ISAW Releases Geospatial Dataset Update

By Tom Elliott
11/16/2023

Since 2008, ISAW has hosted the Pleiades gazetteer, an on-going international collaboration that helps scholars, students, and enthusiasts to use, create, and share authoritative information about ancient places and spaces, providing unique services for finding, displaying, and reusing that information under open license. In 2016, I received a three-year grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities to upgrade and improve Pleiades. One of the major accomplishments of the sponsored work was the production of software for exporting and archiving all published data in Pleiades so that it can be used and cited, both now and in the future, separately from the Pleiades website. These "Pleiades Datasets" -- now released quarterly using continuously updated and improved versions of the software -- help ensure the widest distribution, longest availability, and freest scope for reuse of Pleiades content.

On Friday, 3 November 2023, I announced the release of Pleiades Datasets version 3.2 on the Pleiades blog. This update provides information for 40,418 place resources, adding 108 new and 1,629 updated place resources since the 3.1 release in August 2023. The additions and updates reflect work by Erin Walcek Averett, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anne Chen, Niels Christoffersen, Peter Cobb, Jonathan Fu, Greta Hawes, Carolin Johansson, Noah Kaye, Brady Kiesling, Thomas Landvatter, Stanisław Ludwiński, Ingrid Luo, Stephan Maurer, Colin McCaffrey, Gabriel McKee, David Meadows, Gabriel Moss, John Muccigrosso, Gifford Quinn, Rune Rattenborg, Enrico Regazzoni, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, Georgios Tsolakis, Scott Vanderbilt, and myself. The Version 3.2 Change Log provides an annotated list of every new and updated place, with links to the corresponding place page on the Pleiades website. Names of all past and present contributors to Pleiades may be found on the project's Credits page.

Full copies of Pleiades Datasets 3.2 may be downloaded freely from the following archives:

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.