How to create a gazetteer - what I've learned

I recently completed the seventh year of continual work on the Mycenaean Atlas Project. In that time a great deal has been done but that's not what I want to write about now. I want to write about what I've learned during this work - and one thing in particular. 

 When creating a gazetteer or Atlas of the world of antiquity you must tell the user a story about each site. 

A gazetteer is not simply a matching list of feature names with latitude/longitude pairs. No usable gazetteer of antiquity can be written in this fashion.  Why not?  Because there are too many sites whose positions we do not know for certain.   So when choosing a lat/lon pair it almost always is a judgment - an approximation or a guess.   The user has to be told what went into that judgment.  In that case, it is crucial to give the user some hints about how to proceed in the face of uncertainty. At the very least the user must be given in full the references that you used (and with internet links if possible). 

Full disclosure is important when articles and/or books are not available to the gazetteer creator. For example, the ancient city of Iton in Phthiotis poses a number of geographical puzzles concerning not only Iton but the nearby sites of Zerelia, Karatsadagli, and Marmara. These sites form a little conceptual cluster which may or may not have something to do with a temple (the Barrington Atlas shows Iton and Marmara as cult sites). The gazetteer writer has to sort the sites out, locate them, evaluate their significance, and in particular, discuss the problem of whether there was or was not a cult of Athena Itonia in that area (as Strabo claims).  In my Commentary on Pleiades I went all the way back to the original investigators but I wasn't really able to seal the deal - to remove the last bit of ambiguity. The reason? I have no access to Lalonde's Athena Itonia: Geography and Meaning of an Ancient Greek War Goddess from just three years ago. Brill wants $195.00 for it and Amazon wants $143.00. Impractical either way. This isn't really a complaint. For one reason or another, this happens a lot and to just about everybody. How did I handle this? This is the message I put at the end of my comments for Pleiades 540935 which deals with Marmara. 

"Most of these questions should now be resolved in Lalonde [2019].  Regrettably, Lalonde's book was not available to me at the time of writing." 

Pleiades Commentary on Marmara (Pl. no. 540935)

 Now that the user is warned he or she might be able to get their hands on a copy of Lalonde and figure out the ambiguous parts. 

- Room has to be given to scholarly disagreements.  In the case of Iton which I mentioned above both Stählin [1924] and Philippson [1950] think that there was a temple there.  Roller [2018] thinks not.  The user needs to be told.

 - There are puzzles of transliteration to work through. The user has to be told what these are if they are material. 

 - Bibliography, bibliography, bibliography.  The user needs to know what research the position is based on.  Gazetteers are not just a circular citation game where gA cites gB and gB cites gC and gC cites gA. The user needs to be grounded at least as well as the gazetteer maker himself or herself was grounded. 

 - Misleading descriptions by the primary investigators. Investigators routinely get directions wrong, distances wrong, etc. Investigators are human. We get it. But when these problems are identified then the resolution (if there is one) must be explained to the user.   Here's an example: of a site in Euboea Sackett says 

" ..., Kherronisi, is a rocky headland immediately south of the island church Ayios Nikolaos. It is about 25 m. above the sea ... "[1] 

But Kherronisi isn't south of the Ayios Nikolaos - it's to the NE.  And the elevation of Kherronisi is not 25 m. - it is no more than 15 m.  I nearly made a serious error here but I finally convinced myself, in the teeth of Sackett's description, that Topostext was right in their placement and so I followed Brady Kiesling's solution.[2]

Pleiades Commentary on Helleniki (Pl. 540809)

Status of the commentary on Pleiades:  As of 12/11/22 I have completed some 400+ corrections/annotations to the Pleiades dataset.  These corrections complete the repair of the  rounded coordinates for mainland Greece as far north as Thessaly, the Cyclades, Crete, the Dodecanese, and some of the islands of the Aegean NE.  I have made the data table of these corrections and supplemental notes available to Pleiades. Perhaps they'll be interested.

Because there are about 5000 potentially correctible sites I won't ever be able to finish this.  But already Pleiades, for the Greek worlds and as seen through my Digital Atlas, has a much bouncier and usable feel.  It starts to be what it should be - a product that pays attention to correctness and usefulness and, as a result, gives the user confidence in the result.  And using the Digital Atlas you can also easily compare  Pleiades' solutions with the solutions of the Vici, DARE, and Trismegistos data sets as well as to the Topostext gazetteer and to de Graauw's Harbors.  

The Digital Atlas is now a working prototype of a full-up gazetteer of Antiquity.

And, as always, this is a useful reminder.

Footnotes

[1] Sackett et al. [1966] 42, #11.  'Elliniko'.

[2] Topostext is here, Pleiades is here, and my own solution is here.

Bibliography

Sackett et al. [1966] : Sackett, L.H. with V. Sankey, R.J. Howell, T.W. Jacobsen and M.R. Popham, 'Prehistoric Euboea: Contributions toward a Survey', Annual of the British School at Athens (61) 33-112.  1966.  Online here.

The Commentary on Pleiades

 The Mycenaean Atlas Project is more than just a Bronze Age gazetteer.  It is an accessible viewer for the entire ancient world - and at every period. It accomplishes this goal by integrating several very different data sets.  Here's an example:

The city of Aigion in Achaea as displayed in the Digital Atlas

One of those data sets is Pleiades.  But how do you handle or display a dataset with as many serious defects as Pleiades?  Its deficiencies are of three kinds.  Of Pleiades' approximately 39,000 records about 7,000 have no lat/lon coordinates at all.   As a result, these points cannot be displayed at all and  why they are in the dataset in the first place is a mystery.

Pleiades next problem is the 5,000 or so sites for which the lat/lon pairs are rounded to the nearest quarter degree.  This indefensible practice (and never corrected during the entire 20-year existence of this DB) puts these sites off by about 12 km. on average.  Even worse, it creates about 400 or so 'stacks' in each of which some 10 to 20 sites have exactly the same rounded coordinates and cannot be disambiguated.  (See the example of Boreion, below.)

The remainder 26,000 sites are simply inaccurate.  They are off by about 900 m. on average because this part of the DB was intended for the Barrington Atlas - a printed product in which accuracy, at the given scales, could never be better than a km. or so.  Accuracy is expensive and you never pay for more than you need.  This practice was fine for a printed product but a disaster when moved to the digital world in which representable locations are accurate to less than a meter.  The need to develop precise and accurate data for the digital world is far more urgent than it is for the world of the printed atlas.

When showing Pleiades data in a gazetteer viewer such as the Mycenaean Atlas Project the overwhelming temptation is to correct these numerous errors by adding additional information to the Pleiades data. Providing accurate lat/lon pairs is a chief priority.  The design problem is, somehow, to add that information in a way that new versions of the Pleiades database don't write over what people external to Pleiades, such as myself, have added.  How do we best add and store supplemental and updated information for Pleiades sites and how should this new data be displayed?

What is required is a Commentary on Pleiades.

      To support this Commentary I created a new DB table that would hold any additional information or corrected lat/lon pairs.  A table that is independent of the Pleiades database would not be overwritten by new versions of the Pleiades database.  It would exist alongside the Pleiades DB. And yet the new data in this table could still be connected to the old Pleiades database through the Pleiades id no.  That way if there was an entry in the new table for any specific Pleiades site record my browser would display THAT corrected/additional data instead of the incorrect Pleiades data.  This required that I accompany my new DB table with a new browser page in .html.  This will be the new Commentary on Pleiades page which stands between my viewer and Pleiades itself.  In addition to corrected information this new page maps the Pleiades places to their correct location on a new map instead of to the incorrect rounded quarter-degree locations where they are now displayed.

Design of old and new interaction with Pleiades.

The upper half of this diagram shows the current situation; the Mycenaean Atlas Project takes information from the unmodified local copy of the Pleiades database and displays it.  That display has a button that, when clicked, takes the user back to the original Pleiades page for more information.

The lower half of the diagram shows the new design.  In addition to the local copy of the Pleiades database as before (orange), there is a brand-new table that contains my own contributed material.  On the browser map, when the user clicks the Pleiades icon for more info they don't go to the Pleiades page as before but to the new Pleiades Commentary page that shows the corrected lat/lon pair along with more info and a browser map that shows the icon in its corrected position.  A link on that supplemental commentary page will send the user to the original Pleiades page (dashed line).

This whole process is transparent to the user who will only see the new commentary page when he or she clicks on a Pleiades place for which I have created commentary. 

The new Pleiades Commentary page will look like this (annotations in red):

The new Commentary on Pleiades page (here for Belminatis, Pleiades 570152).

Now I'd like to show a situation in which this commentary is invaluable.

Mt. Boreion in Arcadia is Pleiades 570158.  Pleiades gives its position rounded to the nearest quarter degree like this: 37.25, 22.25.  This is exactly the same position as seventeen other Pleiades sites.  I list them here:

Pleiades grouping 18 sites at the very same location: 37.25 N, 22.25 E.

This sort of practice is common in Pleiades and it must be corrected.  Even a casual user does not deserve to have all these sites shown in the identical location.

I corrected the rounded position of Boreion (37.25 N, 22.25 E) to  37.429300°,  22.342900°.  On the next map I compare my position, Topostext's position, and  Pleiades position:

Placement of Mount Boreion (Attica) in Pleiades, Topostext, and Mycenaean Atlas Project.

I have not adopted Topostext's position here but the rounded Pleiades position (at the bottom of the map) is 21 km. from my proposed location and almost 19 km. distant from Topostext's. 

My Commentary to Pleiades will change all this. If you search for 570158 or 'Boreion' and display it on the digital atlas you will be shown this next page (Be sure to select 'Pleiades' layer from the (not shown) map layer selector on the top right):

Mt. Boreion (Pleiades 570158) displayed in correct position.

The top link in the info box ("Pleiades (S) 570158") will not bring the user to the main Pleiades page for 'Boreion'.  Instead the new Pleiades Commentary screen will be displayed:

Commentary on Pleiades - supplemental information page

My goal for the future is to correct all the locations whose lat/lon coordinates have been rounded.  For the Peloponnese alone this amounts to about 160 such rounded markers.  Presently there are about 150 corrected Pleiades sites (primarily for the Peloponnese) and the work of adding corrections to Pleiades will be ongoing.