Talbert's Rome's World Database
The following description is an incomplete work-in-progress. Volunteers to assist with the work would be welcome.
Among the digital accessories[1] published alongside Richard Talbert's 2010 book Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge) was a web representation of the content of the database Richard and I developed to support his research into the map. Here's the steps and tools I'm using to align it with Pleiades:
- Save off the HTML full listing of the contents.
- Write a simple XSLT to parse that HTML listing into Comma-Separated Value (CSV) format.
- Load that CSV file into Google Refine, making sure to indicate explicitly that the encoding is UTF-8 (we don't want characters above base ASCII range borked).
- In Google Refine, parse Richard's BAtlas citations for each TP feature into a form matching that used for old-style BAtlas IDs (e.g., where Richard supplies a string like "Abellinum 44 G4", we want to produce "abellinum-44-g4"). Regular expressions are our friend!
- Download the file Sean Gillies created that crosswalks BAtlas IDs to Pleiades IDs.
- Use the "cross" function in Google Refine to add Pleiades IDs (like 432618 for Abellinum) from the crosswalk file to the TP listing: this will tell us which place resources in Pleiades with which we should match each TP feature. For the example used here, the Pleiades resource we want is http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/432618.
- download the latest names dump file (CSV) from Pleiades
- use the "cross" function again to
[1] The top-level entry point for the digital materials can be a bit hard to find. It's at http://www.cambridge.org/us/talbert/. Elijah Meeks blogged about the materials back in 2011.