Friday, October 28, 2011

Pleiades Hack Day

I'm thinking it's time. Time we designated a particular day to give over to ganging up on Pleiades content and making it better. Looking at the low-hanging-and-annoying-fruit list, the first thing that comes to mind is improving our titles and descriptions to facilitate discovery and disambiguation. I've laid out what I see as the landscape in a document on the Pleiades site: Improving Titles and Descriptions for Prominent Places.

So what remains is to see who would be willing to devote at least a couple of hours (if not a whole day) to this enterprise and to fix a day for it. You don't need to be an expert to help with this job. Anyone interested at all in ancient geography who has basic web skills and can get on the internet at the scheduled time should be able to make a substantive contribution, whether they are a student, a scholar or an interested "layperson".

If you're interested, leave a comment on my blog and I'll send you a link to a doodle poll to do the scheduling.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Meetup: The Future of the Ancient World Image Bank

So, my brain has mashed up its happiness at the success of last week's Pleiades community meetup with the hanging conversations that started in response to my blog post on Pleiades machine tags in Flickr. Nate Nagy (AWIB Managing Editor) and I had a good conversation a couple of weeks ago about the future of AWIB, one that would be more open and collaborative than the current model.

I'd like to light a fire under (and refine) those ideas. I'm starting a Doodle poll to find a time for a "future of AWIB" meetup, to be held via Google+. I'll send invites to all of our contacts on Flickr and others who have expressed interest. Please post a comment here if you'd like to be part of the event.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Unexpected End to a Halloween Tradition

There's a thread going about this on Facebook, but since that's a walled garden I'm going to repeat my initial post here for the consideration of a wider audience (assuming there is an audience):

So the answer to the question "When are we going to hear about the Randolph School Halloween Carnival this year" seems to be: "there's not going to be one; it's been rebranded as the 'first-ever Raider Ruckus'". Color me sad and frustrated. An extended pep rally is fine and good, but the Halloween Carnival was a great tradition and gave our kids a fantastic venue for the holiday. The question now is: "what rationale, and driven by whom, brought about this change?"

And, no, I'm guessing they're not aware that the Urban Dictionary glosses a "raider ruckus" as a "drug dealer" (citing a lyric from Method Man's What the Blood Clot).

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Taygete Atlantis (Dig Blogs) Returns to Service

I've just returned the Taygete Atlantis Archaeological Dig Blog Aggregator to service, with the following changes:

You can view the full subscription list on the Taygete Atlantis page, or download it in OPML form to install in your own feed reader. 

Please drop me a line if you know of excavation blogs that should be added.

Maia Atlantis Returns to Service, With Changes

The Maia Atlantis feed aggregator has just been put back into service. The following blogs are no longer indexed:

  • Arkeologi Lampung: feed not well-formed
  • Fernando Lillo Redonet (Latín y Cultura Clásica en el siglo XXI): feed hangs on request
  • Nick Nicholas (Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος): feed contains invalid unicode character
  • CHS Fellowships Research Blog: feed returns 404 "not found"
  • Antiquity Lives: feed returns 404 "not found"
  • Épave sous-marine : Arles-Rhône 3: feed not well-formed

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Electra Atlantis is Back

Thanks to Sean Gillies, the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator has been up and running again for a couple of days. I'm still trouble-shooting the other aggregators to find the culprit. More news here as the others are brought back online.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Linked Open Data: Short Version

So, here's what I think I said -- in a caffeine and government-issued-muffin-induced frenzy -- a couple of weeks ago at the NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors' Meeting:

  • Linked: your data is my metadata / my data is your metadata
  • Open: your data is my data / my data is your data
  • Data: stop using computers to produce information resources that require manual human processing / start using computers to produce information resources that other computers can use automagically

Monday, October 3, 2011

Planet Atlantides Feed Aggregators Temporarily Suspended

Due to a technical problem, I've had to suspend updates to all of the feed aggregators at http://planet.atlantides.org. I'll troubleshoot the problem and get them back up and running after I return from vacation on the 10th of October. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may cause in the interim.

If you would like to get the latest information from all the blogs associated with any of these aggregators, please grab the OPML file for the aggregator you're interested in (it contains a list of all the feeds from which the aggregator pulls) and import it into a compatible feed reader of your choice.