Methodology

METHODS

Pleiades compiles crowd-sourced content in the form of location based posts within the site. The locations are linked to others that share similar physical or historical characteristics.

Pleiades is characterized as a “Un-GIS,” which the site creators give certain characteristics to define. An Un-GIS is:

  • “Aggregation of temporally varying features into conceptual places or spaces” that are represented in a scholarly nature
  • Toponymic (place names) site destinations with “ancient spellings, transcription details, temporal scope, and links to primary sources and scholarly literature”
  • Reports on content with vague or no location
  • “Uneven distribution in quality and density of data”
  • Web architecture

CROWD-SOURCING

All of the initial places and names for the site were originally taken from the Classical Atlas Project, and additional content is being added through Harvard’s Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations. All other content is created by individual users of the site. Once a user submits their findings, Pleiades conducts peer review and fact checking to determine the validity of the content posted.

The site also uses JSON format to publish their shared data. JSON is a highly readable “lightweight data-interchange format.”

SOFTWARE

Pleiades attests that it is more similar to Google Places than it is to Google Maps. They emphasize that they would like their site to be the primary authorities on these ancient cites, and are designed to be research and informational tools, not commercial ones.

Pleiades uses the GeoJSON data format for encoding data structures.

The content is currently mapped on Google Maps, but the project initially used OpenLayers, and may return to it.

Shapely, a “manipulation and analysis tool for geometric objects in the Cartesian plane” and Rtree, an advanced indexing software tool, are direct Python products of Pleiades.

ART AND GRAPHICS

Icons on the site were created in GIMP, the Tango Desktop Project, Everaldo Coehlo’s Crystal Icons for Linux, the Oxygen Icons, the OpenOffice.org default theme 3.2, and the Echo Icon theme.

Banners below were derived from a photo by Sean Gillies using GIMP.