The project EpiCUM (Epigraphs of Castello Ursino Museum) pursued the important objective of valorizing and making publicly available (in digital format) the 574 epigraphs of the Castello Ursino Museum in Catania. The various phases of the project (cataloguing and examination of the epigraphic material; setting-up of an exhibition; organization of an international scientific conference; encoding according to the EpiDoc schema; creation of a digital scientific edition; realization of a web platform) seen the involvement of different entities, among which, in particular, a group of students of a High School. Their activities represented a good example of work-related learning.
In questo lavoro vengono descritte le principali attività di sviluppo del progetto EpiCUM con particolare riferimento agli aspetti realizzativi e funzionali dei risultati conseguiti. EpiCUM si propone di presentare e rendere fruibile con un unico museo digitale tutto il corpus epigrafico del museo civico Castello Ursino di Catania, codificato in EpiDoc. Il progetto nasce dalla collaborazione tra l'Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione del CNR e il Comune di Catania, ha visto l’interesse del progetto I.Sicily ed il coinvolgimento del liceo artistico M.M. Lazzaro di Catania con le attività di alternanza scuola-lavoro. La prima fase del progetto è stata dedicata soprattutto alla ricognizione delle epigrafi e all'allestimento della mostra Voci di Pietra che propone una selezione di epigrafi secondo modalità di esposizione innovative attraverso l'uso intelligente della tecnologia e del digitale. Nella fase successiva ci si è concentrati sull'analisi e sulla codifica nel formato aperto EpiDoc di tutte le iscrizioni del museo civico e sulla realizzazione del museo digitale. Tutte le informazioni sulle epigrafi sono codificate in EpiDoc all’interno di file XML e sono facilmente accessibili attraverso le varie sezioni del museo digitale in cui vengono presentate in maniera semplice e intuitiva visualizzandole all’interno di schede epigrafiche. Le schede epigrafiche forniscono l’accesso ai file XML contenenti le codifiche EpiDoc. Le informazioni epigrafiche possono essere interrogate opportunamente attraverso una sezione del museo digitale dedicata alle ricerche. Con questa modalità di organizzazione delle informazioni epigrafiche nel museo digitale si rende fruibile, per diversi scopi, l’intero patrimonio epigrafico del museo civico catanese sia agli studiosi del settore, ma anche a tutte le altre tipologie di possibili utenti. Si osservi che al fine di facilitare la navigazione attraverso le informazioni epigrafiche, si è pensato di includere in maniera autonoma anche le informazioni riguardanti l'ambito religioso, le collezioni di provenienza e lo status di copia delle epigrafi, codificandole all’interno dei file XML attraverso uno specifico set di elementi di marcatura EpiDoc appositamente selezionati.
The article presents the epigraphic databases developed by the Ausonius Institute, highlighting the importance of integrating epigraphy with digital humanities. The flagship project, PETRAE , initiated in the 1980s, combines several Latin, Greek, and Gallic epigraphic corpora encoded in EpiDoc, based on comprehensive and detailed records. Its latest evolution, PETRAE 3.0, includes an interactive web interface and 3D visualization to facilitate the study of inscriptions. Other notable projects, such as ADOPIA , which specializes in the onomastics of the Roman Iberian Peninsula, and PATRIMONIVM , dedicated to Roman imperial properties, demonstrate Ausonius’ dynamism in applying digital technologies to ancient history. The future convergence of these databases into a common platform will optimize digital scholarly editing and facilitate collaborative research.
The essay summarizes the history of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) from the first moments under the coordination of Theodor Mommsen until today. It focuses in particular on the digitization of volumes published up to 1940 and not covered by copyright, which can be consulted freely in the database of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (“Arachne”, n.d.) The transition of CIL into the digital environment is focused in the context of current policies and methodologies developed in the field of digital humanities which have generated the most recent and important databases relating to archaeological and epigraphic sources. In particular, EAGLE (Europeana Network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy), a free access portal to ancient epigraphy, is mentioned. It is a best-practice network co-funded by the European Commission, under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme.
Annotated corpora, provided that they adopt international standards and expose data in open format, have many more chances to be easily exploited and reused for different objectives than traditional, analogue corpora. This paper aims at presenting the results of the early adhesion to best practices and principles afterward codified as Open Science and FAIR principles in the frame of projects concerned with digital textual corpora, in a niche area of research such as the pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy. The case study analysed in this paper is the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions – DASI, an online annotated corpus of the textual sources from Ancient Arabia, which also exposes its records in standard formats (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM) in an OAI-PMH repository. The initiatives of reuse of DASI open data in the frame of the recently ANR-funded project Maparabia (CNRS-CNR) are discussed in the paper, focusing on the exploitation of DASI’s onomastic and geographic data in a new reference tool, the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. After introducing DASI and Maparabia projects and highlighting the objectives of the Gazetteer, the paper describes the conceptual model of its database and the module importing data from DASI. The population of the Gazetteer, implying also a data entry and manipulation phase, is exemplified by the case-study of the Ancient South Arabian place ‘Barāqish/Yathill’. Based on the above experience, limitations and opportunities of data reuse and synchronisation issues between systems are discussed.
The paper provides an overview of the digital tools developed as part of the Ebla Digital Archives Project, which aims to offer a digital edition of roughly 3,000 cuneiform tablets from ancient Ebla (modern Tell Mardikh, in western Syria), dated to the middle of the third millen- nium BCE. The Ebla archive is the oldest one in the history of mankind, for which extensive information concerning the primary setting of the documents is available. The archaicity of the writing system, combined with the inherent dif culties in reconstructing languages from the remote past (Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite), pushes us to rethink the strategies to properly digitally capture the complexity of these sources, of invaluable historical signi cance: admin- istrative documents, literary texts, vocabularies, letters, etc. We tackled the problem through the development of a PostgreSQL database, which is populated by ad hoc Python scripts that parse input transliteration les, which in turn are encoded using a shallow mark-up language. The individual steps in such work ow are discussed, as well as the bene ts in terms of advanced queries for information retrieval that such approach offers.
The paper reviews the history of studying multilingual epigraphy in Georgia. Different research stages of Georgian epigraphy, including electronic editions prepared by the ISU Institute of Linguistic Studies, have been considered.
On 9 May 2016 a group of core partners of the EAGLE project founded IDEA - The International Digital Epigraphy Association in order to maintain, perpetuate and improve this ground breaking project. IDEA represents the most fluid, lean, and efficient way to preserve EAGLE’s legacy and it will carry forward the work established by the EAGLE former partners. The goal of the association is to promote the use of advanced methodologies in research, study, enhancement, and publication of “written monuments”, beginning with those of antiquity, in order to enhance their knowledge at multiple levels of expertise, from that of specialists to that of the occasional tourist. Furthermore, scope of the association is to expand and enlarge the results of EAGLE providing a sustainability model to ensure the long-term maintenance of the project results and to pursue its original aims. IDEA first General Assembly was held in Pisa on 28 September 2016.
The information expressed in humanities datasets is inextricably tied to a wider discursive environment that is irreducible to complete formal representation. Humanities scholars must wrestle with this fact when they attempt to publish or consume structured data. The practice of “nanopublication,” which originated in the e-science domain, offers a way to maintain the connection between formal representations of humanities data and its discursive basis. In this paper we describe nanopublication, its potential applicability to the humanities, and our experience curating humanities nanopublications in the PeriodO period gazetteer.
The information expressed in humanities datasets is inextricably tied to a wider discursive environment that is irreducible to complete formal representation. Humanities scholars must wrestle with this fact when they attempt to publish or consume structured data. The practice of “nanopublication,” which originated in the e-science domain, offers a way to maintain the connection between formal representations of humanities data and its discursive basis. In this paper we describe nanopublication, its potential applicability to the humanities, and our experience curating humanities nanopublications in the PeriodO period gazetteer.
Dieser Artikel stellt einen Gazetteer für antike Kalenderdaten vor: Im Zentrum von “Graph of Dated Objects and Texts” (GODOT) steht eine graphenbasierte Modellierung chronologischer Kalenderdaten aus der klassischen Griechisch-Römischen Antike – diese erlaubt ein verlustfreies, flexibles und präzises Aufnehmen aller Bestandteile eines nicht-gregorianischen Datums und nicht nur der Konvertierungen in den Julianischen Kalender, wie sie üblicherweise in Digitalen Editionen bisher vorgenommen wurde. Die stabilen und zitierbaren URIs für Instanzen aus diversen Kalendersystemen können in Digitalen Editionen (Datenbank-basiert oder TEI/XML-basiert) wiederverwendet werden, oder dienen dem Festlegen von Start- und Endpunkten von Periodendefinitionen oder Events.
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.