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.
The application of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles can revolutionise the epigraphic discipline by facilitating quantitative and reproducible research. Despite the richness of Latin inscriptions, the lack of low-barrier tools for accessing and analysing these datasets has hindered largescale studies and the uptake of FAIR and Open Science principles in ancient studies. The LatEpig v2.0 tool addresses this gap by enabling researchers to programmatically access the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby, and generate reproducible research following state-of-the-art standards. The main aim of LatEpig is to democratise data access and enhance research potential without requiring advanced technical skills. A case study on ‘viator’ inscriptions exemplifies the tool’s utility, illustrating spatial and temporal trends in inscriptions addressing messengers and travellers across the Roman Empire. LatEpig exemplifies that the development of similar tools is crucial for advancing FAIR and Open Science practices in the Humanities, ensuring that substantial investments in digital resources are fully realised.
Study of Roman Sicily is well established and has a long tradition, with the two most authoritative and well-established epigraphic corpora –CIL X (1883) and IG XIV (1890)– dating to the late 19th century. While I.Sicily was conceived to offer easy and up-to-date access to the evergrowing but increasingly scattered epigraphic evidence of Sicily, its digital nature also enables the adoption of new approaches and the pursuit of novel research questions. The open-access dataset has recently been expanded to include institutional annotations, which hold great promise for research, particularly in fields that rely on extensive and detailed datasets, such as administrative and onomastic history (prosopographic annotation will follow). This paper aims to demonstrate both the potential and the limitations of a digitally annotated dataset as a tool for historical research, through a preliminary case study on the practice of dedications to the Roman emperor in Sicily. Recent scholarship suggests that provincial subjects also contributed to shaping the notion and the expectations around emperorship, which were not only imposed from above. The data-driven approach facilitated by an annotated corpus is well-suited to the new bottom-up perspective, but it is not without methodological pitfalls, which will be highlighted in this paper.