Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites (CALCS) was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (via a micro-grant from the Pelagios Commons project), and ran for 4 months (August-November 2016), with the aim to add to the Pleiades gazetteer information about Arabic and Ottoman names (both mediaeval and modern) attached to sites better known by their classical (and sometimes modern European) names in the Mediterranean. The 2016 pilot focused on Sicily, Cyprus, Libya, and to a lesser extent perhaps southern Spain, but also took names from other parts of the Roman/Mediterranean world as they were easily available. The project worked partly from Arabic maps and manuscripts, partly from working with existing databases, and partly harvesting large linked data resources such as Wikidata and Geonames.
Based at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
- Gabriel Bodard
- Valeria Vitale
- Grigor Boykov (Sofia), Historical GIS South-East Europe
- Tom Elliott (NYU) and Ryan Baumann (Duke), Pleiades Project
- Usama Gad (Ain Shams)
- Jonathan Prag (Oxford), I.Sicily
- Eleanor Robson (UCL), Oracc
- Digital Classicist wiki entry
- Pelagios Commons announcement (Aug 2016)
- Talking Humanities blog post (October 2017)
- Arabic to Latin transliteration scheme
- New name data (in progress)
- Slideshow for DH Hissar workshop (Valeria Vitale, September 10, 2016)
All data and code created by the CALCS project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. In summary, this means that this is free software which you may re-use in almost any context, so long as you give credit to the original authors and that the GPL code remains intact on any derivative software. Full code for binding limitations to this license.
All geographical and name data will be released through the Pleiades Project, under the terms of their Creative Commons license. Any images or manuscripts will be distributed via the Recogito platform so long as they are licensed under CC-BY or more open licenses.