Questo contributo illustra un’efficace esperienza di collaborazione tra diverse istituzioni, quali enti di ricerca, di tutela e formazione, e differenti professionalitá, coinvolte nell’ambito dell’alternanza scuola-lavoro, ai fini della digitalizzazione e valorizzazione del patrimonio epigrafico del Museo Civico Castello Ursino del Comune di Catania. Il Museo possiede una rilevante collezione epigrafica, costituita da due raccolte settecentesche catanesi. Alcune iscrizioni sono esposte secondo i vecchi criteri di fruizione museale; la maggior parte é custodita in deposito. Uno degli obiettivi dell’esperienza é dunque far conoscere al pubblico fruitore ed alla comunitá degli studiosi l’ingente patrimonio epigrafico del Castello attualmente non esposto al pubblico. Il progetto di durata triennale é stato caratterizzato in un primo momento da una attivitá di digitalizzazione di schede catalografiche e di documentazione grafica e fotografica di parte delle epigrafi; durante il secondo anno di attivit. é stata realizzata una esposizione presso il Castello Ursino di un gruppo selezionato di epigrafi di provenienza catanese, che sono state sottoposte a un primo restauro conservativo ed inserite nel catalogo digitale con la relativa documentazione. Le epigrafi sono codificate secondo standard e vocabolari controllati internazionali (formatto EpiDoc TEI XML, Pleiades per posizioni geografiche e lessici controllati di EAGLE per i tipi di iscrizioni, i materiali e i supporti) al fine di consentire la creazione di Linked Open Data. La mostra presenta, tra l’altro, la realizzazione di due video e l’inserimento di un chiosco digitale multimediale per accedere a contenuti di approfondimento e immagini 3D. Durante il terzo anno é programmata la prosecuzione dell’attivit. di digitalizzazione e documentazione ed un approfondimento della disseminazione dei risultati sul web.
Human history is born in writing. Inscriptions are among the earliest written forms, and offer direct insights into the thought, language and history of ancient civilizations. Historians capture these insights by identifying parallels—inscriptions with shared phrasing, function or cultural setting—to enable the contextualization of texts within broader historical frameworks, and perform key tasks such as restoration and geographical or chronological attribution. However, current digital methods are restricted to literal matches and narrow historical scopes. Here we introduce Aeneas, a generative neural network for contextualizing ancient texts. Aeneas retrieves textual and contextual parallels, leverages visual inputs, handles arbitrary-length text restoration, and advances the state of the art in key tasks. To evaluate its impact, we conduct a large study with historians using outputs from Aeneas as research starting points. The historians find the parallels retrieved by Aeneas to be useful research starting points in 90% of cases, improving their confidence in key tasks by 44%. Restoration and geographical attribution tasks yielded superior results when historians were paired with Aeneas, outperforming both humans and artificial intelligence alone. For dating, Aeneas achieved a 13-year distance from ground-truth ranges. We demonstrate Aeneas’ contribution to historical workflows through analysis of key traits in the renowned Roman inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, showing how integrating science and humanities can create transformative tools to assist historians and advance our understanding of the past.
DASI is an ERC-Advanced Grant project aimed at digitizing the pre-Islamic inscriptions from Arabia and fostering best practices for the digitization of the epigraphic heritage related to Semitic languages. This paper describes the content model, the standards chosen, and exemplifies the vocabularies in view of a possible harmonization of data pertaining to the specific domain. The architecture of the system and the tools for encoding and retrieving textual content are also illustrated.
The Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI) is a five-year ERC project of the University of Pisa, directed by Prof. A. Avanzini. Started in May 2011, the project seeks to collect the whole corpus of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions in an open-access archive, with the aim of fostering studies and scientific publications on the epigraphic heritage of Arabia. The paper describes the main activities carried out in the first two years of the project: the IT research on the cataloguing methodologies of the epigraphic material, the digitization of thousands of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions, and the setting up of the archive website for the fruition of the catalogued material, which opened in October 2013. The project also encourages the involvement of international partners and promotes interest in pre-Islamic Arabia through a series of related activities and projects, such as the IVIEDINA digital library and the IMTO archaeological database, which are promoted in the Arabia Antica portal of the University of Pisa.
Textual databases enable precise linguistic comparisons and the study of chronological developments of languages in the geographic space and help safeguard endangered world heritage. In this article, we describe an ongoing study of planning and designing a catalogue of 400 Phoenician‑Punic inscriptions and examine strategies of catalogue standardization and implementation, tagging and annotation systems, digital sustainability and cost‑effectiveness. The database will be searchable (of metadata and textual data), linked, and open on the network.
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.
Recensione del volume "Digital Approaches to Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies" di P.M. Liuzzo.
Review of: Digital and Traditional Epigraphy in Context. Proceedings of the EAGLE 2016 International Conference, a cura di S. Orlandi, R. Santucci, F. Mambrini, P.M. Liuzzo.
Review of the volume: CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions. Case Studies on Archaeological Data, Objects, Texts, and Digital Archiving, a cura di V. Bigot Juloux, A.R. Gansell, A. Di Ludovico.