Epigraphic Annotation: From the Stone to the Digital Edition

This poster explains and illustrates the possibility of applying the TEI encoding to paper editions of inscriptions. It shows the eventual limits of the TEI schema for the epigraphic and historical encodings of existing paper editions themselves. The starting point is a TEI encoding of Mommsen's fundamental edition of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (1883) based on the Monumentum Ancyranum. This edition plays a central role in the history of the RGDA, but is already quite rare in libraries and not yet available on line (even if few websites claim to do so). Mommsen is an essential author for the Classical Studies, he was a Nobel laureate in Literature (1902). This was the first and the last time for an historian. In this specific case, several layers are relevant for a digital encoding: Editorial encoding; Epigraphic encoding; Historical encoding. We tried to carry out the marginal encoding of paper editions of inscriptions, with all the advantages of the epigraphical encoding without a loss of fundamental editorial information that are not on the archaeological artefact anymore.