The Pleiades project is a geographical index built for the community and graphs ancient locations around the world. This project gives information about ancient places, and provides people with displays and reuses of that information.
This evaluation will take a look at how well the finished Pleiades project accomplishes its goal, and how users can navigate through the website.
Intent
With every project, there is a reason why they are completed. Pleiades does a wonderful job of establishing their intent for the project on its about page. This project allows users worldwide to create, share, and view geographical points of ancient world locations in a digital space.
User Design
The project’s website includes quite a few other pages which allows navigation and contributions to be significantly easier to maneuver. On the blog page, announcements are made for site-wide projects. This is a great place for staff of partner projects, editors, reviewers, and contributors to check out. Links to Pleiades’ Twitter and Facebook pages can be found here as well for more details and updates.
The next location to check out on the website is the places tab. The content of Pleiades is organized into three sections: places, locations, and names. All information resources that have been published are open and free to the public for access. This page is quite helpful for its instructions on how to search and locate information that a user may desire. Descriptions of search, advanced search, download, Application Programming Interface (API), and indexes are available in this tab.
In the credits tab, users can view the copyrights on software and content to website. Notable users/contributors to find are the senior editors, managing editors, associate editors, and reviewers. Dozens of individuals can also be found with their bio, how long they have been a member, and their additions & contributions with links directly available.
Other pages to note are the downloads, help, and join/login tabs. These tabs give viewers the opportunities to see the most recent updates, give assistance, and allow people to join or sign into their accounts.
Conclusion
The Pleiades project is absolutely incredible and a phenomenal contribution to the digital humanities field. Its intent is very clear, and everything is easily accessible. The page overall is very simple to understand and maneuver for new or experienced users. This project deserves a lot of credit for the content and knowledge it possesses.