The paper describes the main challenges faced, and the solutions adopted in the frame of the project DASI - Digital Archive for the study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions. In particular, the methodological and technological issues emerged in the conversion from a domain-specific text-based project of digital edition of an epigraphic corpus, to an objective-driven archive for the study and dissemination of inscriptions in different languages and scripts are discussed. With a view to keeping pace with, and possibly fostering reasoning on best practices in the community of digital epigraphers beyond each specific cultural/linguistic domain, special attention is devoted to: the modelling of data and encoding (XML annotation vs database approach; the conceptual model for the valorization of the material aspect of the epigraph; the textual encoding for critical editions); interoperability (pros and cons of compliance to standards; harmonization of metadata; openness; semantic interoperability); lexicography (tools for under-resourced languages; translations).

Hesperia. Banco de datos de lenguas paleohispánicas and AELAW. Ancient European Languages and Writings are two narrowly linked projects whose common feature is their general aim: cataloguing the documents written in the ancient languages of Europe (8th cent. BCE–5th cent. CE) excluding Latin, Greek, and Phoenician. Although both projects are closely linked, BDHesp has a track record of twenty years, while AELAW has been active for only two and a half years. In this paper, where we have especially focused on BDHesp, we summarize the problems that arose during the encoding of Palaeohispanic languages, written in multiple writing systems and their variants, and the solutions addressed. We also present the promising tools that have been developed in BDHesp to make significant progress in our understanding of Palaeohispanic languages and writings. Lastly, we introduce AELAW network and its two databases, its aims and what we intend to accomplish in the future.

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.

<p><span style="text-align: justify;">EAGLE (Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigrahy) was born in 2003 as a federation of four epigraphic digital archives (Epigraphic Database Bari-EDB, Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg-EDH, Epigraphic Database Roma-EDR, and Hispania Epigraphica Online). In 2013 it became a more complex and comprehensive European project, co-funded by the European Commission for 36 months, in the framework of the ICT-PSP program, whose aim is to aggregate epigraphic contents provided by different databases (see the complete list on the website www.eagle-network.eu) and make them searchable through a single portal. These contents, harmonized and "disambiguated" in order to give a permanent identifier to records coming from different archives but related to a single object, are then provided to Europeana, the portal of European cultural heritage, to make them accessible not only to scholars, but also to the broad public (that's why the acronym is now expanded Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy).</span><br></p>

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.

This paper reviews the experience of the Ramses Project in constructing a richly annotated corpus of Late Egyptian that consists of 300 000 words in 2011 (and is expected to grow up to more than 1 million words in coming years). During the first five years of the project, this corpus has been encoded in hieroglyphic script, translated in French or English and received annotations for part-of-speech information, lemmatization, and morphological analysis. The methodology and working tools that have been developed in order to build this corpus are here discussed and future developments are presented.

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.

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]