast of modern Turkey) from map 65 of the Barrington Atlas. There are 102 map pages to go, and we'll eventually have about 50,000 ancient places (with extensive bibliography) online next spring. In case you have a Barrington Atlas handy, the map 65 grid is available at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/BA065grid.kml.

It will take a while for Google's index to catch up with our changes, but thanks to mod rewrite and a little scripting, anything you find through a Google Earth search is properly redirected to our new URLs.

ArchAtlas is another of Pleiades's neighbors at the corner of GIS and Humanities. It takes an approach different from MAGIS, using KML and WorldWind plugins for browsing their database of sites.

GeoRSS evangelism is part of what I do for Pleiades. The new support for GeoRSS in Google Maps is the spark that will set it off in the digital humanities. For example, check out this feed of Celtic coin finds from the British Museum's Celtic Coin Index:

http://www.finds.org.uk/CCI/functions/atom-export-all.php?denomination=Stater

Feed on the map

Help! I'm turning into a librarian.

The AHRC ICT Methods Network Workshop on Space and Time: Methods of Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past looks like it will have a neo-geography flavor. Tom Elliot, Pleiades director, is going to be leading discussion on integration of heterogeneous data.

Mike Shaver's post about rich internet applications, with the great quote

If someone tells you that their platform is the web, only better, there is a very easy test that you can use:

rippled around last month, and I was reminded of it again when I viewed the Rome Reborn 1.0 flash movie (via The Stoa Consortium). It's slick, no doubt, but you can't really call it a web site. This manifestation is practically unusable. Flash movies should complement -- never replace -- addressable, linkable, bookmarkable, and programmable web sites.

See also Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig in their book Digital History.

I'm pleased to report that the National Endowment for the Humanities has invited Pleiades to help represent US projects at a joint NEH-CNR conference on "Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage". The new technologies we will be talking about include Open Source GIS, Plone, KML, WxS, Atom/Atompub, and maybe a little bit about Mush. I'll be in DC during 3-5 October, and have time to meet up with anyone in the area who's interested in finding out more about Pleiades.

My boss, Tom Elliot, is an expert epigrapher as well as a fine programmer and geo hacker, and has a new blog on these subjects: Horothesia. Or, as we say around here: τὰ ὁροθέσια. In a way, epigraphs are the push-pins and popup description bubbles of ancient geography.

The slides that I will be using at the National Endowment for the Humanities/Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche "Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage" conference are online.

Speaking of slides, my FOSS4G slides are rather useless on their own. I'm going to try to herd my notes up into a paper over the next couple of weeks.

I thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of attending the NEH/CNR conference on "Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage", but was a bit crushed to learn that I missed meeting Dan Cohen. His book, "Digital History", has been a very important reference for Pleiades and I am a big fan of his blog. Cohen has written a detailed review of the conference.