Today we've published two updates to the content in Pleiades.
With help from
Brian Turner and
Richard Talbert, I've remedied an oversight in the
Barrington Atlas: the omission of the
Στροφάδες/Strophades islands. We'd
originally addressed this oversight back in 2003, when I still worked for the
Ancient World Mapping Center, having been alerted to the problem by
Rick LaFleur. After Sean loaded the legacy information associated with
BAtlas Map 1 into Pleiades, I started working on a place resource as well. In so doing, I dug a bit deeper and discovered the ancient tradition of an alternate, earlier name for this peculiar island group: Πλωταί/Plotae. Once again, Google Earth provided us with better coordinates, although not this time without some confusion (see
the associated accuracy assessment and the map on
the main resource page). I was also able to exploit the greater flexibility provided by Pleiades to enumerate all the attested name variants (including an ethnikon asserted by
Stephanus of Byzantium), in their original orthography, and to provide citations of most of the relevant attestations of same in ancient literature.
It's great to see Pleiades moving closer to full-spectrum use. We're no longer just bringing material forward from the Classical Atlas Project, we're also publishing new, more accurate and complete information. I hope that soon you'll be seeing more of this sort of thing, with contributions by a widening community. You can be part of this community, if you're interested:
here's how.
Thanks to all, including our editors, who helped get these resources ready to publish.