Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy: From Practice to Discipline

Although a relevant number of projects digitizing inscriptions are under development or have been recently accomplished, Digital Epigraphy is not yet considered to be a proper discipline and there are still no regular occasions to meet and discuss. By collecting contributions on nineteen projects - very diversified for geographic and chronological context, for script and language, and for typology of digital output - this volume intends to point out the methodological issues which are specific to the application of information technologies to epigraphy. The first part of the volume is focused on data modelling and encoding, which are conditioned by the specific features of different scripts and languages, and deeply influence the possibility to perform searches on texts and the approach to the lexicographic study of such under-resourced languages. The second part of the volume is dedicated to the initiatives aimed at fostering aggregation, dissemination and the reuse of epigraphic materials, and to discuss issues of interoperability. The read thread running through the volume is the relationship between the compliance with the theoretic tools and the methodologies developed by each different tradition of studies, and, on the other side, the necessity of adopting a common framework in order to produce commensurable and shareable results. The final question is whether the computational approach is changing the way epigraphy is studied, to the extent of renovating the discipline on the basis of new, unexplored questions. The volume is enriched by an introductory and a conclusions chapters, and by two appendices: a webliography of the cited online resources useful to approach digital epigraphy, which are described through the elements of the Dublin Core Matadata Initiative, and a mapping of selected terms from the Index of Concepts to the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus. The volume is published on open access and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It has received funding by the FP7 post-grant Open Access Pilot project.