Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites (CALCS)

Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites (CALCS)

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.