Rationale and Impact
The Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, responds to NEH’s call for innovative research and development projects that produce new mechanisms and models for the creation, maintenance and long-term functional preservation of important humanities reference works.
The Center’s Pleiades project establishes a functioning, international community of scholars, teachers, students and enthusiasts who collaborate in the updating and expansion of the spatial and historical reference information assembled by the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project. Underpinning these efforts is a web-based, multi-lingual, spatially-enabled collaboration support system, built using open-source content-management and geographic information system software and made freely available for reuse by other projects. The Center and its collaborators define and enforce a flexible hierarchy of user roles and responsibilities, permitting each member of the community worldwide to contribute additions, corrections, observations and improvements to any placename, geographic location, date, bibliographic reference or explanatory essay in the Atlas Project dataset?, while facilitating a rigorous process of communal and subject-expert review, preparatory to publication in print and open digital formats.
Reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date reference works are essential tools in all fields of humanities research and teaching. It was in realization of this basic truth that during the 1980s the American Philological Association began to redress a century-long neglect of cartographic tools for the study of antiquity, ultimately culminating in the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World] by Princeton University Press in 2000 (Richard J.A. Talbert, ed.). A similar recognition, combined with an appreciation of the tremendous enabling potential of new digital technologies, led UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences to establish a permanent successor to the Classical Atlas Project: the Ancient World Mapping Center. A central element of the Center’s mission is the constant updating and diversification of the material marshaled for the Atlas in response to new scholarship, fresh discoveries and breakthrough technologies. Pleiades is the technological and procedural framework through which the Center will fulfill this mission. NEH support enables initial implementation and elaboration of the collaboration environment, as well as for the launch of the community itself through efforts focused on the geographic area of western and central Asia Minor, where significant new discoveries have been made since the publication of the Atlas, and other areas as prioritized by the Pleiades Steering Committee.
Key reference works in the humanities – particularly geographic ones – are increasingly prone to obsolescence even as rapid developments in the nation’s information infrastructure increase their value in linking, contextualizing and analyzing primary and secondary materials of every type. The Pleiades Project offers NEH a model opportunity to overcome this problem at a critical stage, before it becomes a damaging liability for the scholarly community. Pleiades creates free, standard-compliant tools and tested procedures for applying a web-enabled, publicly collaborative approach to the creation and enhancement of humanities reference publications. NEH investment in Pleiades unlocks far-reaching innovations essential to preserving key reference works: their relevance will be maintained, and their value enhanced, for scholars, students and the general public.
