New blog added to Taygete Atlantis

I've added the Cape Gelidonya Project Blog from the Institute for Nautical Archaeology to the Taygete Atlantis aggregator. Thanks to Chuck Jones for pointing it out to me.

News blogs added to Maia Atlantis

The ISAW News Blog and the Archaeological Institute of America's Blogs have been added to the Maia Atlantis aggregator.

ISAW has a news blog

ISAW now has an official news blog. I'm going to stop posting ISAW news here on Horothesia. If you want to catch up on the latest from ISAW (e.g., the recent announcement of our newest faculty member, Lillian Tseng), head on over to http://blogs.nyu.edu/isaw/news/.

Ramping up Pleiades 2

Last March, I alerted readers to the great news that NEH had elected to fund a second round of work on the Pleiades project. We're picking up steam.

Sean Gillies, our chief engineer, has been adding more legacy content inherited from the Classical Atlas Project. We're nearly at the half-way point, with features associated with 48 of the 102 Barrington Atlas maps now represented as Pleiades resources (you can keep score on the Pleiades Content wiki page or monitor the Pleiades news feed for announcements as new content appears). Sean's also introduced a number of improvements to the web application and the user interface, and has been blogging about our data model.

Brian Turner (my co-managing editor) and I have been getting ready to start working on adding some new content that wasn't included in the Barrington, including a number of obscure features from the so-called Peutinger map that turned up during Richard Talbert's work to prepare a new scholarly edition of the map (forthcoming from Cambridge UP). Nico Aravecchia, a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW, has been working on new Pleiades resources for a number of poorly published and recently excavated Coptic sites in Egypt that also did not appear in the Barrington. We'll start publishing these new resources during the next month as they clear editorial review.

Meanwhile, we've been in dialog with Michael McCormick, Guoping Huang and Kelly Gibson at Harvard. They're the driving force behind the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, with whom we're collaborating under the new grant. Our aim is to collate and share the datasets assembled by both projects and to cross-link our web applications. This will bring more accurate coordinates for many features into Pleiades, as well as a number of new features that will expand our time horizon into the middle ages. You'll get a choice of display and map interaction modes and, eventually, the ability to move back and forth between both resources. We'll keep you posted as the timeline for this portion of the work is refined.

We also aim to make things easier for early adopters to get started. We're starting to script some more screencasts to show you how to suggest changes or additions to content. We've also been planning improvements to our data portability story: our commitment to open access dictates that we make it easy for you to export our complete content for external reuse elsewhere. Making specific plans for that is on the agenda for next month as well.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to submit them as comments here. If you'd like to give Pleiades a spin, follow the instructions for requesting an account.

New blog added to Electra Atlantis

I've just added the following blog to the Electra Atlantis aggregator:

• Christopher W. Blackwell, Eumaeus - The Noble Swineherd

He's presently blogging about the digitization of 8th and 12th century bibles held in the library of the Lichfield Cathedral, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England.

(Hat tip to Dot Porter, whose post at Stoa alerted me to this blog)

ISAW New Faculty Appointment: Sören Stark

From ISAW's director, Roger Bagnall:

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.

Professor Stark's faculty profile is at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/faculty.htm#stark

New "ancient" blogs added to Planet Atlantides

The following blogs have been added to the Planet Atlantides aggregators:

• Electra Atlantis: David Bamman (Chatterist)
  
• Maia Atlantis: Andie Byrnes (The Archaeology of Egypt's Deserts)
• Taygete Atlantis: iMalqata