Interoperation with Pleiades

I've had a few questions lately about how other web-based publications could be designed to support interoperation with Pleiades. Here's my working advice:

Any project that wants to lay the groundwork for geographic interoperability on the basis of Pleiades should:

1. Capture and manage Pleiades identifiers (stable URLs like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/) for each place one might want to cite.

2. Request membership in the Pleiades community and add/modify content therein as necessary in order to create new resources (and new URLs) for places that Pleiades doesn't yet document, but which are provably historical and relevant to content controlled by the external project.

3. Capture and manage stable URLs from Wikipedia or GeoNames that correspond to modern geographic entities that are relevant to the content controlled by the external project. Don't conflate modern and ancient locations, as this will eventually lead to heartbreak.

4. Emit paged web feeds in the Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) that also conform to the guidance documented (with in-the-wild, third-party examples) at:

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/ConcordiaAtomFeeds

and make use of the terms defined at

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/ConcordiaThesaurus

to indicate publicly relationships such as "findspot" and "original location" between the content controlled by the external project, Pleiades resources, Wikipedia resources, GeoNames resources and resources published by other third parties.

5. Alert us so we can include the entry-point URL for the feeds in the seeded search horizon list for the web crawler and search index service we are developing.

You can see how the Epigraphic Databank Heidelberg team has been thinking about how to accomplish this at:

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/PleiadesMoI

and

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/EDHgeographyTable

Bringing the Frontier to the Center: Empires and Nomads from Achaemenid Persia to Tang China

a lecture, presented by:

Wu Xin
Visiting Research Scholar
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University

This paper presents a comparative consideration of the ideological strategies used by Achaemenid and the Tang empires to manage relations with their subjects living in Central Asia and on the Central to Eastern Eurasian steppe. For both empires, the nomadic communities to the north were an especially important constituency that was complicated by strong dynastic hereditary ties. In each case, a conscious program specifically addressing this complex and mobile community was developed and was expressed through the official language (text and images) of the imperial court. An exploration of those programs reveals striking parallels in their approach to maintaining imperial control and cooperation.

Monday, 6:00 pm
November 30, 2009

Lecture Hall
ISAW Building
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
isaw@nyu.edu

this event is free and open to the public

Bridging Institutional Repository and Bibliographic Management

As an institution, ISAW has an interest in disseminating, preserving and promoting the research products and publications of its faculty, research staff, students, affiliates and collaborators. Our parent institution, NYU, has made a commitment to the persistent dissemination of such materials when voluntarily contributed to its Faculty Digital Archive (FDA). We'll use the FDA as a locus for materials that fit well into DSpace (with which the FDA is realized) and that aren't rights-constrained. But we also need mechanisms for developing and publishing the whole bibliographic story of a particular faculty member, research group, project or conference with links from the individual entries to digital copies wherever they may be (e.g., the FDA, JSTOR, Internet Archive, Google Books). For this function, we like Zotero. Atop Zotero's robust and ubiquitous feed documents, we can build interoperability with our website and other tools and venues in a way that is also completely visible to commercial and third-party search and discovery tools.

There will be a number of iterations necessary to reach a fully robust solution, but we're already taking some of the first steps.

As an early experiment with the FDA, we had a student assistant input all of my boss's articles in PDF format, along with descriptive metadata (see: Roger Bagnall's Publications). The default metadata schema in the FDA wasn't a perfect fit for journal article citations, but the FDA staff is now working with us to extend the schema to meet our needs. We're using the Zotero data model as a guide.

Given that the metadata in this collection is the only structured dataset around for Roger's articles, I wanted to be able to get it all back out to use for other things. The FDA does provide web feeds, but (unlike Zotero) these aren't comprehensive for a given context and don't incorporate all the metadata fields. But we can use FDA's OAI-PMH interface to get the full metadata with a query like:

http://archive.nyu.edu/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=hdl_2451_28115

where "hdl_2451_28115" is the identifier for the "Roger Bagnall's Publications" container I linked to above. (Special thanks to Ekaterina Pechekhonova on the NYU Digital Library team, who helped me with syntax).

As a further experiment, I wrote an XSL transform to convert the OAI-PMH XML document into the RDF XML Zotero can import. There are a couple of inelegant hacks in the transform (mainly to get at substrings within single fields), but I'm still happy with the results. The import into Zotero went smoothly:

http://www.zotero.org/paregorios/items/collection/1505597

Next steps: move this to a shared Zotero library so Roger, a student assistant and members of our digital projects team can collaborate to enter the rest of the publications (books, book sections, etc.) and fix any errors in the article records. Then we'll look at the process for using that metadata (via another transform) to help us populate the FDA. We'll also start working on parsing and aggregating Zotero's feeds for use on our website (in Roger's online profile and aggregated with other affiliates' feeds to provide a "recent publications" section).

We're also experimenting with Zotero for the bibliography of our Pleiades project (a collaborative online gazetteer of the Greek and Roman world), and as a component in a potential replacement for the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets. On a more personal level, I've taken to doing all my bookmarking with Zotero and have set up a folder in my library (with associated feed) so that colleagues can following what I'm citing on a daily basis.

La formation et la définition des frontières locales

By way of compitum.fr I learn about an interesting conference going on today in Poitiers:

Information signalée par Renaud Alexandre

La formation et la définition des frontières locales
(paroisses, communautés d'habitants)

Cycle de journées d'étude « Frontières et limites ». Session 3

Programme

9 h 30
Ouverture de la journée par Cécile Treffort, directrice adjointe du CESCM et par Stéphane Boissellier, professeur (Université de Poitiers, CESCM)

Paroisses, présidence Cécile Treffort, professeure (Université de Poitiers, CESCM)

9 h 50
Les actes de délimitations paroissiales dans les diocèses de Rennes, Dol et Saint-Malo, entre les XIe et XIIIe siècles
Anne Lunven, doctorante (Université de Rennes II)

10 h 20
Limites de paroisses et de villae dans le nord du Portugal
Christophe Tropeau, doctorant (Université de Poitiers)

10 h 50
La délimitation des paroisses de l'ancien diocèse de Liège ( XIIe -XVe siècles)
Julie Dury, doctorante (Université de Liège)

11 h 20 Discussion

12 h 00 Repas (buffet sur place)

Autres circonscriptions, présidence Luc Bourgeois, maître de conférences (Université de Poitiers, CESCM)

13 h 30
Les frontières des territoires locaux dans l'espace gaulois de Sidoine Apollinaire à Grégoire de Tours
Pierre-Eric Poble, post-doctorant (Université de Paris IV)

14 h 00
Villa, ban, court et mairie Formation et définition des frontières locales dans les seigneuries de l'abbaye de Stavelot-Malmedy (XIe - XVe s.)
Nicolas Schroeder, doctorant (Université libre Bruxelles)

14 h 30
Réflexions autour des limites des agglomérations à la fin du Moyen-Âge en Basse-Bretagne,
Régis Le Gall, doctorant (Université de Poitiers)

15 h 00
Délimiter l'espace maritime dans la Bretagne de la fin du XVe siècle, d'après les archives ducales
Frédérique Laget, doctorante (Université de Nantes)

15 h 30
Discussion

16 h 20
Conclusions


Source : Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale

The Horse is Man's Wings: Archaeological Science and the Changing Nature of the Human-Horse Relationship in Central and East Asia

Dr. Mim Bower (Cambridge University) will give a free, public lecture at ISAW on 27 October 2009 at 6:00 p.m.

More information, including an abstract of the talk, is available on the ISAW events page.

The Historian in the Future of the Ancient World: A View from Central Eurasia

ISAW has announced the third annual Leon Levy Lecture, to be held on November 5, 2009 at 6 p.m in the Oak Library, 2nd floor of the ISAW building, located at 15 East 84th Street in New York. The speaker will be Professor Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for Advanced Study. The lecture is free and open to the public but seating is limited. Interested individuals are requested to RSVP by calling 212.992.7818, or emailing isaw@nyu.edu.

More information (including abstract) is available on the ISAW events page. There is also an NYU press release with more details.

David Klotz: The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period

2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period
Presented by: David Klotz, Visiting Research Scholar

Although the city of Abydos was one of the most important religious centers of Egypt from the Predynastic  Period through the New Kingdom, little remains of its monuments from the Late Period (c. 1000-300 BC).  In the early twentieth century, W.F. Petrie discovered meager traces of an Osiris temple dating to the reign of Amasis (Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, c. 570-526 BC), and recent New York University excavations have uncovered another temple built by Nectanebo I and II (Thirtieth Dynasty, c. 378-341 BC). Nonetheless, the intervening period - the era of Persian domination - remains a mystery, and the earlier temple of Amasis seems to have completely vanished.

Two new sources provide valuable information on this obscure chapter in the history of Abydos.  The first  is a statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 1996.91) belonging to a prominent Egyptian general from the Thirtieth Dynasty.  This object includes a difficult autobiographical inscription text in which the owner narrates how he defended Egypt from invading Persian armies and restored massive damage inflicted upon Abydos. At Sohag, meanwhile, the church of St. Shenoute at the White Monastery (c.450 AD) incorporates Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman spolia reused from earlier monuments.  The Yale White Monastery Church Documentation Project (2007-2009) recorded over twenty granite blocks from the reign of Amasis, and the decoration indicates they derive from the Osiris temple at Abydos.

The archaeological and epigraphic record suggests the Osiris temple was badly damaged - if not completely destroyed - during the period of Achaemenid rule in Egypt.  Similar accounts of Persian looting are attested at multiple Egyptian sites, but they are often dismissed as mere propaganda intended to legitimize the subsequent Ptolemaic dynasty.  The case of Abydos leads us to reevaluate our assumptions concerning the religious policies of the Great Kings of Persia.

Date: Tuesday, October 20th
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Lecture Hall
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY  10028
212-992-7843
isaw@nyu.edu

*This event is free and open to the public