Pelagios

Available

• http://commons.pelagios.org/

Investigative team

• Project Director: Leif Isaksen, History, Lancaster University
• Community Director: Elton Barker, Classical Studies, The Open University
• Technical Director: Rainer Simon, The Austrian Institute of Technology
• Developer: Andrew Lindley, The Austrian Institute of Technology
• Community Manager: Pau de Soto, Institute of Catalan Studies, Barcelona

Description

Title

Pelagios: Linking together the places of our past

History

Established in 2011, Pelagios has been developing the means of linking independently created and curated online resources together via their common references to place. In its first two phases, Pelagios worked with major partners specialising in different areas of the classical world—e.g. the Perseus Classical Library, the German Archaeological Database, Nomisma.org, the Pleiades gazetteer—to develop a simple but effective means of linking between their varying resources. In phase 3, we extended our work to encompass "Early Geospatial Documents" more broadly, including early Christian Mappae Mundi and pilgrimages, Portolan charts, and Islamic and Chinese maps. This centred on developing a user-friendly platform (Recogito) for annotating documents (both texts and maps), and trialling a map interface (Peripleo) for searching through the network. Pelagios 4 worked with scholars from these different traditions to test the extent to which digital tools could facilitate geospatial analysis, and encourage reflection on the process of annotation itself. Pelagios 5 ("Sea Change") trialled crowdsourcing annotation in university undergraduate classes.

The research output by Pelagios is having a significant impact in the development of ancient world web-infrastructure for academic and non-academic data providers alike. The open data service technology it has championed is now the de facto international standard for open linked geospatial data concerning the ancient world, and is being used by other Web and linked data projects (e.g. Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies; PeriodO: a gazetteer for period assertions). Impact is measured not just by the growing number of partners whom Pelagios has attracted but also by the process that each group undertakes to become a partner: by aligning their data to the Pelagios network, each partner changes the way they hold their data. This means that Pelagios’s research is transforming both the nature of these data and the way in which these organisations work or even conceptualise their activity.

• Pelagios phases 1 and 2 was funded by JISC in successive programmes: Geospatial and Community Outreach and Resource Discovery (2011-2012)
• Pelagios phase 3: "Early Geospatial Documents" was funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-2015)
• Pelagios phase 4: "Studying the places of our past through the documents that refer to them" was funded by the AHRC (2014-2015)
• Pelagios phase 5: "Sea Change" was supported with funding from Open Knowledge Foundation (2014-2015)
• Pelagios phase 6: "Pelagios Commons" is currently supported with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2016-2018)

Publications

• Simon, R., Barker, E. and Isaksen, L. (2012a): Exploring Pelagios: a visual browser for geo-tagged datasets. In: Agirre et al. (eds.), International Workshop on Supporting Users' Exploration of Digital Libraries. Cyprus, 29-34
• Simon, R., Barker, E. and Isaksen, L. (2012b): Exploring Pelagios: a visual browser for geo-tagged datasets. In: International Workshop on Supporting User's Exploration of Digital Libraries, Paphos, 29-34.
• Isaksen, L., Simon, R., Barker, E., and de Soto Cañamares (2014): Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data. Web Sci’14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science, 197-201.
• Simon, R., Pilgerstorfer, P., Isaksen, L. and Barker, E. (2014): Towards semi-automatic annotation of toponyms on old maps. e-Perimetron, 9.3, 105-112 (www.e-perimetron.org).
• Simon, R., Barker, E., de Soto Cañamares, P. and Isaksen, L. (2014a): ‘Pelagios’. ISAW Papers 7.27. http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/simon-barker-desoto-isaksen/
• Simon, R., Barker, E., de Soto Cañamares, P. and Isaksen, L. (2014b): Pelagios 3: Towards the semi-automatic annotation of toponyms in Early Geospatial Documents. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2014. Lausanne, Switzerland, July 8-12, 2014.
• Simon, R., Barker, E., Isaksen, L. and de Soto Cañamares, P. (2015): Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito. e-Perimetron. 10.2, 49-59. ISSN 1790-3769.
• Simon, R., Isaksen, L., Barker, E., and de Soto Cañamares, P. (In Press). The Pleiades gazetteer and the Pelagios project. In M. L. Berman, R. Mostern H. Southall, eds. Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers, Indiana.

The Partners

Arachne, the British Museum, the British Library, CLAROS, Fasti Online, GAP, Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine, nomisma.org, Open Context, Oracc, Papyri.info, Perseus Digital Library, Pleiades, Ports Antiques, PtolemyMachine, Regnum Francorum Online, SPQR, Ure Museum