DASI is an ERC-Advanced Grant project aimed at digitizing the pre-Islamic inscriptions from Arabia and fostering best practices for the digitization of the epigraphic heritage related to Semitic languages. This paper describes the content model, the standards chosen, and exemplifies the vocabularies in view of a possible harmonization of data pertaining to the specific domain. The architecture of the system and the tools for encoding and retrieving textual content are also illustrated.

The ERC-Advanced Grant project DASI has contributed to define and foster best practices in the digitization of pre-Islamic inscriptions Arabian inscriptions. As one of the early attempts at digitizing the epigraphic heritage related to Semitic languages, it has been facing specific challenges in support description and text encoding. This contribute describes the solutions chosen to encode and represent different kinds of phenomena, such as phonemes typical of the Semitic languages, onomastics, textual portions, symbols and grammatical phenomena. Moreover a digital lexicon tool for under-resources languages, such as those attested in the epigraphic documentation of pre-Islamic Arabia, is illustrated.

The international perspectives on these issues are especially valuable in an increasingly connected, but still institutionally and administratively diverse world. The research addressed in several chapters in this volume includes issues around technical standards bodies like EpiDoc and the TEI, engaging with ways these standards are implemented, documented, taught, used in the process of transcribing and annotating texts, and used to generate publications and as the basis for advanced textual or corpus research. Other chapters focus on various aspects of philological research and content creation, including collaborative or community driven efforts, and the issues surrounding editorial oversight, curation, maintenance and sustainability of these resources. Research into the ancient languages and linguistics, in particular Greek, and the language teaching that is a staple of our discipline, are also discussed in several chapters, in particular for ways in which advanced research methods can lead into language technologies and vice versa and ways in which the skills around teaching can be used for public engagement, and vice versa. A common thread through much of the volume is the importance of open access publication or open source development and distribution of texts, materials, tools and standards, both because of the public good provided by such models (circulating materials often already paid for out of the public purse), and the ability to reach non-standard audiences, those who cannot access rich university libraries or afford expensive print volumes. Linked Open Data is another technology that results in wide and free distribution of structured information both within and outside academic circles, and several chapters present academic work that includes ontologies and RDF, either as a direct research output or as essential part of the communication and knowledge representation. Several chapters focus not on the literary and philological side of classics, but on the study of cultural heritage, archaeology, and the material supports on which original textual and artistic material are engraved or otherwise inscribed, addressing both the capture and analysis of artefacts in both 2D and 3D, the representation of data through archaeological standards, and the importance of sharing information and expertise between the several domains both within and without academia that study, record and conserve ancient objects. Almost without exception, the authors reflect on the issues of interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the relationship between their research practice and teaching and/or communication with a wider public, and the importance of the role of the academic researcher in contemporary society and in the context of cutting edge technologies. How research is communicated in a world of instant- access blogging and 140-character micromessaging, and how our expectations of the media affect not only how we publish but how we conduct our research, are questions about which all scholars need to be aware and self-critical.

Taking the work on the graphemic and morphemic analysis of the cuneiform texts of Ebla as a starting point, the paper reviews the ‘grammatical’ criteria that make digital coding not only more efficient and dynamic, but also intellectually more in tune with the goal of establishing an argument and unfolding a narrative. This throws light on aspects of software application on the one hand (such as the semantic web) and of the digital humanities on the other, ranging from textual to archaeological data.

At present, the issue of digital epigraphy seems limited to the digitalization of epigraphs by means of the creation of databases. Digital epigraphy, unlike the digital palaeography that in the last few years has known a potential development that is likely to produce very interesting results, still does not have its own defined search line, at least at current research.

This webliography includes a selection of the online resources that have been referenced within the papers. Among them, only those useful to approach digital epigraphy, in content and method, have been selected. Each resource is described through the core elements of the Dublin Core Matadata Initiative. Therefore, especially indications on subjects, and chronological and geographic coverage are general, not domain-specific.

Digital Epigraphy is a very specific research field, which has made considerable advances in the last ten years. The pioneers were projects dealing with Latin and Greek epigraphy, which have published nearly all (and still few indeed) of the available volumes dealing with Digital Epigraphy. This book intends to enlarge the perspective, making the state of the art on global Digital Epigraphy. This open access, peer-reviewed book is a miscellany volume collecting 19 contributions on Digital Epigraphy projects, presenting the major methodological and technical challenges they have been facing in digitizing epigraphic corpora of different cultural contexts. The projects, presented in the volume by their directors and collaborators, were selected to represent the state of the art and the most advanced research on Digital Epigraphy. In particular, the contributions focus on the research topics that have proved to be most challenging during the development of the ERC project “DASI-Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions”, in which the two editors of the book have been engaged since 2011: encoding, lexicography and interoperability. By collecting different experiences in one place, the volume aims at understanding the shared questions and at comparing the different solutions adopted, and eventually at investigating the future directions of the research in the field.

Digital editions of ancient texts and objects follow the nineteenth–twentieth century tradition of academic editing, but are able to be more explicit and accessible than their print analogues. The use of digital standards such as EpiDoc and Linked Open Data, that emphasise interoperability, linking and sharing, enables—we shall argue, obliges—the scholarly editor to make the digital publication open, accessible, transparent and explicit. We discuss three axes of openness: 1. The edition encodes dimensions and physical condition of the inscribed object, as well as photographs and other imagery, and should include translations to modern languages, rather than assuming fluency. 2. Contextual and procedural metadata include the origins of scholarly work, permissions, funding, influences on academic decision-making, material and intellectual property, trafficking, ethics, authenticity and archaeological context. 3. The digital standards and code implementing them, enabling interoperability among editions and projects, and depend on consistency and accessible documentation of practices, guidelines and customisations. Standards benefit from training in scholarly and digital methods, and the nurturing of a community to preserve and encourage the sustainable re-use of standards and editions. Ancient text-bearing objects need to be treated as material artefacts as well as the bearers of (sometimes abstract or immaterial) strings of historical text. All elements of the publication of both object and text are interpretive constructs. It is essential that we not neglect any of the material or immaterial information in all of these components, in our scholarly quest to make them explicit, interoperable and machine actionable.

The two volumes of this Special Issue explore the intersections of digital libraries, epigraphy and paleography. Digital libraries research, practices and infrastructures have transformed the study of ancient inscriptions by providing organizing principles for collections building, defining interoperability requirements and developing innovative user tools and services. Yet linking collections and their contents to support advanced scholarly work in epigraphy and paleography tests the limits of current digital libraries applications. This is due, in part, to the magnitude and heterogeneity of works created over a time period of more than five millennia. The remarkable diversity ranges from the types of artifacts to the methods used in their production to the singularity of individual marks contained within them. Conversion of analogue collections to digital repositories is well underway—but most often not in a way that meets the basic requirements needed to support scholarly workflows. This is beginning to change as collections and content are being described more fully with rich annotations and metadata conforming to established standards. New use of imaging technologies and computational approaches are remediating damaged works and revealing text that has, over time, become illegible or hidden. Transcription of handwritten text to machine-readable form is still primarily a manual process, but research into automated transcription is moving forward. Progress in digital libraries research and practices coupled with collections development of ancient writtten works suggests that epigraphy and paleography will gain new prominence in the Academy.

This chapter reviews some of the historical developments in scientific illustration that influenced our modern-day approach to Egyptological epigraphy and discusses the idea of objectivity in scientific illustration. It then offers a brief assessment of the advantages of digital epigraphy over more traditional methods. A discussion follows regarding working on-screen with drawing layers, creating sun and shadow lines digitally, and reviewing the reasons to choose either raster images (bitmaps) or vectors—in the context of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator—to create facsimile line drawings of Egyptian scenes and inscriptions. It briefly summarizes the development of new devices that allow for digital epigraphy in the field and then takes the discussion one step further into 3D modeling and other forms of archaeological visualization, including the Giza Project at Harvard University. Concluding remarks touch on the sustainability of digital workflows, data management plans, and the challenges of keeping pace with new technologies.