Mike Goodchild wrote yesterday to say that a "digital gazetteers" issue of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science (Taylor & Francis; ISSN-print 1365-8816; ISSN-online 1365-8824) is now in press and will appear in 2008. This issue arises from the 2006 Santa Barbara workshop on digital gazetteers and includes the following articles:

• M.F. Goodchild and L.L. Hill, Introduction to Digital Gazetteer Research
• C.B. Jones, R.S. Purves, P.D. Clough, H. Joho, Modelling Vague Places with Knowledge from the Web
• Q. Guo, Y. Liu, J. Wieczorek, Georeferencing Locality Descriptions and Computing Associated Uncertainty Using a Probabilistic Approach
• R. Mostern, I. Johnson, From Named Place to Naming Event: Creating Gazetteers for History
• J.T. Hastings, Automated Conflation of Digital Gazetteer Data
• K. Janowicz and C. Kessler, Rethinking Feature Type Thesauri -- An Ontological View

A big change ... and continuity too.

On the first of February I will be changing jobs: I'll take on the position of Associate Director for Digital Programs in New York University's new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. It's a tremendous opportunity, and I'm eager to get started supporting ISAW's research, teaching and outreach missions and in collaborating with colleagues and friends at other institutions to address digital research and infrastructure needs across the breadth of ancient studies.

Leaving UNC and especially the Ancient World Mapping Center is bittersweet; it's been the center of my professional life for 12 years now. My thanks to all the teachers, colleagues, students and friends who've made that time and place so stimulating and rewarding.

As to Pleiades: I've been discussing with Richard, Ross and my new boss (Roger Bagnall) restructuring the current bilateral collaboration (AWMC and the Stoa) as a tripartite confederation adding ISAW. Indeed, ISAW will support my continued work as the Pleiades director as we finish out the current grant period and work to identify follow-on support for continued work.

It's going to be an exciting year!

I've made a series of entries on the Stoa blog providing details about, and abstracts for (where available) talks and panels intersecting on classics and technology at the joint meetings, now in progress.

I've just finished listing epigraphical talks at this week's joint meetings of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America (over at Current Epigraphy). Two of these sessions have actually been scheduled concurrently, so I hope multiple folks out there in cyberspace will be willing to blog about some of the talks.

Ian Gregory wrote with the following call for papers:

Historical GIS 2008
University of Essex
21-22 August 2008

This conference will be the first major European conference concerned with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical research. It follows on from the success of a previous Historical GIS conference held at the Newberry Library, Chicago in 2004. The main aim of the conference is to demonstrate how GIS can make a contribution to our understanding of the geographies of the past. We welcome submissions on all aspects of using GIS in historical research from database development to applied research in which GIS has made a contribution to understanding a historical topic. Contributions from PhD students are encouraged. Non-speaking participants who are keen to learn what is happening in the field are also welcome.

I've been yammering on and off about cool URLs for Pleiades ... now I should point and hoot at the very important W3C working draft, just posted, of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. And in this context, how could I fail to whisper about an RDF future for HEML, mooted most recently at a November workshop on Cyberinfrastucture in the Humanities at chez Ross?

Back in October, I blogged about URLs in Pleiades. Sebastian Heath has been doing some useful writing on the topic in his Mediterranean Ceramics, including a critique of URLs for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and his monthly Reference Stability Report.

Chuck Jones started it, and the content is starting to flow ...

Yesterday, Sean pointed out that the Open Knowledge Foundation has been stalking Pleiades (in the best possible way). Most recently (on Monday), Rufus Pollock had nice things to say about how we're releasing our data. Thanks! It's as useful to get praise for specific aspects of our approach as it is to get criticism; it helps us keep tabs on what not to change.