Space and Bibliography

[Shawn Graham]

From my main blog - which might be of interest to folks over here:

"In my research, I have often wished to know
what kinds of archaeological projects were going on in a given region. This usually involved a bibliographical search on various names describing the region or place names I know within the region. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I know the name of the principle researcher synonymous with the region’s archaeology, and can search for that person’s published works.

But what if I don’t know these things? What if research in an area has yet to be published? It can sometimes be an extremely frustrating process. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just zoom in on a map of the region, and discover who is working there, and the relevant publications?

Problems should be solved by those who see them, and so, I have created just such an annotated map for archaeologists using the tools of platial.com

[Andrew Reinhard]

This is really, really useful. What I would love to see Platial do is offer maps that are tied to a specific time that could be tagged, or offer "layers" where you can see modern locations of ancient sites (which include roads to get you there...) that can then be peeled back to show ancient sites that relate to each other over space and time. Ideally, if we were to make Platial truly useful to the serious researcher, we could add links to findspots, images for significant finds, notebook page-scans, theadolite data, stratigraphic maps, etc. Published research in two dimensions (especially in archaeology) makes little sense what with the modern tools we have to add CONTEXT, which is all-important to the archaeologist (like me!).

[Shawn Graham]

It is possible to integrate Platial with images from Flickr, and it is also possible to update platial from databases, rss feeds, etc. It's also possible to categorise the dots-on-the-map, so it should be feasible to get the map to display according to date-ranges, site-types, etc, and to link in associated images, and so on. Links can be added into the dots-on-the-map to other sources of information, so I think the sky's the limit.... It's just a matter of finding the time to put more information on the map and to push the envelope!