Pleiades: Creating Geographic Information

Pleiades has been designed to support not just dissemination of its content for use by others, but also the creation of new content by a community of contributors.

Beginning in fall 2008, any interested individual may request membership in the Pleiades community. After providing basic identifying information and agreeing to a contributor’s agreement, such a person may suggest changes to existing content, or add entirely new content reflecting results of their own study. Such suggestions are initially drafts, visible only to the contributor. They may be shared with other members or the entire community prior to submitting a request for publication. Such a request invites review from other members and from the Pleiades editorial college, leading ultimately to a publication decision by the managing editors. Until so published, suggestions are visible only to other authenticated members of the Pleiades community and their status is clearly indicated.

This process is designed to replicate for scholars the basic components of scholarly communication and publication in a digital, networked environment. In this sense, Pleiades can be thought of as a scholarly journal or reference encyclopedia whose primary content is not articles but packages of structured information about ancient places, spaces and names. Because the highly granular nature of the content and the freedom from print confer freedom from the need to bundle unrelated content for publication, Pleiades holds the potential for rapid, frequent updates.

Key early tasks, for which the managing editors will solicit member assistance, are the refinement of coordinates for discrete features and the elaboration of Greek orthography for geographic names. Google and other services are increasingly providing free online access to high resolution digital imagery. This imagery usually affords a much higher degree of precision than was possible for the Classical Atlas Project. After downloading Pleiades KML files, contributors will modify feature locations in Google Earth. Uploading these modified files will create new draft location records, which will then be reviewed by other members and the editors before publication into the services described above. Working directly in the Pleiades web interface, contributors can add Greek orthography to existing name records that currently only hold transliterations, or they can even create completely new name records for variants.