Welcome to the GeoDia User Forum

This blog is set up to serve as a way to collect feedback from users of GeoDia, a spatial timeline of the ancient Mediterranean developed by Adam Rabinowitz (University of Texas at Austin, department of Classics), Peter Keane and Stuart Ross (UT Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services), and Nick Rabinowitz, using Nick's timemap.js library and the LAITS DASe architecture, with support from two LAITS project grants. It will also serve as a place where GeoDia managers can alert users to additions, changes, and new developments. The GeoDia code itself can be found at http://code.google.com/p/geodia/.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

SXSW panel on geotemporal visualization

Adam's SXSW panel on geotemporal visualization on March 12 seems to have been well-received. The credit goes to the panelists, who presented a range of tools and good ideas. You can see some of the reactions on Twitter, there's a writeup in Time's Techland section, and there's a brief summary in the Austin Chronicle. We're hoping to continue the conversation through the blog that Ana Boa-Ventura has set up at www.geotemporalviz.org.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Geotemporal visualization at SXSW

If anyone's checking this blog yet and will be in Austin for SXSW, please come see the panel Adam organized: Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization. It'll be at 12:30 on Saturday, March 12. GeoDia will make a cameo appearance, and there will also be a series of interesting presenters who will approach the visualization of spatial and temporal data from a number of different perspectives. Check the blog we've set up for some of the examples we plan to discuss: geotemporalviz.org. The panel also appears in a preview piece in this week's Austin Chronicle.

GeoDia sites linked to Pleiades URIs

We have now done a preliminary round of linking to Pleiades URIs for the sites in GeoDia. To do this, we queried the Pleiades feed to look for sites with the same name within the geographic bounding-boxes used by Pleiades to locate sites. These bounding-boxes are based on the spatial divisions of the Barrington Atlas.

About 2/3 of our sites could be connected automatically. Some others aren't found in Pleiades, while some didn't  link because the Pleiades feed didn't expose all alternate names.

We will be interested to see how well we can connect sites now that the Pleiades project is drawing more specific locations from Harvard's DARMC project. The DARMC site locations are less specific, in many cases, than the GeoDia locations, which are derived from satellite imagery rather than cartographic coordinates. The question will be whether the Pleiades feed will include both bounding-box information and specific DARMC coordinates.

GeoDia now officially hosted and open for business!

As of the end of January 2011, GeoDia is now hosted by the University of Texas Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Service at geodia.laits.utexas.edu. The current interface is stable, and will remain the fully-functional public version for the foreseeable future. We will keep adding data, however. Right now, students in Adam's Introduction to Greek Archaeology class are generating information about another 12 Greek sites as part of a group project. The results of their work should be posted to GeoDia during the week of March 14th, so keep checking back!