By way of David Meadow's rogueclassicism, I spotted this call for papers for a Graduate Conference in Ancient Borderlands, to be held 22-23 March 2008 at the University of California Santa Barbara. Abstracts due 1 December 2007.

A forum in which participants from a variety of fields and areas of expertise can explore both physical and intellectual borderlands in the ancient world. The specific disciplines the Graduate Student Conference aims to involve include Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Asian Studies, Classics, History, Medieval Studies, Mesoamerican Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Philosophy, and Religious Studies.

Andrew Reinhard is blogging the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities ...

So, there were plenty of folks (classicists and otherwise) throwing around ancient history as persuasive (or disssuasive) rhetoric in the run-up to the current land war in Asia. I'll offer only the example of Elaine Fantham.

Question: Why aren't we seeing the Roman Social War brought into the current argument about immigration in this country?

Don't like the Wikipedia article linked above? I've had no role in its content whatsoever. Send me a link to something else online, free and open, and I'll link it. Or -- better yet -- just pitch in to improve the article.

How is it that I'm only just now discovering Phil Schwartz's Kodos python regular expression debugger? I think my life is going to get better ...

Thanks to Raffaele Viglianti for the tip.

Thanks to Sean's code-wizardry, it's now possible for us to provide you with on-going information on what data has been added to Pleiades, and what's slated to come next. You can view the information:

• with a web browser: http://pleiades.stoa.org/batlas
• with an atom-capable feed reader: http://pleiades.stoa.org/batlas.atom
• a KML-aware tool (like Google Earth): http://pleiades.stoa.org/batlas.kml

Why "batlas" you ask? The page explains it all. Enjoy!

Or check it out in google maps directly.

It should be easy for projects outside Pleiades to assert relationships between their content (primary and secondary sources, images, find records etc.) and ours. It should be easy for Pleiades users to stumble upon (or search for) these assertions (via maps or other means). It should be easy to harvest these assertions and pump them through our editorial workflow.

We already use Atom + GeoRSS, as well as KML, to expose Pleiades content for discovery and reuse by others. It's clean, simple, standard and RESTful. No heavy architecture. No elaborate call-and-response rituals. No home-made schemas or protocols.

Can we turn the telescope around and ask other projects to use the same mechanisms -- maybe with a little semantic sugar in the form of a simple relationships thesaurus -- to communicate with us (and each other)?

So, I tried to imagine an Atom+GeoRSS feed for an inscription from Aphrodisias that's already published to the web. You'll see from the comments that there are a number of distinctions I'd like to see from the Pleiades side that just don't fit. Bruce Robertson has lately got me thinking about RDF, so I tried my hand at an RDF encoding of the missing stuff too. Maybe an XML version of the RDF could go into the Atom feed using its standard extension mechanisms.

Thoughts? Corrections? Suggestions?

Joaquín Gómez-Pantoja just wrote to alert me to another land-use inscription that I didn't know:

Hispania Epigraphica Online, no. 1009

It's a ceramic rooftile, found in Garrovillas de Alconétar and first published in 1906. The text, incised in irregular letters, grants use of land to several distinct peoples.

Joaquín says that the tile has been recently re-edited with discussion in a couple of periodicals; the full summary details will appear shortly in HEp 13, no. 116. He also hopes to be able to post an image of the inscription to the website shortly.

I had to miss the Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage meeting in Washington last week (I was in Lexington, Kentucky for a workshop on cyberinfrastructure in the classics ... more on that anon). But Sean and Richard went (their slides are here).

To judge from Dan Cohen's post, it was a great meeting. And he gave Pleiades some very nice press too.

In his comment on my Pleiades URLs post, Sebastian writes:

For places, is it significant that there are sometimes trailing slashes, sometimes not?

It's not significant; that's copy-and-paste sloppiness on my part. Plone automagically deals with either formulation. We could get pedantic and say that some of these are containers and therefore ought to have no trailing slash, but then there's the fact that implementation-wise a place object is a container too. But I don't think users need or want to have to think about these things this way.

So, I think canonical URLs for places and names and lists of same have no trailing slashes; however, our application will pleasantly handle trailing slashes.

Stay tuned for responses to Sebastian's other points anon ...

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