Joining the Dots with Pelagios 3

Hereford_Mappa_Mundi (1)

The Pelagios 3 project is a community-driven initiative led by the University of Southampton that is annotating, linking and indexing place references in documents that use written or visual representation to describe geographic space prior to the European discovery of the Americas in 1492. They include ancient and medieval geographic descriptions (geographiae and chorographiae and itineraries) world maps (mappaemundi) and portolan charts.

The project has three primary objectives:
(i) to provide an index of toponyms attested, and the places they refer to (where known), in all available EGDs, accessible both as Linked Open Data and via the Pelagios Web Service;
(ii) to create a toolset that allows the scholarly community to enhance and refine the index incrementally, by annotating for themselves place references in further historical sources (written and visual) as and when they are digitized;
(iii) to develop an analysis workbench and embeddable Web tools that will enable researchers to bring together spatial documents in new and innovative ways.

This seminar will talk about the past, present and future directions of the project.

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I completed a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge in 2007. I then worked in commercial archaeology before beginning a masters in Archaeological Computing at the University of Southampton in 2010. I am now undertaking a PhD with the ACRG focussing on the visualisation and analysis of medieval Cairo, with particular emphasis on simulating movement, visibility and acoustics. My research interests include procedural modelling, visualisation of ancient cities, the visualisation of uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions, medieval and Roman urbanism, the archaeology of early Christianity and Islam.

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