Epigraphy.info
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| Epigraphy.info | |
|---|---|
| Name | Epigraphy.info |
| Type | Collaborative digital epigraphy platform |
| Established | 2010s |
| Disciplines | Epigraphy, Paleography, Classics, Archaeology, History |
| Country | International |
| Languages | Multilingual |
Epigraphy.info is a collaborative digital platform for publishing, annotating, and linking inscriptions and epigraphic data. It aggregates editorial projects, corpora, and databases connected to ancient inscriptions while interoperating with museums, libraries, excavations, and academic institutions. The project emphasizes linked open data, semantic interoperability, and integration with digital humanities infrastructures.
Overview
Epigraphy.info serves scholars working on inscriptions from fields such as Classical antiquity, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Empire, Roman Empire, and Ancient Greece. It interoperates with repositories and institutions like the British Museum, Louvre, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Vatican Museums, and Pergamon Museum. The platform connects with projects including Packard Humanities Institute, Perseus Project, PHI Latin Texts, Trismegistos, Pleiades (gazetteer), Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, and DRAC (Digital Research Alliance of Canada). Epigraphy.info supports integration with standards and initiatives such as Linked Open Data, TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), CIDOC CRM, EpiDoc, and DARIAH, while collaborating with universities and research centers like University of Oxford, Harvard University, Heidelberg University, École pratique des hautes études, and University of California, Berkeley.
History and Development
The project emerged in the 2010s from collaborations among epigraphers, classicists, and digital humanists at institutions such as King's College London, University College London, Stanford University, University of Leipzig, and University of Vienna. Early influence came from corpora and editors associated with Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and Inscriptiones Graecae, and from digital initiatives like Clausulae Reliquiarum and Arachne (database). Funders and partners have included European Research Council, National Endowment for the Humanities, Horizon 2020, and national heritage agencies like Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The platform’s development aligned with standards work by bodies such as International Council on Archives and projects like Linked Heritage.
Platform and Features
Epigraphy.info provides editorial tools for inscription text, diplomatic transcription, translation, and metadata linked to authorities like VIAF, ISNI, GeoNames, and Wikidata. It supports searchable corpora from collections maintained by the Ashmolean Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Archaeological Museum (Athens), British Library, and Smithsonian Institution. The interface allows annotation workflows used by teams at Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, Institut d'archéologie classique, CNRS, MPIWG (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), and KIK-IRPA (Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage). Features include epigraphic sign inventories linked to Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, paleographic typology with references to scholars like Bernard Grenfell, Arthur Hunt, and Sir John Boardman, and geographic visualization tied into Pelagios and OpenStreetMap. Integration options include APIs used by projects such as Digital Classicist, Isidore, Europeana, and HathiTrust.
Data Model and Standards
The platform’s data model is built on standards including EpiDoc, TEI, and mappings to CIDOC CRM and BIBFRAME. It reuses authority files like Library of Congress Name Authority File, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and thematic vocabularies from ICONCLASS and AAT. Provenance and editorial history draw on schemas aligned with PROV-O and recommendations from W3C. The model supports epigraphic phenomena—such as lacunae, restorations, squeezes, and palaeographic hands—while encoding links to corpora like Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Inscriptiones Graecae, CIL (abbreviation), and regional catalogues such as Inscripciones de Hispania and Epigraphic Database Bari. Semantic enrichment is compatible with ontologies developed in projects like Recogito and Pelagios Network.
Use Cases and Projects
Scholars use the platform for publishing editions and commentaries linked to projects like Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, Prosopographia Imperii Romani, and regional initiatives including EAGLE (Europeana network) and SCRIPTA. Excavation teams from sites such as Pompeii, Herculaneum, Delphi, Olympia, Ephesus, Dura-Europos, Leptis Magna, and Jerusalem deposit epigraphic finds and link to museum catalogues. Digital projects for teaching and outreach include collaborations with Khan Academy, Google Arts & Culture, OpenGLAM, and university MOOCs at Coursera and edX. Interdisciplinary research ties to initiatives in numismatics (British Numismatic Society), prosopography (Prosopography of the Byzantine World), and paleography (British School at Rome).
Technical Infrastructure
Infrastructure components include RDF triple stores, SPARQL endpoints, IIIF image servers, and search stacks using Elasticsearch and Apache Solr. Hosting and compute partners include cloud services from providers used by European Grid Infrastructure and national research networks like SURF and GEANT. Development practices follow open source workflows on platforms similar to GitHub, continuous integration influenced by Travis CI and Jenkins, and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes. Authentication and access integrate with identity federations such as eduGAIN and digital preservation follows protocols advocated by LOCKSS and OAIS.
Governance and Community Engagement
Governance combines advisory boards with representatives from museums, universities, and research councils including ICOM, Europa Nostra, Association Internationale d'Épigraphie Grecque et Latine, and national academies like Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Community engagement occurs through workshops at conferences such as Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting, Digital Humanities Conference, International Congress of Byzantine Studies, and training with organizations like TEI Consortium and Digital Classics Association. Outreach includes collaboration with public history partners such as Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and regional cultural heritage bodies.