The Open Digital Epigraphy Hub, or EpiHub, is an open-access platform designed to streamline access to digital resources related to epigraphy, thereby facilitating scholars and practitioners in navigating a constantly expanding digital landscape.
Developed as a pilot project within the Humanities and cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC) for the E-RIHS infrastructure, EpiHub provides a comprehensive and searchable catalogue of digital epigraphic resources and tools that support the community of epigraphists across different disciplinary boundaries. These mainly include epigraphic corpora and aggregators in a wide range of languages and scripts, both ancient and modern, but also useful registries and tools like chronological and geographical gazetteers, dictionaries, guidelines and software designed to support anyone working with epigraphy.
EpiHub is designed to align with the FAIR principles and the Linked (Open) Data paradigm. It offers API access and incorporates standard metadata schemas such as Dublin Core and schema.org to ensure data interoperability, reusability, and discoverability. Additionally, the database includes a curated bibliography that gathers references connected to the records in EpiHub, as well as relevant literature for the Digital Epigraphy domain. This bibliography is maintained via a Zotero public group.
Access the full catalogue by clicking on Catalogue in the navigation bar, or Search the Catalogue button in the landing page.
Use the free-text search bar to query Names, Alternative Names, and Description fields.
Click the arrow below the text search bar to reveal advanced filters. Apply AND/OR logical operators and refine your search criteria. Filters are grouped into three main categories and are easily accessible through dropdown menus:
For users who do not have a specific research question in mind, another way to explore EpiHub is by browsing the Collections in the carousel located further down the landing page, or by clicking on Collections in the navigation bar.
Collections are a curated selection of resources grouped thematically, offering an overview of key topics and areas of interest. The groups and their content will evolve in response to trends and needs in the digital epigraphy research landscape.
The Open Digital Epigraphy Hub (EpiHub) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
This license allows you to freely:
As attribution requirements, you must give appropriate credit by including:
Credit should be provided in a reasonable manner that does not imply endorsement by the original creators or licensors of EpiHub.
The base URL for all API requests is https://open-epihub.cnr.it/api. The API schema is detailed in the same page.
To cite the entire database:
To cite a record, use the citation provided in the particular record's page. Here is an example:
Activity leader: Irene Rossi (contact person)
Content design: Irene Rossi, Chiara Elena Salvador
Content: Irene Rossi, Chiara Elena Salvador, Erica Scarpa, Riccardo Valente
IT specialist: Matteo Gallo
Web design: Matteo Gallo, Erica Scarpa
The research leading to this output was carried out by the Milan branch of CNR-ISPC as part of Activity 7.4 of the H2IOSC Project - Humanities and cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud funded by the European Union NextGenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) - Mission 4 ‘Education and Research’ Component 2 ‘From research to business’ Investment 3.1 ‘Fund for the realization of an integrated system of research and innovation infrastructures’ Action 3.1.1 ‘Creation of new research infrastructures strengthening of existing ones and their networking for Scientific Excellence under Horizon Europe’ - Project code IR0000029 - CUP B63C22000730005. Implementing Entity CNR.
If you would like to share initiatives not yet included in the catalogue, or corrections to the entries already published, we will be happy to receive your notification! Please write to Irene Rossi.