This morning I've added the following blogs to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator:
Thanks to Adam Brin at Digital Antiquity for alerting me to their existence.
I have updated feed addresses in Electra for the following blogs, which have changed recently:
I have also removed the following blogs for the reasons indicated:
I have added the following blogs to the Maia Atlantis feed aggregator:
I like version 2. For one, I could see it and read it without any problems; something I could not do with version 1. I like the idea of being able to see pictures, texts, and translations of inscriptions on a single page. My question is: what are you trying to do here? What's the purpose, goal, etc. of Mob Epigraphy? And how can others help, contribute, etc.?
Giving a child a strong foundation -- a home, a family to love, and a safe place to grow -- is one of life's greatest and most generous gifts. Through adoption, both domestic and international, Americans from across our country have provided secure environments for children who need them, and these families have benefited from the joy an adopted child can bring. Thanks to their nurturing and care, more young people have been able to realize their potential and lead full, happy lives. This year, we celebrate National Adoption Month to recognize adoption as a positive and powerful force in countless American lives, and to encourage the adoption of children from foster care. (President Barack Obama, Presidential Proclamation: National Adoption Month, 1 November 2010).There is also a blog post and video from the Secretary of State.
Hi Heathre:
Thanks for giving us your perspective as a new user of Pleiades. It's really helpful to hear how people are trying to use this emerging resource and to see where they run into trouble.
The delay in signing you up initially is an occasional consequence of the fact that our signup procedure is manual and occasionally the editors are unavailable while on travel or the like. I apologize if it put you in a difficult situation time-wise.
We currently have funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support software and content development through April 2013, but editorial work is all volunteer.
We're not finished loading up all the legacy content from the Barrington Atlas. You can read more about the state of that process here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/data-import-round-1 with maps here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/figures-import-round-1 .
Since you last looked at the site, Sean has rolled out some improvements to the individual maps. They now show you nearby places as well. See further: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/map-of-a-places-neighborhood .
The squares you see on the maps for many places correspond to the grid squares on the Barrington Atlas maps from which they derive. We are currently working with colleagues at Harvard, who have digitized the exact coordinates from the Barrington compilation materials and improved their precision by visually checking them in Google Earth. We anticipate these coordinates will be added to Pleiades by mid-2011, replacing the squares that frustrated you. We'll also have reciprocal links to the Harvard project's online system, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization: http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do
"Phokaia" is a transliteration of the ancient Greek, whereas "Phocaea" is the Latin version, used by the Romans and subsequently in the west during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. I'm glad Pleiades was able to help you sort this out, despite the fact that our resources do not yet comprehensively list all the variants for every site. This is something we're encouraging our users to help flesh out.
Please let us know if you have further observations or suggestions (or complaints) about the site.
Best wishes,
Tom
I'm very interested in finding ways through Pleiades and other ISAW digital projects to support the efforts of Leif, Elton and Eric on the "Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus" project. In particular, I'd hope we can integrate this into the web interfaces for our projects:
ECS will work on a Web Service and Web Widget [that] will make it possible for Webmasters to add links to the ancient texts [in Google Books] within their websites, enabling the public and researchers to search for them easily.
I was pleased to discover Phoebe Acheson's blog Classics Librarian via a twitter follow. Herein the University of Georgia Library's liaison to the Department of Classics there writes about such topics as resources for the study of Roman topography and tutorials for Dyabola (the bibliographic database of the German Archaeological Institute), while making the occasional alllusion to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I've just posted a new screencast that, in less than 5 minutes, shows you had to draft a new, rudimentary place resource in Pleiades without recourse to Google Earth or other external tools. Let me know what you think.
I don't know how it's possible that I've been unaware of the Blogging Pompeii blog all this time. Thanks to a post on the ever-vigilant David Meadows' Rogue Classicism blog, my cluelessness has been rectified. And of course I've added Blogging Pompeii's feed to the Maia Atlantis aggregator.
The Homer Multitext blog and the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins blog have both been added to the Maia Atlantis aggregator. I've also added the Homer Multitext blog to the Electra Atlantis aggregator.
I just learned, thanks to a blog post at the old blog, that the website and blog for the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon has moved but not put any standard redirects in place at the old blog or feed. I've updated the subscription list for Taygete Atlantis to point at the new source, where I see there are a large number of posts (since early June) that I had missed.
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is pleased to announce the appointment of Sören Stark as Assistant Professor of Central Asian Art and Archaeology.
Professor Stark studied Oriental Archaeology and Art History, Ancient History, and European Art History at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He received his doctorate in 2005 with a study on the archaeology and history of the pre-Muslim Turks in Central and Inner Asia, which was published in 2008 as Die Alttürkenzeit in Mittel- und Zentralasien. Archaeologische und historische Studien (Nomaden und Sesshafte 6).
From 2005 to 2008 he led archaeological surveys and excavations in Northern Tajikistan. Before joining the faculty of ISAW he was a Junior Fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI and teaching at the Freie Universität in Berlin.
His research ranges chronologically from the Iron Age up to the pre-Mongol Middle Ages and deals with various aspects of archaeology, art history, and history in Central and Inner Asia as well as in neighboring cultural areas. His main focus lies on the political and cultural interrelations between pastoral nomads in these areas and their sedentary neighbors. Currently, he is preparing a book on territorial fortifications in Western Central Asia. He is also co-editor of a Handbook of Central Asian Archaeology and Art which is presently under preparation at Oxford University Press.
Professor Stark will begin teaching seminars at ISAW in the fall. Please join us in welcoming him to our community.
The general perception of the academic humanities as far removed from the daily lives of the general public that is only heightened by isolationist jargon and publishing mechanisms that create rather than break down silos represents a massive failure to make the case for the value of that work to society ...Epistemographer | Notes from “The Shape of Things to Come”
This special concert will highlight folk and traditional songs from different parts of Romania. Some of the musical traditions included are Colinde (Winter Songs/Carols) , Bocete (Death Laments), Doina (Lyrical Songs) and Wedding Songs. Each song will be presented with sensitivity to traditional methods of interpretation, while bringing in new elements such as sound samples of folk instruments and improvisation by the musicians. The music will express a full spectrum of universal human emotion and experience, while sharing the rich repertoire of Romanian traditional music. Each song will be introduced with a brief description and translation of the words, and time will be set aside for audience questions.
This event is associated with the Lost World of Old Europe exhibition, currently showing at ISAW.
The Late Copper Age in the East Balkans and the Case of Varna
Speaker: Vladimir Slavchev
Location: 2nd Floor Lecture Room
Date: Thursday, January 21 2010
Time: 6:00 p.m.
*reception to followThe Varna Necropolis, a cemetery that lies in the western industrial zone of Varna, Bulgaria, is one of the premiere archaeological sites in the world for the research of world pre-history. The massive interest in this cemetery is due to the abundance and variety of objects recovered from its graves, namely gold artifacts. Dr. Slavchev will discuss these grave goods (and the necropolis from which they came) in relation to Varna culture as a whole. The presence of artifacts in a wide range of materials at the cemetery, one of the burial sites of the highly-developed local community that inhabited the shore of Varna Bay at the time, suggests that the community was part of a developed network of medium and long range trading, transport and distribution of prestige items. Dr. Slavchev will argue that the local manufacturing of goods was predominantly aimed at the local community and its needs. Therefore, such prestige items could have functioned as gifts for exchange with neighboring cultures or as goods to be sold in the trading network.
This lecture is associated with the Lost World of Old Europe exhibition, currently showing at ISAW.
Speaker: Damián Fernández
Location: 2nd Floor Lecture Room
Date: Tuesday, January 19 2010
Time: 6:00 p.m.
*reception to followHilltop settlement was one of the most prominent characteristics in the landscape of the northern Iberian Peninsula until the Roman conquest. With the establishment of Roman rule in the decades around the turn of the era, several of the pre-Roman hilltop forts were abandoned in favor of a developed network of lowland cities that became the backbone of the regional settlement hierarchy. This process was somewhat reversed after the late-third century CE, when archaeologists have dated the beginning of the occupation of hilltops (and, sometimes, the re-occupation of Iron Age sites). The ‘movement towards the highlands’ has traditionally been interpreted either as reemergence of indigenous social structures that had survived the Roman conquest or as the result of the insecurity provoked by the presence of barbarian armies in the third and fifth centuries.
In the last two decades, piecemeal archaeological research in the northern Iberian Peninsula has begun to provide us with new information about these sites. Their material culture and the more accurate chronology indicate that traditional interpretations about the phenomenon of hilltop occupation are no longer valid. After reviewing some paradigmatic sites, this lecture will offer an alternative model to understanding the change in settlement patterns. It will be argued that occupation of hilltops must be understood in the context of the administrative reforms of the late Roman Empire and the economic changes that occurred in northern Iberia during late antiquity.
