Background: how this project uses Geographic Information System (GIS) programs, and how does this work?
Anima uses Peripleo, a prototypal GIS program developed by the Pelagios network. Like many GIS programs, Peripleo helps scholars and community organisations to map and engage with geographic or place-based data. Peripleo is unique in several capacities which hold the potential to be incredibly beneficial for environmental historians. The program is prototypal, but is situated in a family of software options from the Pelagios network which holds tremendous promise for future integrations with existing GIS software options (many of which are commonly in use). Peripleo is also an open-source program — anyone can adapt the code for free, opening accessible possibilities for new uses, even among institutions with limited funding options. Scholars everywhere can use these programs to make maps which easily explore the interconnectedness of a given map’s included data points.
Because Peripleo can be hosted on Github, it functions on a static-URL format, allowing its data to be permanently located at URLs. This fact, coupled with CSV file and code storage via Github allows the data files which produce those URLs to be stored in an open, accessible format which anyone can use. Written in a common, machine-readable coding languages, this (in theory) allows anyone to view and use the data from one of these projects (or the code) in their own work, allowing for the free flow of information and a system of interlinked data where these options are accessibly developed. These considerations strengthen Peripleo’s integrations for and commitment to Linked Open Data (LOD) — users can learn more about LOD (also called linked place format (LPF)) through these animations produced by the Fitzwilliam Museum for their “Linking Islands of Data” project, below.
Changing the way we categorize animal or more-than-human life in archive puts a more conscious more-than-human history within reach.
These tools are designed with humans in mind. What if we reimagined them? Broke the code meant to categorize human histories (broadly conceived), reformed it to instead center the histories of more-than-human communities, and provided these details in an open, public sphere to which the community could contribute?
Anima is still a new project. While any system of categorization will, in surety, betray the nature of animal lives and their histories, it is the hope of this project to reimagine the possibilities of attempting better service to those histories through tools which, while imperfect, often problematic, and certainly sometimes frustrating, are extant, expanding, and will continue relevance in archival lines of work as well as scholarly ones for decades to come.