This paper reports on the construction-based Treebank currently under development in the frame-work of the Ramses Project, which aims at building a multifaceted annotated corpus of Late Egyptian texts. We describe the specifications that have been implemented and we introduce the syntactic formalism and the related representation format that are used for the syntactic annotation. Further-more, the annotation scheme is discussed with particular attention paid to its evolutionary nature. Finally, we explain the methods as well as the annotating tool, called SyntaxEditor; we conclude by addressing the question of forthcoming developments, especially the search engine and a context-sensitive parser.
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.
The Maya hieroglyphic script, an indigenous graphic notation system in the Americas, presents a formidable decipherment challenge. Approximately 40 per cent of its approximately one thousand known signs remain elusive owing to limited comprehension of the Classic Mayan language. Spanning modern-day south-eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, the Classic Maya civilization left over ten thousand inscriptions, primarily detailing the lives of political elites. The ‘Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan’ project endeavours to unveil the script’s mysteries via an online text database and dictionary at https://classicmayan.org. Collaborative digital humanities methodologies and tools empower insights into the Maya’s cultural and historical legacy. The project catalogues inscribed artefacts and images in the virtual research environment TextGrid and the ‘Maya Image Archive (MIA)’, enhancing accessibility and collaboration. It further converts Maya hieroglyphic texts into machine-readable XML/TEI format and employs a novel sign classification framework. A new linguistic tool facilitates linguistic analysis and translation, enriching our understanding of Classic Mayan language and culture. Furthermore, the project compiles a vast repository of digitized Maya culture-related images and textual data, accessible online. As of 2024, it focuses on hieroglyphic texts from specific regions, with ongoing transliteration, transcription, and linguistic analysis. This digital approach not only facilitates dynamic Maya script research but also offers a platform for comprehensive source material evaluation and publication.
Digital epigraphy has made great strides toward interoperability and data integration over the last two decades, and Linked Data approaches are now taking advantage of the spatial information associated with inscriptions for new search and visualization tools. The ability to search across epigraphic collections by time, and especially by relative chronologies, lags behind. The PeriodO project has created a Linked Data gazetteer of structured period definitions that facilitates translation between absolute dates and relative chronologies, creating new possibilities for the interoperability of epigraphic collections and their connection with archaeological databases.
Digital epigraphy has made great strides toward interoperability and data integration over the last two decades, and Linked Data approaches are now taking advantage of the spatial information associated with inscriptions for new search and visualization tools. The ability to search across epigraphic collections by time, and especially by relative chronologies, lags behind. The PeriodO project has created a Linked Data gazetteer of structured period definitions that facilitates translation between absolute dates and relative chronologies, creating new possibilities for the interoperability of epigraphic collections and their connection with archaeological databases.
This paper introduces Ramses, a database of Late Egyptian texts, currently under development at the University of Liège (Belgium). Ramses sets out to be a new and powerful research tool. Its main applications are linguistically and philologically orientated. After a general overview of the structure of the database, the search engines are described with some detail.
First official presentation of the "Ramses Project", an richly annotated corpus of Late Egyptian [Paper submitted in 2008/2009]