Cuneiform tablets remain founding cornerstones of two hundred plus collections in American academic institutions, having been acquired a century or more ago under dynamic ethical norms and global networks. To foster data sharing, this contribution incorporates empirical data from interactive ArcGIS and reusable OpenContext maps to encourage tandem dialogues about using the inscribed works and learning their collecting histories. Such provenance research aids, on their own, initiate the narration of objects’ journeys over time while cultivating the digital inclusion of expert local knowledge relevant to an object biography. The paper annotates several approaches institutions are or might consider using to expand upon current provenance information in ways that encourage visitors’ critical thinking and learning about global journeys, travel archives, and such dispositions as virtual reunification, reconstructions, or restitution made possible by the provenance research.

Comme Gaignières en son temps, les dynamiques actuelles et les politiques publiques d’ouverture des données réinterrogent les dispositifs de collecte, de mise à disposition et d’exploitation des corpus d’informations qui aujourd’hui sont numériques. Se mettent en place des hubs de données, sortes de collections multiformes qui se développent aussi bien en local sur notre territoire qu’au niveau international. Ces objets qui sont aujourd'hui appelés entrepôts de données ne sont pas neutres et détermineront le paysage de la recherche sur le patrimoine de demain. Cette communication entend s’interroger sur ces objets pour lesquels la dimension technique et les interfaces jouent un rôle majeur. Il s’agit aussi de réfléchir dans quelle mesure, comme pour la collection Gaignières, ces outils influent sur nos dynamiques de connaissance. Nous utiliserons pour illustrer nos propos un nouvel outil, que nous souhaitons mettre en perspective : la plateforme open data La Fabrique Numérique du Passé. La Fabrique Numérique du Passé (FNP), plateforme open data pour les données géohistoriques se fixe comme objectif de développer pour les sciences du patrimoine et du passé des outils accessibles de capitalisation et de mise à disposition des données, respectant les principes de l’open data et du fair data. FNP s’adresse aux acteurs de la recherche afin de leur permettre de s’impliquer simplement dans une démarche d’ouverture des données qui prend pied dans le mouvement plus global de l’open science (ouvrirlascience.fr). Plus fonctionnellement, il s’agit d’agglomérer l’information existante et de mettre à disposition de tous, en libre téléchargement, les données produites dans le cadre de projets et programmes de recherche (PCR, ANR, ERC...) dans leur format standard le plus « accessible » afin d’être facilement réutilisables par l’ensemble des acteurs du monde socio-économique et des acteurs du territoire. La Fabrique numérique du passé, permet ainsi de faire la jonction pour nos disciplines entre des lieux de dépôts pérennes (entrepôts de données comme Nakala pour les Sciences Humaines et Sociales), des acteurs qui produisent des données dans le cadre de projets de recherche et un capital de données qui doit être à la fois pérennisé et accessible pour être mobilisé par de nouveaux acteurs. , Like Gaignières in his day, current trends and public policies to open up data are re-examining the mechanisms for collecting, making available and exploiting bodies of information that are now digital. Data hubs are being set up, multiform collections developing both locally in France and internationally. These objects, now known as data warehouses, are not neutral and will determine the landscape of heritage research in the future. The aim of this paper is to examine these objects, whose technical dimension and interfaces play a major role. It will also look at the extent to which, as in the case of the Gaignières collection, these tools influence the dynamics of our knowledge. To illustrate this, we will be using a new tool that we hope to put into perspective: the open data platform La Fabrique Numérique du Passé. La Fabrique Numérique du Passé (FNP), an open data platform for geohistorical data, has set itself the goal of developing accessible tools for the sciences of heritage and the past to capitalise on and make available data, in accordance with the principles of open data and fair data. FNP is aimed at research players, enabling them to get involved in a simple process of opening up data as part of the wider open science movement (ouvrirlascience.fr). More functionally, the aim is to bring together existing information and make the data produced as part of research projects and programmes (PCR, ANR, ERC, etc.) available for free download in the most “accessible” standard format so that it can be easily reused by all socioeconomic players and local stakeholders. The FNP is a way of bridging the gap for our disciplines between permanent repositories (data warehouses such as Nakala for the humanities and social sciences), players who produce data as part of research projects and a pool of data that needs to be both durable and accessible so that it can be mobilised by new players.

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.

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 article is a report about the progress and current status of the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org) (WHG) in the context of its value for helping to organize and record digital and paleographic information. It summarizes the development and functionality of the WHG as a software platform for connecting specialist collections of historical place names. It also reviews the idea of places as entities (rather than simple objects with single labels). It also explains the utility of gazetteers in digital library infrastructure and describes potential future developments.

The paper presents the work on the Telamon and the Tituli projects which aim at creating online databases respectively of Greek and Latin epigraphic heritage from Bulgaria. The AIAX front-end service for the indexing and visualisation of EpiDoc XML files is described, as well as collaborations with different Bulgarian museums.

In 2001, Rutgers University Libraries (RUL) accepted a substantial donation of Roman Republican coins. The work to catalog, house, digitize, describe, and present this collection online provided unique challenges for the institution. Coins are often seen as museum objects; however, they can serve pedagogical purposes within libraries. In the quest to innovate, RUL digitized coins from seven angles to provide a 180-degree view of coins. However, this strategy had its drawbacks; it had to be reassessed as the project continued. RUCore, RUL’s digital repository, uses Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). Accordingly, it was necessary to adapt numismatic description to bibliographic metadata standards.With generous funding from the Loeb Foundation, the resulting digital collection of 1200 coins was added to RUCore from 2012 to 2018. Rutgers’s Badian Roman Coins Collection serves as an exemplar of numismatics in a library environment that is freely available to all on the Web.

Recent years have seen an exponential growth (+98% in 2022 w.r.t. the previous year) of the number of research articles in the few-shot learning field, which aims at training machine learning models with extremely limited available data. The research interest toward few-shot learning systems for Named Entity Recognition (NER) is thus at the same time increasing. NER consists in identifying mentions of pre-defined entities from unstructured text, and serves as a fundamental step in many downstream tasks, such as the construction of Knowledge Graphs, or Question Answering. The need for a NER system able to be trained with few-annotated examples comes in all its urgency in domains where the annotation process requires time, knowledge and expertise (e.g., healthcare, finance, legal), and in low-resource languages. In this survey, starting from a clear definition and description of the few-shot NER (FS-NER) problem, we take stock of the current state-of-the-art and propose a taxonomy which divides algorithms in two macro-categories according to the underlying mechanisms: model-centric and data-centric. For each category, we line-up works as a story to show how the field is moving toward new research directions. Eventually, techniques, limitations, and key aspects are deeply analyzed to facilitate future studies.

This article discusses the challenges addressed in the digital scholarly encoding of the fragmentary texts of the languages of Ancient Italy according to the TEI/EpiDoc Guidelines in XML format. It describes the solutions and customisations that have been adopted for dealing with the peculiarities of our epigraphical documentation and with the formalisation of epigraphical information deemed interesting for data retrieval in a historical linguistic perspective. The making of a digital corpus consisting of new critical editions of selected inscriptions is a work carried out in the context of the project “Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models”, which aims to investigate the languages of Ancient Italy by combining the traditional methods, proper to historical linguistics, with methods and technology proper to the digital humanities and computational lexicography. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to create a set of interrelated digital language resources which comprise: (1) a digital corpus of texts editions; (2) a computational lexicon compliant with the Web Semantic requirements; (3) a relevant bibliographic reference dataset encoded according to the FRBRoo/LRMoo specifications. Additionally, selected textual data and scientific interpretations will be encoded using CIDOC CRM and its extensions, namely CRMtex and CRMinf. The present contribution thus tackles one of the main aspects of the project, and proposes significant innovations in the encoding of critical editions for epigraphic texts of fragmentary languages, which will hopefully foster future interoperability and integration with other external datasets, a paramount concern of the project.

Book of Abstracts from the Digital Humanities Conference 2023, held from 10th to 14th July in Graz, Austria

This chapter examines the status of the digital study of premodern spatial documents understood as expressions of local knowledge systems. It investigates the tension between the prevalently Cartesian perception of the world underlying modern efforts of mapping and spatial analysis, and the contrasting multiplicity of premodern spatial epistemologies, which reveal deep, multi-layered forms of representation. The first part summarizes the dynamics in the development of spatial knowledge and offers a gallery of examples showing the complexity of premodern spatial descriptions. The second part evaluates current trends in Digital Humanities and examines the ways in which this complexity is (or is not) addressed. The conclusion emphasizes the main issues that still affect the study of premodern spatial perception and proposes some recommendations.