Category: URIs

More on Ancient Itineraries

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Image derived from Gerrit Dou, Astronomer by Candlelight, late 1650s. Oil on panel. The J. Paul Getty Museum

I have recently re-posted here the call for members for the new Institute programme, “Ancient Itineraries”, funded by the Getty Foundation as part of its Digital Art History initiative and led by DDH and collaborating with KCL’s Classics department and Humlab at Umea, which seeks to map out some possible futures for digital art history. We will do this by convening two meetings of international experts, one in London and one in Athens. The posting has generated some discussion, both on the listservs to which we’ve posted and privately.  “What’s the relationship”, asked one member of the community, “between this and the Getty Provenance Index and other initiatives in this area, such as Linked Pasts?”. Another asks if we are seeking professors, ECRs, faculty, or curators? These are good questions, and I seek to answer them, in general terms, here.

In practical terms, he project is funded by the Getty Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Getty Trust. The Getty Provenance Index is a resource developed and managed by the Getty Research Institute (GRI).  (Briefly, there are four programs that rest under the umbrella of the Getty Trust: the GRI, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Museum. Each program works independently and has a particular mandate under the broader mission of the Getty Trust.)

A word should be devoted to the Proof of Concept (PoC). A key strand of the project will be a collaboration with King’s Digital Lab to develop an exemplum of the kind of service or resource that the art history community might find useful. The programme gives us unprecedented space to explore the methodological utility of digital methods to art history, so it is not only logical, but incumbent upon us, to try and operationalize those methods in a practical manner. The PoC will therefore be one of the main outputs of the project.  However, it must be stressed that the emphasis of the project, and the bulk of its efforts, will go into defining the question(s) which make it important. What are the most significant challenges which art history (without the “digital” prefix) currently faces and which can be tackled using digital tools and services?

There are many excellent examples of tools, services and infrastructure which already address a variety of scholarly challenges in this space – Pelagios, which enables the semantic annotation of text, aggregates data from different sources, and provides a platform for linking them together is an obvious example. As is the Pleiades gazetteer, which provides stable URIs for individual places in the ancient world, and frames much current thinking about representing the idea of (ancient) place on the WWW. Arachne, an initiative of the DAI, is another one, which links art/archaeological objects and their descriptions using catalogue metadata. These infrastructures, and the communities behind them, actually *do* things with datasets. They combine datasets and put them together; inspiring new questions, and answering old ones. from a technical point of view, our project will not be remotely of the scale or ambition of these. Rather, our motivation is to survey and reflect on key initiatives and technologies in this space, discuss their impact, and explore their relationship – or possible relationships – with methods and theories long practiced by art historians who have little or no connection with such tools.

What of the chronological scope? As we intimate in the call, digital gazetteers, visualization, the use of Semantic Web technologies to link datasets such as catalogue records, have a long pedigree of being applied within the sphere of the Classical world, very broadly conceived as the orbit of Greece and Rome between the fifth century BCE and the fourth century CE. At least in part, this can be traced back to the deep impact of Greco-Roman traditions on Western culture and society, and its manifestation in the present day – a topic explored by the current exhibition at KCL, “Modern Classicisms and The Classical Now”. Because of this, those traditions came in to early contact with scientific cartography (Ortelius first mapped the Roman empire in the 1580s) and the formal information structures of (Western) museum catalogues.  The great interest in the art and culture of this period continues to the present day, and helps explain its intensive intellectual interest to scholars of the digital humanities – resulting in a rich seam of projects and infrastructures fleetingly outlined above.

Our motivation in Ancient Itineraries is to ask what the wider field of art history can learn from this, and vice versa. Many of the questions of space, trajectory and reception that we might apply to the work of Phidias, for example, might apply to the work of other sculptors, and later traditions. Ancient Itineraries will seek to take to the myriad digital tools that we have for exploring Phidias’s world and work, and take them into theirs. The programme will give us space to review what the art-historical strands of digital classics are, and what they have already contributed to the wider area. However we will also ask what technology can and cannot achieve, and explore its wider application. Therefore, while art-historical Classicists are certainly welcome and may stand to gain most; those with interests in the art of other periods can certainly contribute – so long as they are sure they could benefit from deepening their historical and/or critical understanding of that tradition using digital praxes.

(Not quite) moving mountains: recording volcanic landscapes in digital gazetteers

Digital gazetteers have been immensely successful as means of linking and describing places online. GeoNames for example, now contains 10,000,000 geographical names corresponding to over 7,500,000 unique features. However, as we will be outlining at the ICA Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage next month in relation to the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus project, one assumption which often underlies them is fixity: an assumption that a name and a place and, by extension, its location on the Earth’s surface are immutably linked. This allows gazetteers to be treated as authorities. For example, a gazetteer with descriptions fixed to locations can be used to associate postal codes with a layer of contemporary environmental data and describe relationships between them; or to create a look-up list for the provision of services. It can also be very valuable for research, where a digital edition of a text has mentions of places. If contained in a parallel gazetteer, these can be used to provide citations and external authorities to those places, and also to other references in other texts.

However, physical geography changes. In the Aegean, where  the African tectonic plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate to the north, the South Aegean Volcanic Arc has been created, a band of active and dormant volcanic islands including the islands of  Aegina, Methana, Milos, Santorini, Kolumbo, and Kos, Nisyros and Yali. Each of these locations has a fixed modern aspect, and can be related to a record in a digital gazetteer.  However, these islands have changed over the years as a result of historical volcanism, and this history requires  the flexibility of a digital gazetteer to adequately represent it.

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The island of Thera. The volcanic dome of Mt. Profitis Elias is shown viewed from the north.

I recently helped refine the entry in the Pleiades gazetteer for the Santorini Archipelago. Pleiades assigns a URI to each location, and allows information to be associated with that location via the URIs.  Santorini provides a case study of how multiple Pleaides URIs, associated with different time periods, can trace the history of the archipelago’s volcanism.  The  five present-day islands frame two ancient calderas, the larger formed more recently in the great Late Bronze Age eruption, and the other formed very much earlier in the region’s history. Originally, it is most likely that a single island was present, which fragmented over the millennia in response to the eruptions. Working backwards therefore, we begin with a URI for the islands as a whole:  http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/808255902. This covers the entire entity of the ‘Santorini Archipelago’. We associate all the names that have pertained to the island group through history – Καλλιστη (Calliste; 550 BC – 330 BC); Hiera (550 BC – 330 BC) and Στρογγύλη (Strongyle; AD 1918 – AD 2000), as well as the modern designation ‘Santorini Archipelago’ itself.  These four names have been used, at different times as either a collective term for all the islands, or, in the case of Strongyle, for the (geologically) original single island. This URI-labelled entity has lower-level connections with the islands that were formed during the periods of historic volcanism:  Therasia, Thera,  Nea Kameni, Mikro Kameni, Palea Kameni, Caimeni  and Aspronisi. Each, in turn, has its own URI.

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The Santorini Archipelago in Pleiades

Mikro Kameni  and Caimeni are interesting cases as they no longer exist on the modern map. They are attested respectively by the naval survey of Thomas Graves of HMS Volgae (1851), and Caimeni was attested by Thomaso Porcacchi in 1620. Both formed elements of what are now the Kameini islands, but due to the fact that they have these distinct historical attestations, they are assigned URIs, with the time periods when they were known to exist according to the sources, even though they do not exist today.

This speaks to a wider issue of digital gazetteers, and their role in the understanding of past landscapes. With the authority they imbue to place-names, gazetteers might, if developed without reference to the nuances of landscape changes over time, potentially risk implicitly enforcing the view, no longer widely accepted, that places are immutable holders of history and historic events; where, in the words of Tilley in A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (1994), ‘space is directly equivalent to, and separate from time, the second primary abstracted scale according to which societal change could be documented and ‘measured’.’ (p. 9). The evolution of islands due to volcanism show clearly the need for a critical framework that avoids such approaches to historical and archaeological spaces.