Pleiades: Creating an Interactive Internet Archive for Ancient Geography

FAIN: PA-51873-06

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)
Richard J. A. Talbert (Project Director: July 2005 to November 2008)

The creation of an interactive Internet-based spatial and historical reference tool for the cartography of the ancient world, which expands and updates the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project.

Pleiades develops new mechanisms for the creation, maintenance and long-term functional preservation of humanities reference works. It establishes an international community of scholars, students and enthusiasts who collaborate in updating the information assembled by the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project. They use a web-based, multi-lingual collaboration support system, built with open-source software and made freely available for reuse. Pleiades enforces user roles that permit each user to contribute additions and improvements to any placename, geographic location, date, bibliographic reference or explanatory essay in the dataset, while facilitating rigorous review preparatory to publication in print and digital formats.