Pleiades Project Blog
Pleiades Project Blog
This blog is essential reading for contributors, editors, reviewers and staff of partner projects. It's where we'll announce site-wide projects, major maintenance work, new site or dataset features, and community events.
New FAQ: User Profiles
How to modify
Three New FAQs: user accounts and passwords
Do you need one and what to do if you lose the information.
Pleiades Community Time: 16 December 2010
A chance to chat about current capabilities and future plans
Quarterly Report for December 2010 published
The project team summarizes recent developments across the effort.
Community Time Report
Notes and chat transcript published.
Adopt a place for Valentine's day
Pleiades places are looking for love and this year you can give it to them (it never hurts to get ready for Valentine's Day early). It will only take a few minutes of your time.
Zeugma at Pleiades and ISAW
In honor of Kutal Gorkay's upcoming talk at ISAW (Recent Archaeological Research in Zeugma: March 21, 2011), I've taken the opportunity to update the Zeugma resource at Pleiades.
Draft "How-to" for Review: Add Better Coordinates to an Existing Place
For those interested in adding new/better coordinates to existing Pleiades places, there is now an (I hope) accurate step-by-step outline that I'll soon turn into a full script for a screencast
Regular archives of nightly exports
Quarterly, long-term, third-party digital archiving
Time Periods for Ancient Egypt
Pleiades now supports several additional time periods for names and locations in ancient Egypt
Semiannual Report Published (May 2011)
Achievements and progress over the preceding 6 months.
Toponyms in Demotic and Hieratic
A new publication from Pleiades partner project Trismegistos
Hurricane Irene
Pleiades will not be affected
Feeds of Flickr Photos Depicting Pleiades Places
Linking photos on Flickr to place resources in Pleiades
Community Meetup: Wednesday, 19 October, 4:00p.m. UCT
Tom Elliott will initiate a Google+ Hangout for all interested Pleiades community members
Content Improvement Projects and Call for Volunteers
We've added a new section of the website to enable community members to suggest, organize and volunteer for projects to improve or expand Pleiades content.
Volunteer Opportunities: Improving Data
Pleiades needs your help!
New FAQs: adding new references/links and better coordinates
Two of the most common interests of active community members are now provided with better guidance.
Planning a Pleiades Hack Day
An opportunity to work together to improve titles and descriptions for our place resources. Volunteers needed!
New FAQ: Links to excavation websites
Where these belong in Pleiades
Two New FAQs: Modern Names and Accuracy Assessments
How to add and modify these important bits of information.
New FAQ: Pleiades Internet Relay Chat Channel
How to use IRC to connect with other members of the Pleiades community.
Pleiades Hack Day: 21 November 2011
Participants will meet virtually throughout the day to work on improving titles and descriptions for prominent and well-known places in Pleiades.
Pleiades, PELAGIOS and Linked Open Data
Pleiades is at the center of an emerging graph — a web of data — for ancient world resources on the web.
New FAQ: How to view and download Pleiades coordinates
Download place KML, look inside the "location" resources within a "place" resource, or visit our downloads page.
What do you want from bibliography in Pleiades?
The Barrington Atlas Map-by-Map Directories used bibliographic references for various purposes. We have inherited that bibliographic data, but have not yet implemented "full" bibliographic support in Pleiades, in part because our use case(s) for bibliography are underspecified. Help us flesh them out.
Eye on the sidebar: cool new Pleiades portlets
Sean Gillies has been working to enhance the user experience. You'll see some new and useful things in the right-hand margin of Pleiades pages.
How to cite Pleiades
We've added a "suggested citation" to every place resource page in Pleiades.
Giving credit where credit is due
The Pleiades website now provides a credits page that highlights the broad range of community contributions to its code and content while endeavoring to implement emerging best practice for fair and complete citation in digital humanities publications projects.
Pleiades Content Workshop, Thursday 5 April 2012
Beginners welcome! Participate in person in New York, or online.
Content Workshop (Online): Friday, 20 April 2012
Between 10am and noon U.S. Central Daylight Time
New FAQ and screencast: How do I add a better location for an existing place resource?
New FAQ: Adding a reference to the Peutinger Map
We've added an FAQ that makes it easy to add a citation to this important resource.
Updated FAQ: Referencing Wikipedia
We like links to Wikipedia, and here's the latest guidelines on how to add them to Pleiades content.
A New Help Experience
Announcing a newly reorganized help and information center for Pleiades.
New Citation Guide
A new guide to references and citation has been added to the Pleiades help center.
Virtual Hack Day: 6 December 2012
An online group work session like this is a great way to start learning how to edit and improve content in Pleiades. It's also a good way to meet your fellow community members.
Virtual Hack Day: 18 December 2012
Let's spruce up Asia Minor!
Tutorials on Titles, Descriptions, and Connections
Improving the titles and descriptions of Pleiades place resources, and linking them one to another using connections, are some of the easiest and most valuable ways that community members can help improve Pleiades content.
Virtual Mapping Party: 15 January 2013
Come summit with us! The focus of our next mapping party (formerly "hackfests") will be mountains and mountain ranges.
Virtual Mountain Mapping Party: 24 January
We had so much fun working on mountains last week, let's do it again! 2pm UTC on Thursday, 24 January 2013.
Reviewers' Guide for Comment
We are soliciting comments on a newly-drafted "Reviewers' Guide", which we think also will be of use to everyone interested in adding content to Pleiades.
New: How to search for things in Pleiades
Our first help document on the subject!
New in Help: Tutorial Categories
Grouping our how-tos in a more useful way.
Updated help concept: "What are connections?"
Direct place-to-place relationships allowing the construction of geographic hierarchies and networks. Rivers to seas, roads to towns, towns to ethnic regions or provinces.
New Help Topic: Add a Name
The latest guidance how to add new name resources to Pleiades.
Updated Citation Guide
Explanatory notes have been added for some existing entries, and several areas that were marked "to be added" have now been completed.
Adam Rabinowitz joins editorial board
Pleiades has a new associate editor!
New Help Topic: Using Advanced Search
In addition to our ubiquitous "Live Search", Pleiades provides a sophisticated "Advanced Search" form for more complicated queries. Here are some tips for using it.
How to track changes in Pleiades
I was recently asked on Facebook if there is "a new places feed from Pleiades". The answer is: yes, and then some. Here are the details.
Bob Consoli's "placename lookup" critique
How to use our downloadable CSV files most effectively.
Pleiades is now on Facebook
You asked for it...
Pleiades is now on Twitter
Better late than never...
Last Week in Pleiades
The all-volunteer editorial review team published 57 new or updated content items. We also set up Facebook, Twitter, and Feedburner accounts, as well as adding support for events and events listings to the site.
Last Week in Pleiades (9 August 2013)
51 new or updated content items have been published in the past week.
5 September Review Party Canceled
Due to conflicts for a majority of the editorial board, tomorrow's review party has been canceled. Stay tuned for announcements about future events.
Pleiades Downtime: Thursday, 21 November 2013
From 3:45 to 5:45 p.m. US Mountain Standard Time
Review Parties in December and January
Several review parties have been scheduled for December 2013 and January 2014. If you're interested in helping the editorial college clear the review backlog and publish new, high-quality information in Pleiades, please consider joining us.
The Ancient Near East in Pleiades
We have recently accessioned some data derived from the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO) by an external project. Here is the status of the work, some context, and a call for volunteers.
Geographies of the Ancient City: Lessons to Learn from Diachronic Comparisons
A second call for papers has just been issued for this session at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (London, August 2014). Deadline for 300-word proposals is February 3, 2014.
Studying Identities in Rome and its Empire
A call for papers has been issued for a proposed colloquium sponsored by the Roman Provincial Archaeology Interest Group at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans. The deadline for 500-word abstracts is February 21, 2014.
Richer Names Listings for Places
Pleiades place pages now provide more summary information for associated names.
New Pleiades Plus Matches Pleiades with GeoNames
Pleiades Plus is an experimental machine alignment between Pleiades place resources and content in the GeoNames Gazetteer.
Maintenance Downtime: May 29, 2014
Pleiades will be down for approximately an hour tonight.
Pleiades 2 Final Report
The Pleiades 2 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities ended in April 2014. A copy of the final report submitted to the NEH has been posted on the Pleiades website.
Stuart Dunn on Santorini
A blog post about the challenges of documenting changing volcanic landscapes in a digital gazetteer.
Sarah Bond joins editorial board
Pleiades has a new associate editor: Sarah E. Bond.
Ryan Horne Assumes Co-Managing Editor Role
The Pleiades Editorial College is pleased to announce that, concurrent with his role as Acting Director of the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ryan will work with Tom Elliott to manage the day-to-day and strategic operational aspects of Pleiades.
AWMC Launches Online Strabo's Geography Map
This interactive web application was designed to accompany Duane W. Roller’s new English translation of Strabo, just out from Cambridge University Press.
Mapping Spartacus: Using Pleiades in the Classroom
Pleiades provides geospatial data to dozens of digital projects, but it can also be used as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Students in Sarah Bond's 'Ancient Financial Crisis' class used Pleiades data and the AWMC's Antiquity À-la-carte tool in order to make maps of the sites involved in the Third Servile War (73-71 BCE) led in part by Spartacus, and then mapped the course of the slave rebellion through the terrain of Republican Italy.
PhD opportunity on ‘Abstract Mapping for Ancient and Contemporary Cities’
New opportunity at the University of Kent, with potential for funding.
Elizabeth Robinson joins editorial board
Pleiades has a new associate editor: Elizabeth Robinson
AWMC to Host "Mapping the Past" Conference
The Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has just released a call for papers for a conference, to be held on April 8-9, 2016, on the applications of mapping and GIS to ancient history.
Pleiades in San Francisco (January 2016)
Members of the Pleiades team will be in San Francisco, CA from 6-10 January, 2016 during the Joint Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies. Would you like to participate in a Pleiades workshop during that time? Please let us know!
Request for Comment: New Editorial Guidelines
A draft of a new policy document has been posted on Google Docs for review and comment by community members. Please help us perfect it.
Maintenance Downtime
Pleiades will be down for routine maintenance on Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 8pm US Mountain Standard Time.
AWMC Announces Conference Program and Workshop
The Ancient World Mapping Center will host a conference on "Mapping the Past: GIS Approaches to Ancient History", 7-9 April 2016 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The full schedule has now been announced, as well as a hands-on workshop introducing the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) aimed at students and faculty in History, Classics, Archaeology, and related disciplines.
Workshop: Linking the Ancient World
A Pleiades workshop with Sarah Bond at the University of Virginia.
Sarah Bond to Lead Workshop at UVA
On Tuesday, March 15, 2016, Associate Editor Sarah Bond will lead a two-hour workshop on Pleiades at the University of Virginia.
Workshop: Mapping the Ancient World
A Pleiades workshop with Tom Elliott at Harvard University.
Lecture: The Pleiades Data Model
Tom Elliott will deliver a Spatial Humanities Lecture Series lecture at Brown University on Friday, March 25, 2016.
Places, Spaces, Sites: Mapping Critical Intersections in Digital Humanities
The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas has issued a call for proposals for the 2016 DH Forum, which will take place on Saturday, October 1, following a full day of (gratis) Digital Humanities workshops on Friday, September 30.
Pleiades maintenance between 12 and 21 May 2016
The Pleiades 3 development team will be conducting software maintenance on the Pleiades website between now and the 21st of May.
Recent Improvements (May 2016)
On May 13th, 2016, the Pleiades 3 development team deployed a package of upgrades to the Pleiades website. This blog post summarizes the changes.
Downtime: Tuesday, 5 July 2016
At 8:30 a.m. US Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, 5 July 2016, the Pleiades website will be in read-only status for a feature upgrade.
New in Help: Conceptual Overview
This document describes the information structure of the gazetteer and explains what we mean when we say "place", "name", or "location".
New in Help: Modifying an existing resource
This new help topic (complete with up-to-date screenshots) provides step-by-step instructions for creating a personal working copy of a published place, name, location, or connection resource; modifying and saving the working copy; and submitting the working copy for review.
Last week in Pleiades (June 27 - July 10, 2016)
Bonus edition: two weeks of updates!
Downtime: Wednesday, 13 July 2016
At 8:00 a.m. US Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, 13 July 2016, the Pleiades website will be in read-only status for a feature upgrade.
Downtime Complete
This morning's "read only" downtime is now complete.
July 2016 in Pleiades
During the month of July 2016, the Pleiades editors published new and/or updated information resources for 6 places, 11 locations, and 32 names.
Workshop on ancient world places
On 28 October 2016, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University will present a workshop, organized by Visiting Professor Gina Konstantopoulos, entitled "Hic Sunt Dracones: Creating, Defining, and Abstracting Place in the Ancient World".
New Progress Report Available
A copy of the most recent semiannual progress report submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities has been posted online.
ToposText Presentation in Athens, December 7
Brady Kiesling and colleagues will present an upgraded version of the ToposText mobile app at the Historical Library of the Laskaridis Foundation in Piraeus.