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.

The Tesserae Project offers a free online intertextual search tool for ancient Greek, Latin, and English. Tesserae has in the past allowed for a pairwise searching of literary texts in these languages for exact word or lemma similarities. This paper describes two new types of search now offered by Tesserae, by meaning (semantic search) and by sound.

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.

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.

In the last fifteen years digital resources have become essential to a number of key tasks in the realm of epigraphy. Whether one needs comparanda for a new text one is editing, images and translations for the classroom, or evidence to consider for a broad-ranging thematic or historical study, digital resources can significantly speed up research and improve completeness. This chapter covers the proliferation of digital resources and provides guidance on locating and using such resources that are likely to survive the passage of time. No attempt is made here to grapple with the history of digital epigraphy or to list pre-web resources that are no longer available.

What are the implications of digital representation on intellectual property and ownership of cultural heritage? Are aspirations to preservation and accessibility in the digital space reconcilable with cultural sensitivities, colonized history, and cultural appropriation?This volume brings together different perspectives from academics and practitioners of Cultural Heritage, to address current debates in the digitization and other computational study of cultural artifacts. From the tension between the materiality of cultural heritage objects and the intangible character of digital models, we explore larger issues in intellectual property, collection management, pedagogical practice, inclusion and accessibility, and the role of digital methods in decolonization and restitution debates.The contributions include perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, addressing these questions within the study of the material culture of Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.