Antiquity À-la-carte

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Available

In January 2024, the Ancient World Mapping Center announced that Antiquity À-la-carte had been taken offline. Replacement software (entitled AWMC Interactive) is currently under development, with hopes to release a prototype for beta testing in March 2024. [1]

Author

  • Ryan Horne, with assistance from Jeffrey Becker, Richard Talbert, Joseph Ryan, Ray Belanger, and Ashley Lee.

Licensing, Permissions, Citation

Thanks in no small part to input from the Digital Classicist community, as of June 1, 2016, Antiquity A-la-carte and all maps and data files produced in the application are available for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This new license drops the non-commercial clause in effect before June 1, 2016, and so content produced in A-la-carte can now be used for commercial purposes (including any and all publication) without the need for additional permissions and licensing.

The A-la-carte website suggests the following citation formats:

"For Shapefiles, The suggested citation is the following: Ancient World Mapping Center. “Shapefile name”. <http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [Accessed: April 23, 2013 11:00am]

For example, the citation for our coastline file should be: Ancient World Mapping Center. “Coastline”. <http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [Accessed: April 23, 2013 11:00am].

For maps created with the application we suggest something similar to the following: Ancient World Mapping Center. “À-la-carte”. <http://awmc.unc.edu/awmc/applications/alacarte/> [Accessed: April 23, 2013 11:00am]."

Description

The Ancient World Mapping Center's Antiquity À-la-carte application provides an interactive digital atlas of the ancient world and allows users (even those without GIS experience) to create basic, customized maps. The application displays historically accurate geospatial data (based largely on the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World), in addition to the entire Pleiades feature set.

Customizing a Map in Antiquity À-la-carte

À-la-carte allows users to build custom maps by creating a personalized set of "features." These features include settlements, buildings, physical features, and political divisions. In the Map Layers window, custom features are stored in Layers>Cultural Data>Physical Culture>Features.

Users create their personalized set of features by extracting individual places from "Static Features," a layer which includes the full datasets of the Ancient World Mapping Center and Pleiades. This layer can be viewed in the Map Layers window at Layers>Cultural Data>Physical Culture>Static Features, and searched with the "Search for Features" button. To extract a data point from Static Features to your custom features, either 1: In the main map viewing window, select the desired feature, click its name for more information, then press the "Make Interactive Feature" button, or 2: In the search window, select the desired feature and press the "Add a Feature to Map" button.

Once you have created a custom data set in Antiquity À-la-carte, you can export this data in a variety of formats (File>Export). This data can then be reused in any standard desktop GIS platform (i.e. Google Earth, ArcGIS, QGIS). Alternately, you can use the File>Print tool to select a portion of the main map viewing window and export it as a .pdf.

For more detailed instructions and FAQ's, see the User Guide [2]