IATH NEWS
Pelagios Commons Two-Day Workshop on Historical Geospatial Data
November 27, 2017
The University of Virginia Library and Pelagios Commons are offering a two-day workshop on tools and strategies for working with geospatial data in the historical past. The workshop will begin at 10am on Wednesday, November 29, and end 2pm on Thursday, November 30, in Alderman 421.
Trainers from Pelagios and the Ancient World Mapping Center will be offering hands-on guidance with several digital tools. 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 and PeriodO).
The workshop will provide hands-on tutorials for scholars and students of the University and outside the University, who wish to familiarize themselves with the process of geo-annotation and georeferencing, contribute to online gazetteers of the ancient world, and have an overview of the main GIS applications and software. The event is co-sponsored by the UVa Library, Scholars Lab, and IATH with lunch provided both days. There are limited seats, so attendees should register early.
Pelagios Commons is a community and infrastructure for Linked Open Geodata in the Humanities. Established in 2011, Pelagios has been developing means of linking independently created and curated online resources together via their common references to place. Pelagios has worked with major partners specializing 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, and with scholars from different traditions to test the extent to which digital tools could facilitate geospatial analysis. It has also worked on crowd sourcing annotation in university undergraduate classes, and developed a user-friendly platform (Recogito) for annotating documents (both texts and maps), and a map interface (Peripleo) for searching through the network.
