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 * Database
 * Hosting Organisation
 * Project Team Members
 * Itiner-e in the future
 * Data and case-study
 * A Gazetteer of Roads
 * Description
 * Itiner-e

Select Page
 * Database
 * Hosting Organisation
 * Project Team Members
 * Itiner-e in the future
 * Data and case-study
 * A Gazetteer of Roads
 * Description
 * Itiner-e




ITINER-E

What?

 * A resource development project that will confront a unique challenge in the
   gazetteer eco-system: a gazetteer of historical roads to support the creation
   of linked open road datasets.
 * The alignment process will be done not just by places conceptualised as dots,
   but through unique roads or road segments connecting sets of places.
 * Linking with other Pleiades-linked resources will be enabled based on the
   places associated with each road (segment) URI.
 * This project is a proof-of-concept to allow implementing the proposed
   methodology to the full spectrum of historical road networks by a community
   of users.
 * The method will be tested by adding a new data resource linked to Pelagios:
   the most up-to-date and accurate digital dataset of Roman roads in the
   Iberian Peninsula.

How? – Innovation

 * Change of perspective: in this gazetteer the roads become nodes and the
   places become edges.
 * URIs will identify routes documented in historical sources. Within each
   element, relevant information will be stored: places, chronology,
   bibliography, images…

Impact?

 * Enhance the currently limited aggregation and openness of digitised
   information about historical routes.
 * Support all future research on historical roads by providing the first
   platform with unique references to road (segments).
 * Establish a focal point for the community of those interested in historic
   roads, enabling discussion, adding roads and sources, and correcting them.
 * These resources will facilitate future historic road data collection and
   improve the accuracy of existing road datasets.


DESCRIPTION

The study of historical routes connecting places is a crucial aspect to enabling
a better understanding of the structure, performance and evolution of past and
present transport systems around the world. Routes can be documented from their
collection in historical sources, such as itineraries and inscriptions in Roman
Era, books of pilgrimages in medieval times or drawn maps in more modern times.

However, the study of historical routes is currently faced with a crucial issue:
there is an increasing gap between our rapidly increasing knowledge about the
physical connections between places and the research community’s ability to
access and aggregate this mass of information to improve our understanding of
the past and present flows of people, goods and ideas these systems facilitate.
By building on the Pelagios platform and community, and on the recent growth in
the scholarly practice of linked open data, this project will overcome this
challenge.

Itiner-e will develop the first online gazetteer of historical roads, to enhance
our ability to collect, aggregate and debate historical roads, and to enable the
linking of this important source of information about past societies with other
resources by linking related places. This proposal concerns a resource
development that aims to develop a pipeline methodology for linked open road
data, set up an online platform and implement the method using the Roman routes
in the Iberian Peninsula as a proof-of-concept.


A GAZETTEER OF ROADS

Until now, the most common way of approaching the study of communication routes
has been to focus on the places where the routes started, ended and passed
through. This approach is crucial and partly inevitable, but Itiner-e will
explore an alternative to this.

The novelty in this project is that each possible route between every pair of
places is understood as a single element that is either historically documented
or not, but can all be unambiguously referred to. In other words, it is not the
sets of places conceptualised as points that create a route, but the opposite:
we conceptualise routes as entities connected through places. Each potential
route between a pair of places can receive a unique URI to refer to it, if it is
historically documented or merely mentioned. Doing so will enable for each route
(segment) the linking of historical documentation, GIS vector-based descriptions
of its physical path, photos and other research outputs. Doing so stimulates
debate and multivocality of opinion, but it also enables the documentation of
different chronological phases of the same route. It will be possible to observe
how a locality has some links with other places at a certain moment and how
subsequently these relationships change.

Each of the created elements (tracks) will configure a new online gazetteer item
accessible and linked with other sources of information such as Pleiades. In
this way, it will be possible from any existing node in a route to quickly
visualize all the information of the set: to which way (or routes) it belongs in
a certain moment or in several moments; which cities or settlements are related
to it; explore the role this place played in the global network, etc.


DATA AND CASE-STUDY

The pipeline method for linked open road data and the creation of the gazetteer
will be tested through a model focused on the Roman Roads of the Iberian
Peninsula. This case was selected due to the diversity and richness of the
resources as well as the availability of the most up-to-date knowledge on these
routes through the Mercator-e project led by Pau de Soto. In these territories
we can find different Roman roads attested in ancient written and depicted
sources such as the Vicarello Cups, the Itinerarium Antonini Augusti, and the
Tabula Peutingeriana. The Mercator-e project additionally collected all
archaeological and historical traces of all route segments to create the most
accurate and up-to-date digital resource of physical routes in the Roman Iberian
Peninsula. However, this dataset is not currently linked open data.

Through the Itiner-e gazetteer and the places associated with routes, this data
resource will be linked with other Gazetteer projects such as Pleiades
(https://pleiades.stoa.org/) and the TIR-FOR Project
(https://tir-for.iec.cat/the-map/). All the data generated will be stored in
GeoJson format where all the information will be stored (id names, places within
the roads, chronology, etc…)


ITINER-E IN THE FUTURE

This project is conceived as a continuation of the Mercator-e Project, the
actual project of the lead applicant, Pau de Soto. After storing and digitising
all the available information about the historical roads of the Iberian
Peninsula, an appropriate next step is to create new ways to share some of the
newly produced data. At the same time, this project is conceived as a seed of a
bigger project which will be focused in the creation of a digital resource of
all the roads of the Roman Empire. The main roads of this future project will be
uploaded to Itiner-e. Hence the proof-of-concept nature of this proposal. The
final result of Itiner-e will be the creation of the biggest Historical Road
Gazetteer where scholars and other audiences will benefit from this online
resource.

From now on, after testing this methodology in a small territory, all the
historical roads of the Iberian Peninsula recorded in historical sources will be
uploaded into the system. The collaboration within the Institute for Catalan
Studies and within the TIR-FOR project assures the continuity of the project and
its maintenance online. In a future step, an open tool will be created to allow
other researchers to easily upload their own roads and information.

All the information and code produced within this project will be hosted on
Github and released under CC licenses.

The beneficiaries of this project will be researchers interested in historical
places and roads. At the same time, the Open Data community will be benefited
with this tool as they could link their project and information not only to some
places but also to bigger entities, as in this case, big roads.


PROJECT TEAM MEMBERS

Pau de Soto

PhD in Classical Archaeology (2010) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona
(UAB). He is specialized in the use of GIS and Network Analysis to analyse the
Roman transportation and communication routes. He also obtained an MSc. in
Geographical Information Technologies (2012) from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona (UAB). After his PhD, he has been involved in projects at several
international research centers and universities in Catalonia, Spain, England,
Italy and Portugal.  He is also specialized in the development of non-intrusive
techniques, mainly geophysics applied to Archaeology. Since October 2016, he is
working as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa developing a
project about the evolution of the transportation networks in the Iberian
Peninsula from Roman times to the XIXth Century.

Tom Brughmans

Tom Brughmans is an archaeologist specialised in studying the Roman economy
through ceramic data analysis, computational simulation modeling and network
science. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s
School of Archaeology where he leads the Leverhulme-funded project MERCURY,
affiliated with the Oxford Roman Economy Project. He previously held a
postdoctoral position at the computer science department in Konstanz where he
developed original computational GIS methods for studying visibility phenomena
in landscape archaeology. Tom holds a PhD and MSc in Roman archaeology through
computational methods and Roman tableware studies (University of Southampton),
and an MA and BA in Archaeology (KU Leuven).

Santiago Muxach

Santiago has a degree in Philosophy and Letters by the Autonomous University of
Barcelona, an MSc in Medieval Archaeology (University of Barcelona) and a
Specialisation in Museology (University of Barcelona). Between 1990 and 2008 he
belonged to the Autonomous University of Barcelona staff reaching the chief of
the digital computing department position of the Humanities Library. From 2008
he was hired as Head of the Digital Resources Service of the Institute for
Catalan Studies. In this position, he has been responsible of the technical
development of several national and international projects like the TIR-FOR
Project, Corpus des Troubadors, Mapa de la Recerca en Neurociències a Catalunya,
Corpus Internationale des Timbres Amphoriques or Catalunya Carolíngia.

Josep Guitart

He is chairman of Archaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and
member of the Institute for Catalan Studies. He was director of the Badalona
Museum between 1975 and 1980. He has held various positions in the Generalitat
of Catalonia: he has served as Head of the Museum Service (1980-82), Deputy
Director of Museums, Plastic Arts and Archeology (1982-84), Subdirector General
of Universities (1987-90) and director of this last section (1990-93), he has
also been director of the Catalan Institute of Classical Archeology (2003-2007).
In the field of research, he has worked on various aspects of Roman archaeology
in Catalonia, including excavations and studies about the Roman cities of
Baetulo (Badalona) and Iesso (Guissona) and the edition of Sheet K/J-31 of the
Tabula Imperii Romani, commission that he presides since 2014. His knowledge
about Iberian Roman archaeology is an added value to this project. He is a
delegate of the IEC in the International Academic Union (UAI) and vice president
of the UAI since 2013. He has been appointed an elected member of the Royal
Catalan Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi (2008).


HOSTING ORGANISATION

The Itiner-e project is hosted by The Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC) and has
received fundings from a Pelagios Commons Resource Development Grant. Pelagios
Commons is a long term project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (NY)
and developed under the auspices of the University of Exeter.

IEC is a centenary institution which hosts part of the scientific society and
scholars of Catalonia, which configures the role of an institution with a clear
impact on the scientific society. The Institute of Catalan Studies is structured
in five sections, established according to large thematic units, which organise
the research. The Institute has a staff of more than one hundred people and has
about 250 permanent and emeritus members. The Historic-Archaeological Section
research includes history, archaeology, history of art, the history of law and
the history of literature, mainly focused on the study of the territories of
Catalan language, but also participating in international research programs and
projects.

This wide time scope has allowed its researchers to initiate or collaborate in a
large volume of prestigious research projects with strong international
repercussions. Some of the most prominent projects where members of this section
participate are: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL), Corpus International des
Timbres Amphoriques (CITA), Catalunya Carolingia, Corpus des Troubadours or
Tabula Imperii Romani-Form Orbis Romani project (TIR-FOR). The international
vocation and excellence of this section has been continuously strengthened
thanks to the various international collaborations.


DATABASE




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
International License.

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701 620 · Fax: 932 701 180 · a/e: informacio@iec.cat · a/i: http://www.iec.cat