Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages

Anàlisi de la xarxa de comunicacions i del transport a la Catalunya romana: estudis de distribució i mobilitat

El concepte elemental sobre el que s'ha articulat aquest treball és que l'anàlisi de l'economia romana també s'ha de reconstruir a partir de la distribució i de la mobilitat de les mercaderies. Diversos són els acostaments metodològics utilitzats fins avui dia que permeten intuir com funcionava el transport romà. L'anàlisi de les dades que aporta el material arqueològic és sens dubte un dels més importants doncs representa l'enregistrament del resultat de la circulació d'aquestes mercaderies. L'estudi de les fonts antigues que descriuen en els seus passatges qüestions com els mitjans de transport, la compra o venda de productes o aspectes sobre la legislació romana representen també una font d'informació molt valuosa. A tot això, aquest treball aporta la visió de l'ús de les infraestructures i la simulació del moviment com a elements indispensables per conèixer els beneficis i les deficiències del sistema de transport creat en època romana. Un anàlisi aprofundit de cadascun dels models de distribució (tant temporals com econòmics) definits aporta informacions molt valuoses per comprendre els mecanismes de l'economia i societat romanes, però alhora presenten un conjunt de mancances que fan de la seva interpretació un resultat incomplert. És obvi doncs que la combinació de tots ells ha de permetre obtenir una visió més global de l'economia romana, sobretot en les qüestions de la circulació de mercaderies. El coneixement de les infraestructures és indispensable per obtenir un coneixement més exacte del funcionament del transport de mercaderies. És per això que a la primera part d'aquest treball s'ha presentat l'estudi de la xarxa de comunicacions del territori català. La manca d'estudis anteriors que haguessin tractat de manera profunda, sistemàtica i global tot el conjunt de les comunicacions romanes en aquest territori, ha obligat a dedicar una part important d'aquest projecte precisament a la compilació, documentació, anàlisi i digitalització de les comunicacions romanes. Aquest projecte ha tingut en compte alhora d'analitzar les infraestructures romanes tot el conjunt de vies de comunicació existents en època romana, ja fossin a través de medi terrestre, fluvial o marítim. Així, el coneixement de les infraestructures i el funcionament del transport s'ha utilitzat com a base per a interpretar les particularitats econòmiques de la regió nord oriental de la Tarraconense en època romana. Els resultats d'aquesta tesi doctoral ha estat, per tant, la elaboració d'un model de la circulació comercial que ajudi a comprendre millor les particularitats econòmiques i polítiques d'aquest territori i que ofereixi noves respostes als interrogants sobre la mobilitat en època romana, com podria ser la distribució del material arqueològic de Catalunya. Els resultats de la simulació han permès obtenir amb dades quantificades la valoració dels costos i temps necessaris per al transport de mercaderies des de diferents indrets del territori català. La quantificació dels costos de transport és una eina indispensable per poder justificar si el registre arqueològic segueix per exemple, pautes d'estratègies de mercat o al contrari si està sent influït per altres elements com podria ser una subvenció estatal que en finances parcial o totalment els costos de transport per exemple. De fet es pot entendre que aquest treball ha intentat per primer cop valorar de forma numèrica les particularitats de les comunicacions romanes a Catalunya. Allunyant-se de percepcions més o menys intuïtives o suposicions, els resultats d'aquest estudi ofereixen una quantificació estimada dels costos de transport en les condicions d'un sistema de mercat. Com s'ha anat veient durant tot el treball, les coincidències o divergències entre el model i la documentació arqueològica permeten indicar particularitats del sistema.The basic concept which this work has been articulated with is that the analysis of the Roman economy was also reconstructed from the distribution and the mobility of goods. Several methodological approaches are used to these days that also suggest how Roman transport works. The analysis of data provided by the archaeological material is certainly one of the most important as the recording is just the result of the movement of such goods. The study of ancient sources describe in its passages such issues as transportation, the purchasing or selling of products or aspects of Roman law, which also represent a source of valuable information. Meanwhile, this work provides a view of the use of infrastructure and the simulation of the movement as indispensable to know the benefits and shortcomings of the transport system created in Roman times. A thorough analysis of each distribution models set (both temporary and cheap) provides valuable information for understanding the mechanisms of the Roman economy and society, but also presents a series of shortcomings that make its interpretation a incomplete result. It is therefore obvious that the combination of all of them should allow a more global perspective of the Roman economy, especially in matters of the movement of goods.The knowledge of infrastructure is essential to obtain a more accurate knowledge of the freight transportation. Therefore the first part of this work has been presented to study the communications network of the Catalan territory. The lack of previous studies which globally, thoroughly and systematically treated the whole set of communications on this Roman territory, forced to devote a significant part of this project precisely to the gathering, documentation, analysis and digitization of Romanian communications. This project has taken into account while analyzing the whole infrastructure of Roman roads which existed in Roman times, whether through land environment, river or sea. Hence, the knowledge of infrastructure and working of transport has been used as a basis for interpreting the economic particularities of the north east region of Tarragona in Roman times. The results of this thesis has been, therefore, developing a model of the commercial movement which can help to a better understanding of the economic and political peculiarities of this region and to provide with new answers to the questions about mobility in Roman times as it might be the distribution of archaeological material in Catalonia. The simulation results have allowed to obtain, with quantified data, assessment of costs and time needed to transport goods from different parts of the Catalan territory. Quantification of transport costs is an indispensable tool to justify if the archaeological record follows, for example, patterns of market strategies or on the contrary it is being influenced by other elements such as a state grant to finance all or part of the transportation costs. In fact, it can be understood that this work has attempted to first evaluate numerically the particularities of the Roman communications in Catalonia. Moving away from more or less intuitive perceptions or assumptions, the results of this study provide an estimated quantification of transport costs in terms of a market system. As it has been seen throughout the whole work, coincidences or differences between the model and the archaeological documentation allow to indicate peculiarities of the system

The Pleiades Gazetteer and the Pelagios Project

Pelagios is a community-driven initiative that facilitates better linkage between online resources documenting the past, based on the places that they refer to. Our member projects are connected by a shared vision of a world – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article “Digital Geography and Classics” (Elliot and Gillies, 2009) – in which the geography of the past is every bit as interconnected, interactive and interesting as the present. Each project represents a different perspective on our shared history, whether expressed through text, map or archaeological record. But, as a group, we believe passionately that the combination of all of our contributions is enormously more valuable than the sum of its parts. The key to connectivity in Pelagios is the use of common gazetteer references when referring to places. Phrased in more technical terms, the first Pelagios convention states that whenever you refer to a place in your data, you should do so using a gazetteer URI. Such place references could express the find spot of a particular item in an archaeological database; mark up a piece of literature or a research article; identify a toponym in a digitized old map; or record the location of a historic site depicted on a photograph. By expressing them in the form of URIs from a shared gazetteer, otherwise isolated datasets are implicitly joined up to an interconnected graph, with the gazetteer as its central backbone

Peripleo: a Tool for Exploring Heterogenous Data through the Dimensions of Space and Time

This article introduces Peripleo, a prototype spatiotemporal search and visualization tool. Peripleo enables users to explore the geographic, temporal and thematic composition of distributed digital collections in their entirety, and then to progressively filter and drill down to explore individual records. We provide an overview of Peripleo’s features, and present the underlying technical architecture. Furthermore, we discuss how datasets that differ vastly in terms of size, content type and theme can be made uniformly accessible through a set of lightweight metadata conventions we term “connectivity through common references”. Our current demo installation links approximately half a million records from 25 datasets. These datasets originate from a spectrum of sources, ranging from the small personal photo collection with 35 records, to the large institutional database with 134.000 objects. The product of research in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Pelagios 3 project, Peripleo is Open Source software

Linked Data Annotation Without the Pointy Brackets: Introducing Recogito 2

Recogito 2 is an open source annotation tool currently under development by Pelagios, an international initiative aimed at facilitating better linkages between online resources documenting the past. With Recogito 2, we aim to provide an environment for efficient semantic annotation—i.e., the task of enriching content with references to controlled vocabularies—in order to facilitate links between online data. At the same time, we address a perceived gap in the performance of existing tools, by emphasizing the development of mechanisms for manual intervention and editorial control that support the curation of quality data. While Recogito 2 provides an online workspace for general-purpose document annotation, it is particularly well-suited for geo-annotation, in other words annotating documents with references to gazetteers, and supports the annotation of both texts and images (i.e., digitized maps). Already available for testing at http://recogito.pelagios.org, its formal release to the public occurred in December 2016

Peripleo: a Tool for Exploring Heterogeneous Data through the Dimensions of Space and Time

This article introduces Peripleo, a prototype spatiotemporal search and visualization tool. Peripleo enables users to explore the geographic, temporal and thematic composition of distributed digital collections in their entirety, and then to progressively filter and drill down to explore individual records. We provide an overview of Peripleo's features, and present the underlying technical architecture. Furthermore, we discuss how datasets that differ vastly in terms of size, content type and theme can be made uniformly accessible through a set of lightweight metadata conventions we term "connectivity through common references". Our current demo installation links approximately half a million records from 25 datasets. These datasets originate from a spectrum of sources, ranging from the small personal photo collection with 35 records, to the large institutional database with 134.000 objects. The product of research in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Pelagios 3 project, Peripleo is Open Source software

Methodological proposals for the study of ancient rural landscapes in the central area of the Contestania

Este trabajo tiene un doble propósito. Por una parte, se presentan métodos de prospección superficial, geofísica y sondeos que han estado asistidos con tecnologías geoespaciales aplicadas a la Arqueología. Este tipo de intervención destaca por su escasa agresión al subsuelo y al entorno y el requerimiento de recursos temporales y económicos menores a los de otras intervenciones arqueológicas. El segundo objetivo es reflexionar sobre los usos antiguos del suelo, la diacronía y la forma de ocupación de un complejo asentamiento que se data entre los siglos III a. C. y VII d. C., más allá del concepto puntual de yacimiento. Este análisis histórico-arqueológico se puede realizar gracias al registro en detalle de la dispersión de vestigios materiales.In this paper we have two main objectives. The first is the presentation of fieldwork and geophysics assisted with GPS, GIS and other Spatial Technologies applied to archaeological research. The advantage of this approach is the scarce aggression to soils and environment and the request of smaller economic and temporary resources than other archaeological fieldwork. The second objective is to reflect on ancient land uses, the diachronic sequence and structure of a complex Iberian Iron Age and Roman site of long duration (3rd cent. BC to 7th cent. AD). The accurate mapping of dispersion of the archaeological record allows this kind of historical analysis

Anàlisi de la xarxa de comunicacions i del transport a la Catalunya romana : estudis de mobilitat i accessibilitat /

Descripció del recurs: 27-06-2011El concepte elemental sobre el que s'ha articulat aquest treball és que l'anàlisi de l'economia romana també s'ha de reconstruir a partir de la distribució i de la mobilitat de les mercaderies. Diversos són els acostaments metodològics utilitzats fins avui dia que permeten intuir com funcionava el transport romà. L'anàlisi de les dades que aporta el material arqueològic és sens dubte un dels més importants doncs representa l'enregistrament del resultat de la circulació d'aquestes mercaderies. L'estudi de les fonts antigues que descriuen en els seus passatges qüestions com els mitjans de transport, la compra o venda de productes o aspectes sobre la legislació romana representen també una font d'informació molt valuosa. A tot això, aquest treball aporta la visió de l'ús de les infraestructures i la simulació del moviment com a elements indispensables per conèixer els beneficis i les deficiències del sistema de transport creat en època romana. Un anàlisi aprofundit de cadascun dels models de distribució (tant temporals com econòmics) definits aporta informacions molt valuoses per comprendre els mecanismes de l'economia i societat romanes, però alhora presenten un conjunt de mancances que fan de la seva interpretació un resultat incomplert. És obvi doncs que la combinació de tots ells ha de permetre obtenir una visió més global de l'economia romana, sobretot en les qüestions de la circulació de mercaderies. El coneixement de les infraestructures és indispensable per obtenir un coneixement més exacte del funcionament del transport de mercaderies. És per això que a la primera part d'aquest treball s'ha presentat l'estudi de la xarxa de comunicacions del territori català. La manca d'estudis anteriors que haguessin tractat de manera profunda, sistemàtica i global tot el conjunt de les comunicacions romanes en aquest territori, ha obligat a dedicar una part important d'aquest projecte precisament a la compilació, documentació, anàlisi i digitalització de les comunicacions romanes. Aquest projecte ha tingut en compte alhora d'analitzar les infraestructures romanes tot el conjunt de vies de comunicació existents en època romana, ja fossin a través de medi terrestre, fluvial o marítim. Així, el coneixement de les infraestructures i el funcionament del transport s'ha utilitzat com a base per a interpretar les particularitats econòmiques de la regió nord oriental de la Tarraconense en època romana. Els resultats d'aquesta tesi doctoral ha estat, per tant, la elaboració d'un model de la circulació comercial que ajudi a comprendre millor les particularitats econòmiques i polítiques d'aquest territori i que ofereixi noves respostes als interrogants sobre la mobilitat en època romana, com podria ser la distribució del material arqueològic de Catalunya. Els resultats de la simulació han permès obtenir amb dades quantificades la valoració dels costos i temps necessaris per al transport de mercaderies des de diferents indrets del territori català. La quantificació dels costos de transport és una eina indispensable per poder justificar si el registre arqueològic segueix per exemple, pautes d'estratègies de mercat o al contrari si està sent influït per altres elements com podria ser una subvenció estatal que en finances parcial o totalment els costos de transport per exemple. De fet es pot entendre que aquest treball ha intentat per primer cop valorar de forma numèrica les particularitats de les comunicacions romanes a Catalunya. Allunyant-se de percepcions més o menys intuïtives o suposicions, els resultats d'aquest estudi ofereixen una quantificació estimada dels costos de transport en les condicions d'un sistema de mercat. Com s'ha anat veient durant tot el treball, les coincidències o divergències entre el model i la documentació arqueològica permeten indicar particularitats del sistema.The basic concept which this work has been articulated with is that the analysis of the Roman economy was also reconstructed from the distribution and the mobility of goods. Several methodological approaches are used to these days that also suggest how Roman transport works. The analysis of data provided by the archaeological material is certainly one of the most important as the recording is just the result of the movement of such goods. The study of ancient sources describe in its passages such issues as transportation, the purchasing or selling of products or aspects of Roman law, which also represent a source of valuable information. Meanwhile, this work provides a view of the use of infrastructure and the simulation of the movement as indispensable to know the benefits and shortcomings of the transport system created in Roman times. A thorough analysis of each distribution models set (both temporary and cheap) provides valuable information for understanding the mechanisms of the Roman economy and society, but also presents a series of shortcomings that make its interpretation a incomplete result. It is therefore obvious that the combination of all of them should allow a more global perspective of the Roman economy, especially in matters of the movement of goods. The knowledge of infrastructure is essential to obtain a more accurate knowledge of the freight transportation. Therefore the first part of this work has been presented to study the communications network of the Catalan territory. The lack of previous studies which globally, thoroughly and systematically treated the whole set of communications on this Roman territory, forced to devote a significant part of this project precisely to the gathering, documentation, analysis and digitization of Romanian communications. This project has taken into account while analyzing the whole infrastructure of Roman roads which existed in Roman times, whether through land environment, river or sea. Hence, the knowledge of infrastructure and working of transport has been used as a basis for interpreting the economic particularities of the north east region of Tarragona in Roman times. The results of this thesis has been, therefore, developing a model of the commercial movement which can help to a better understanding of the economic and political peculiarities of this region and to provide with new answers to the questions about mobility in Roman times as it might be the distribution of archaeological material in Catalonia. The simulation results have allowed to obtain, with quantified data, assessment of costs and time needed to transport goods from different parts of the Catalan territory. Quantification of transport costs is an indispensable tool to justify if the archaeological record follows, for example, patterns of market strategies or on the contrary it is being influenced by other elements such as a state grant to finance all or part of the transportation costs. In fact, it can be understood that this work has attempted to first evaluate numerically the particularities of the Roman communications in Catalonia. Moving away from more or less intuitive perceptions or assumptions, the results of this study provide an estimated quantification of transport costs in terms of a market system. As it has been seen throughout the whole work, coincidences or differences between the model and the archaeological documentation allow to indicate peculiarities of the system