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CH4 Linked Geodata
Thursday Feb 11, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET
Convenors: Anne Chen (Yale), Rainer Simon (Austrian Institute of Technology), Valeria Vitale (British Library)
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/NLDrQ7-av4Y
Slides: Combined PDF
In this class we will introduce historical gazetteers, and discuss their scope, structure, and applications, especially in the study of ancient cultural heritage. We will analyse how information in gazetteers is organised, and how the data models help us codify and compare our knowledge of the places of the past. We will examine, in particular, the Pleiades Gazetteer of the Ancient World and the role it played in a number of Linked Open Data projects. We will focus on a use case, learning how the urban gazetteer of the ancient city of Dura Europos was born, in what directions is developing, and how can it be used in the future to enhance the knowledge of the place. Finally, we will show how gazetteers have been applied by the Pelagios Project to build an online platform, Recogito, that enables us to annotate geographical references in digital documents and visualise them on a map.
- Chiara Palladino. 2016. "New Approaches to Ancient Spatial Models: Digital Humanities and Classical Geography." In Digital Approaches and the Ancient World. Edd. G. Bodard, Y. Broux & S. Tarte. BICS 59.2, 56-70. Available: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12038.x/full
- Rainer Simon, Valeria Vitale, et al. 2019. “Revisiting Linking Early Geospatial Documents with Recogito.” e-Perimetron 14.3, 150-163. Available: http://www.e-perimetron.org/Vol_14_3/Simon_et_al.pdf
- Berman, M.L., Åhlfeldt, J., & Wick, M. (2012). Historical Gazetteer System Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames. 2016-12-10. Available: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53a1/9e3be077ca259e78947f6ebdba7bf7715dd2.pdf
- Berners-Lee, Tim, Linked Data, 2006. (available: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
- Blaney, Jonathan, "Introduction to the Principles of Linked Open Data." In The Programming Historian (2017). Available: https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/intro-to-linked-data
- EuropeanaTech Issue 12: Pelagios. Available: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/issue-12-pelagios
- Hugh A. Cayless (2019). "Sustaining Linked Ancient World Data." In M. Berti (ed.), Digital Classical Philology: Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution. De Gruyter. Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572-004
- Tom Elliott and Sean Gillies (2009). "Digital Geography and Classics." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1. Available: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000031/000031.html
- Goodchild, M.F., & Hill, L.L. (2008). "Introduction to digital gazetteer research." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22(10), 1039-1044. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13658810701850497
- Randa El Khatib. 2019. "Laying the Foundation for Community-Driven, Open Cultural Gazetteers." KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 3.1, pp. 21–. Available: https://kula.uvic.ca/articles/10.5334/kula.53/
- Southall, H., Mostern, R., & Berman, M.L. (2011). "On historical gazetteers." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 5(2), 127-145. Available: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0028
- tba
Option 1: Create a free account on Recogito. Upload a text (in .txt format) or an image (in .jpg, .png., or .tiff format) that show a relevant amount of geographical information. Geo-resolve the place references against Recogito's gazetteers. Use tags to enrich your annotations, and, when appropriate, also links to external authority lists such as Wikidata. Experiment with different visualisation modes, and think of what have you learned about the original source, and how could you use your output in different contexts (for example a class, an academic publication, a conference, a museum exhibition, and so on). You can choose any resource you like, but bear in mind that Recogito's gazetteers are more focused around the ancient world. You may try annotating accounts of battles, mediaeval itineraries, archaeological accounts, as well as epigraphic corpora. Remember that you can also choose to upload a single file, or multiple in a bundle, to enable comparisons. You can also mix texts and images in your comparisons.
Option 2: Create a free account on Recogito. Download a copy of Pompeii Illustrated with Picturesque Views by T.L. Donaldson, a 19th century early tourist guide of Pompeii, and upload it on your Recogito account. Please, notice that the text has not been completely cleaned from OCR mistakes, and records of graffiti and inscriptions are currently broken. Read quickly through the guide, and try to annotate as many houses in Pompeii as you can. It is a long text, so, if you are part of a group, it may be more sensible to work on this together. The annotation process won't be easy because not all houses have currently an ID in Pleiades, but also because not all the houses' variant names have been recorded in the gazetteer. If you encounter the name of a building in Pompeii in the guide, try looking it up in Pleiades. If you find it, create an annotation in Recogito. If it doesn't appear in Pleiades, try looking for alternative names of the same house or villa. Van der Poel book on Pompeian toponymy is the best resource, but a lot of information is actually available online. If you find variant toponyms, look them up in Pleiades. If your search is still unsuccessful, find a way to make your annotations a useful starting point to improve the gazetteer in the future. For example, create an uncategorised annotation, and use it to record the name of the house, and its location. You can then download your annotations as CSV and, if you want, you're ready to start filling some gaps in Pleiades!
(If you have any technical problems with this exercise, you may ask for help in this forum thread)