There is more than one "TimeMap" in the geohistorical software space

Guest blogging at the Google Geo Developer's Blog, UC Berkeley's Nick Rabinowitz details his TimeMap Javascript library that:

helps the Google Maps API play nicely with the SIMILE Timeline API to create maps and timelines that work together

This is not to be confused with the older TimeMap family of software components (some now open-sourced), originally built by the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney under the direction of Ian Johnson.

DM The Book Ex

Paul Jones posted at Facebook a link to this notice from Bull City Rising: "The Book Exchange to shutter in February after 75 years."

The Book Ex (in Durham, North Carolina) wasn't just for Law School students. I was a clueless freshman in the fall of 1985, sent there by Bill Willis (cf. APA Newsletter, 23.4, August 2000, p. 11 sub "Obituaries" [pdf]) to collect a copy of the then already out-of-print Allen's First Year of Greek.

Cluelessness on my part of course is proved by the fact I'd elected to take Greek. As a freshman. At 9:00 a.m. With no prior Latin. From a papyrologist. Some will of course already have guessed that that experience, harrowing as it was, is no small part of why I do what I do professionally today.

So long, Book Ex. And thanks.

The Concordia Graph

In yesterday's post, I should also have linked directly to the working copy of the Concordia Graph ... persons, places, names, objects and some basic, history-oriented relationships between them ... a subset of what hopefully GAWD will eventually address (as non-idiosyncratically as possible).

Semantic Web, Scholarly Resources for Antiquity and the Museum

Our on-going work on geographically functional, cross-resource, machine-actionable citation(!) with the Web continues to get more interesting.

The kickoff was, of course, the joint NEH/JISC grant that is (under the rubric of the Concordia project) funding our look at this in collaboration with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. Our two workshops (and lots of discussion with other parties in between) have led us through KML, Atom+GeoRSS, citation vocabularies and OAI/ORE on to Cool URIs, Linked Data, CIDOC CRM and more.

Traffic is now building on the Graph of Ancient World Data discussion group (e.g., Sebastian Heath's post on coin hoard data at nomisma.org). Yesterday, Sean Gillies rolled out some changes to the Pleiades interface that provide #this endpoints for Pleiades places, so that Sebastian and others can make explicit reference either to the historical places themselves (non-information resources cited like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639166#this) or our descriptions of them on the web (information resources, cited like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639166/).

And then this afternoon I came across the latest Talis Semantic Web podcast, featuring Koven Smith on Semantic Web initiatives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 38 minutes well-spent. They're thinking about and exploring a number of the approaches and technologies we're interested in, but from a museum perspective. It would be interesting to discuss how these methods could be used to better bridge gaps between museums, field archaeologists, epigraphers, numismatists, papyrologists, prosopographers, historical geographers, librarians, archivists and the rest!

From "Web Watch" to "Planet Atlantides"

In rummaging around the web for a prior citation, I stumbled across Michael Shank's kind comment about a now-defunct, labor-intensive service I cobbled together in 2004 for the Ancient World Mapping Center: Web Watch. It was an attempt to "provide links to interesting articles and discussions elsewhere on the web" that related to ancient geography.

I realize now that, in setting up the Planet Atlantides feed aggregators, I've exploited the now more-mature ancient blogosphere (and webfeed way of doing things and other people's software) to gin up a true replacement.

I just hadn't realized I should probably say so, until now.

Spatial Technologies and Methods (Charlottesville, 28-30 June 2009)

I learned, by way of Bethany Nowviske, that the topic of the next Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia has just been announced:

The upcoming session, SCI 7, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, June 28-30. It will focus on spatial technologies and methodologies—the specific modes of working they favor, the scholarly practices they enhance, and the infrastructure they demand to achieve scale and significance. Technologies that analyze and represent space and spatial relations—notably geospatial and mapping technologies—have gained widespread use both through sophisticated Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) software (commercial, like ESRI Arc Globe, and open source, like GeoServer/GeoNetwork) and through vernacular applications such as 2-dimensional mapping (Yahoo Maps), 3-dimensional globes (Google Earth), and virtual worlds (Second Life). We will also consider visualizations such as virtual modeling and concept mapping, as appropriate. SCI 7 will bring together accomplished scholars from the humanities and social sciences, as well as leaders in information technology and data stewardship, to explore the range of these technologies and their promise to advance humanities scholarship.

SCI is designed to frame a set of meaningful questions that lead to a plan for further action. Participants will convene for two full days in plenary and small group discussions, with ample occasion for informal discussions and to include time in the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab to explore key methodical questions in the context of ongoing research projects. The meeting will result in an action agenda, and SCI leadership will follow up over the following 12 months to advance activities identified by the participants.

Participants will include scholars who are working in imaginative and innovative ways with geospatial, mapping, and visualization technologies, including leading figures from historically-grounded disciplines such as geography, archaeology, and history that engage methodological questions posed by spatial relationships in their work. We will also involve leaders from research centers that could support possible follow-up activities. Individuals with expertise in libraries, advanced technologies, and publishing will join us to help us think through the implications of scholarly practices we discuss for the full cycle of scholarly communication, from research and discovery to analysis, presentation, dissemination, and persistent access.

In the months preceding the Institute, SCI will consult with leaders in a variety of disciplines to identify the key challenges and opportunities to use of spatial technologies in the humanities, with special attention to the critical methodical questions that these new ways of representing spatial and temporal relations pose to researchers. What are the implications for such scholarly practices as comparison and contextualization, temporal analysis and causality, study of global phenomena, and the possibility of new fields emerging from these?

Participation seems to be by invitation only; participants have not yet been publicly announced on the SCI website.

Smithsonian 2.0

Smithsonian 2.0, a "gathering to re-imagine the Smithsonian in the digital age," is going on right now in Washington. You can follow the procedings via:

• The Smithsonian 2.0 Blog
• Tweets with the hashtag #si20