New in Maia: Katherine McDonald

I have just added the following blog to the Maia Atlantis feed aggregator:

title = Katherine McDonald
url = http://katherinemcdonald.net/
creators = Katherine McDonald
license = The materials on this site are for study and research purposes only. Please do not reproduce without permission.
description = Researcher in Classics and Historical Linguistics
feed: http://katherinemcdonald.net/feed/

New in EpiDig

Here's the latest regarding EpiDig, the free and open bibliography of digital resources for epigraphy.

Comprehensive updates have been made over the past couple of months. See my post yesterday at the ISAW News Blog.

And today, thanks to a note from Chuck Jones, I've added an entry for:

Vértes, Krisztián. Digital Epigraphy. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/misc/digital-epigraphy.

Cf.:

Jones, Chuck. “New Book from the Oriental Institute: Digital Epigraphy.” AWOL - The Ancient World Online, September 10, 2014. http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2014/09/new-book-from-oriental-institute.html.

Updated in Planet Atlantides: From Stone to Screen

I have updated in the Maia and Electra feed aggregators the URL and feed URL for the website of the From Stone to Screen project at the University of British Columbia:

title = From Stone to Screen
url = http://fromstonetoscreen.com/
creators = University of British Columbia
description = There are over 1,000 artifacts and squeezes  of inscriptions in the collection of the  Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies of The University of British Columbia. Until now, the collection was only available on site in Vancouver. We are excited to announce the beginning of our effort to make these objects available for study to scholars and students around the world.
feed = http://fromstonetoscreen.com/?feed=rss2

New in EpiDig: From Stone to Screen

The epigraphic squeeze and artifact digitization project at the University of British Columbia has a new website, and a record for it has been added to the Digital Epigraphy Zotero Library.

• University of British Columbia. From Stone to Screen, 2014. http://fromstonetoscreen.com/.

New in EpiDig

Records for the following digital resources for the discovery, publication, study, and teaching of epigraphy have been added to the EpiDig library at zotero.org:

Bérard, François, Denis Feissel, Nicolas Laubry, Pierre Petitmengin, Denis Rousset, and Michel Sève. Guide de l’Epigraphiste.

Epigraphica Anatolica.” Institut Für Altertumskunde, Universität Zu Köln.

Fossati, Dario. Hittite Epigraphic Findings in the Ancient Near East.

Maspero, Gaston. Cahiers de notes épigraphiques de Gaston Maspero ; copies d’inscriptions hiéroglyphiques, de papyrus égyptiens et coptes ; dessins, croquis, etc. de monuments d’Akmîm, Louqsor, etc. (1881-1884). 1801.

Revue Raydân. Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa.

Roman Inscriptions of Britain.

Studi Epigrafici E Linguistici Sul Vicino Oriente Antico.

Sylloge Epigraphica Barcinonensis: SEBarc.

Van Nijf, Onno. Saxa Loquuntur.

New in Planet Atlantides: Stone to Screen

I have just added the following blog to the Electra and Maia feed aggregators:

title = From Stone to Screen
url = https://fromstonetoscreen.wordpress.com/
description = A collaborative project to create a digital database of the archaeological teaching collections at the University of British Columbia.
feed url = https://fromstonetoscreen.wordpress.com/feed/

Eighteen Years of EpiDoc. Now what?

Transcript of my keynote address, delivered to the EAGLE 2014 International Conference on Monday, September 29, 2014, at the École normale supérieure in Paris:

Thank you.

Allow me to begin by thanking the organizers of this conference. The conference chairs: Silvia Orlandi, Francois Berard, and John Scheid. Members of the Steering Committee: Vittore Casarosa, Pietro Liuzzo, and Raffaella Santucci. The local organizing committee: Elizabeth Le Bunetel and Philippe Martineau. Members of the EAGLE 2014 General Committee -- you are too numerous to mention, but no less appreciated. To the sponsors of EAGLE Europeana: the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme of the European Commission. Europeana. Wikimedia Italia. To the presenters and poster-authors and their collaborators. To those who have made time out of busy schedules to prepare for, support, or attend this event. Colleagues and friends. Thank you for the invitation to speak and to be part of this important conference.

OK. Please get out your laptops and start up the Oxygen XML Editor. If you actually read the syllabus for the course, you'd have already downloaded the latest copy of the EpiDoc schema...

Just kidding.

I have perhaps misled you with my title. This talk will not just be about EpiDoc. Instead, I'd like to use EpiDoc as an entrance point into some thoughts I've had about what we are doing here. About where we are going. I'd like to take EpiDoc as an example -- and the EAGLE 2014 Conference as a metaphor -- for something much larger: the whole disparate, polyvalent, heterarchical thing that we sometimes call "Épigraphie et électronique". Digital epigraphy. Res epigraphica digitalis.

Before we try to unpack how we got here and where we're going, I'd like to ask for your help in trying to illuminate who we are. I'd like you to join me in a little exercise in public self-identification. Not only is this an excellent way to help fill the generous block of time that the conference organizers have given me for this talk, it's also much less awkward than trooping out to the Place de la Sorbonne and doing trust falls on the edge of the fountain. ... Right?

Seriously. This conference brings together a range of people and projects that really have had no specific venue to meet, and so we are in some important ways unknown to each other. It's my hypothesis that, if we learn a bit about each other up front, we prime the pump of collaboration and exchange for the rest of the conference. After all, why do we travel to conferences at all if it is not for the richness of interacting with each other, both during sessions and outside them. OK, and as Charlotte Roueché is ever vigilant to remind us, for the museums.

OK then, are you ready?

Independent of any formal position or any academic or professional credential, raise your hand if you would answer "yes" to this question: "Are you an epigraphist?"

What about "are you an information scientist?"

Historians?

Oh, yes, you can be more than one of these -- you'll recall I rolled out the word "heterarchy" in my introduction!

How about "Wikipedian?" "Cultural Heritage Professional?" "Programmer?" "Philologist?" "Computer Scientist?" "Archivist?" "Museologist?" "Linguist?" "Archaeologist?" "Librarian?" "Physicist?" "Engineer?" "Journalist?" "Clergy?"

Phooey! No clergy!

Let's get at another distinction. How many of you would identify yourselves as teachers?

What about students?

Researchers? Administrators? Technicians? Interested lay persons?

OK, now that we have your arms warmed up, let's move on to voices.

If you can read, speak, or understand a reasonable amount of the English language, please join me in saying "I understand English."

Ready? "I understand English."

OK. Now, if we can read, speak, or understand a reasonable amount of French, shall we say "Je comprends le français?"

"Je comprends le français."

What about Arabic?

Bulgarian? Catalan? Flemish? German? Of course there are many more represented here, but I think you get my point.

OK. Now let's build this rhetorical construct one step higher.

This one involves standing up if that's physically appropriate for you, so get yourselves ready! If cannot stand, by all means choose some other, more appropriate form of participation.
Independent of any formal position or any academic credential, I want you to stand up if you consider yourself a "scholar".

Now, please stay standing -- or join those standing -- if you consider yourself a "student".

Yes, I did it. I reintroduced the word "student" from another category of our exercise. I am not only a champion of heterarchy, but also of recursive redefinition.

And now, please stay standing -- or join those standing -- if you consider yourself an "enthusiast."

If you're not standing, please stand if you can.

Now, pick out some one near you that you have not met. Shake their hand and introduce yourself. Ask them what they are so enthusiastic about that they were compelled to come to this conference!

Alright. Please resume your seats.

I think we're warmed up.

Let me encourage you to adopt a particular mindset while you are here at this conference. I hope that you will find it to be both amenable and familiar. It's the active recognition of the valuable traits we all share: intelligence, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, incisiveness, interdependence. Skill. Stamina. Uniqueness. Respect for the past. Congeniality.

I am here, in part, because I have a deep, inescapable interest in the study of ancient documents and in the application of computational methods and new media to their resurrection, preservation, and contemplation, and to their reintegration into the active cultural memory of the human people.
I have looked over the programme for this conference, and I have the distinct impression that your reasons for being here are somewhat similar to mine. I am delighted to have this opportunity to visit with old friends and fellow laborers. And to make the acquaintance of so many new ones. I expect to be dazzled by the posters and presentations to come. Are you as excited as I am?

My title did promise some EpiDoc.

How many of you know EpiDoc?

How many of you know what EpiDoc is?

How many of you have heard of EpiDoc?

The word "EpiDoc" is a portmanteau, composed of the abbreviated word "epigraphy" and the abbreviated word "document" or "documentation" (I can't remember which). It has become a misnomer, as EpiDoc is used for much more than epigraphic documents and documentation. It has found a home in papyrology and in the study of texts transmitted to us from antiquity via the literary and book-copying cultures of the intervening ages. It has at least informed, if not been directly used, in other allied subfields like numismatics and sigillography. It's quite possible I'll learn this week of even broader usages.

EpiDoc is a digital format and method for the encoding of both transcribed and descriptive information about ancient texts and the objects that supported and transmitted them. Formally, it is a wholly conformant customization of the Text Encoding Initiative's standard for the representation of texts in digital form. It is serialized in XML -- the Extensible Markup Language -- a specification developed and maintained by the World-Wide Web Consortium.

EpiDoc is more than format and method. It is a community of practice. The term embraces all the people who learn, use, critique, and talk about EpiDoc. It also takes in the Guidelines, tools, and other helps that have been created and curated by those people. All of them are volunteers, scraping together the time to work on EpiDoc out of their personal time, their academic time, and out of the occasional grant. There has never been formal funding devoted to the development or maintenance of the EpiDoc guidelines or software. If you are a participant in the EpiDoc community, you are a hero.

EpiDoc was born in the late 1990s in a weird little room in the northwest corner of the third floor of Murphey Hall on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The room is no longer there. It was consumed in a much-needed and long-promised renovation in 2003 or so. It was the old Classics Department computer lab: a narrow space with a sturdy, home-made, built-in counter along two walls and a derelict bookshelf. It was part of a suite of three rooms, the most spacious of which was normally granted as an office to that year's graduate fellow.

The room had been appropriated by Classics graduate students Noel Fiser and Hugh Cayless, together with classical archaeology graduate student Kathryn McDonnell, and myself (an interloper from the History Department). The Classics department -- motivated and led by these graduate students with I-forget-which-faculty-member serving as figurehead -- had secured internal university funding to digitize the department's collection of 35 millimeter slides and build a website for searching and displaying the resulting images. They bought a server with part of the grant. It soon earned the name Alecto after one of the Furies in Greek mythology. I've searched in vain for a picture of the lab, which at some point we sponge-painted in bright colors evocative of the frescoes from Minoan Santorini. The world-wide web was less than a decade old.

I was unconscious then of the history of computing and the classics at Chapel Hill. To this day, I don't know if that suite of rooms had anything to do with David Packard and his time at Chapel Hill. At the Epigraphic Congress in Oxford, John Bodel pointed to Packard's Livy concordance as one of the seminal moments in the history of computing and the classics, and thus the history of digital epigraphy. I'd like to think that we intersected that heritage not just in method, but in geography.

I had entered the graduate program in ancient history in the fall of 1995. I had what I would later come to understand to have been a spectacular slate of courses for my first term: Richard Talbert on the Roman Republic, Jerzy Linderski on Roman Law, and George Houston on Latin Epigraphy.
Epigraphy was new to me. I had seen and even tried my hand at reading the odd Latin or Greek inscription, but I had no knowledge of the history or methods of discipline, and very little skill. As George taught it, the Latin Epigraphy course was focused on the research use of the published apparatus of Latin epigraphy. The CIL. The journals. The regional and local corpora. What you could do with them.

If I remember correctly, the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg was not yet online, nor were the Packard Greek inscriptions (though you could search them on CDROM). Yes, the same Packard. Incidentally, I think we'll hear something very exciting about the Packard Greek Inscriptions in tomorrow's Linked Ancient World Data panel.

Anyway, at some point I came across the early version of what is now called the Epigraphische Datenbank Clauss - Slaby, which was online. Back then it was a simple search engine for digital transcripts of the texts in the L'Annee Epigraphique up from 1888 through 1993. Crucially, one could also download all the content in plain text files. If I understand it correctly, these texts were also destined for publication via the Heidelberg database (and eventually Rome too) after verification by autopsy or inspection of photographs or squeezes.

At some point, I got interested in abbreviations. My paper for George's class was focused on "the epigraphy of water" in Roman North Africa. I kept running across abbreviations in the inscriptions that didn't appear in any of the otherwise helpful lists one finds in Cagnat or one of the other handbooks.  In retrospect, the reasons are obvious: the handbook author tailors the list of abbreviations to the texts and types of texts featured in the handbook itself. Selected for importance and range, the statistical distribution of textual types and language, and of features like abbreviation, are not the same as those for the entire corpus. So, what is a former programmer to do? Why not download the texts from Clauss' site and write a program to hunt for parentheses. The Leiden Conventions make parentheses a strong indicator of abbreviations that have been expanded by an editor, so the logic for the program seemed relatively straightforward.

Mercifully, the hacktastical code that I wrote to do this task has, I think, perished from the face of the earth. The results, which I serialized into HTML form, may still be consulted on the website of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy.

As useful as the results were, I was dissatisfied with the experience. The programming language I had used -- called "C" -- was not a very good fit for the kind of text processing involved. Moreover, as good as the Leiden Conventions are, parentheses are used for things other than abbreviations. So, there was manual post-processing to be done. And then there were the edge cases, like abbreviations that stand alone in one document, but are incorporated into longer abbreviations in others. And then there were expanded use cases: searching for text in one inscription that was abbreviated in another. Searching for abbreviations or other strings in text that was transcribed from the original, rather than in editorial supplement or restoration. And I wanted a format and software tools that was a better fit for textual data and this class of problems.

XML and the associated Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) -- both then fairly new -- seemed like a good alternative approach. So I found myself confronted with a choice: should I take XML and invent my own schema for epigraphic texts, or should I adopt and adapt something someone else had already created? This consideration -- to make or to take -- is still of critical importance not only for XML, but for any format specification or standards definition process. It's important too for most digital projects. What will you build and on what will you build it?

There are pros and cons. By adopting an existing standard or tool, you can realize a number of benefits. You don't reinvent the wheel. You build on the strengths and the lessons of others. You can discuss problems and approaches with others who are using the same method. You probably make it easier to share and exchange your tools and any data you create. It's possible that many of the logic problems that aren't obvious to you at the beginning have already been encountered by the pioneers.
But standards and specifications can also be walled gardens in which decisions and expert knowledge are hoarded by the founders or another elite group. They can undermine openness and innovation. They can present a significant learning curve. You can use a complex standard and find that you've built a submarine to cross the Seine. Something simpler might have worked better.

Back then, there was a strong narrative around warning people off the cavalier creation of new XML schemas. The injunction was articulated in a harsh metaphor: "every time someone creates a new schema, a kitten dies." Behind this ugly metaphor was the recognition of another potential pitfall: building an empty cathedral. Your data format -- your personal or parochial specification -- might embody everything you imagined or needed, but be largely useless to, or unused by, anyone else.
So, being a cat lover, and being lazy (all the best programmers are lazy), I went looking for an existing schema. I found it in the Text Encoding Initiative. Whether the TEI (and EpiDoc) fit your particular use case is something only you can decide. For me, at that time and since, it was a good fit. I was particularly attracted to a core concept of the TEI: one should encode the intent behind the formatting and structure in a document -- the semantics of the authorial and editorial tasks -- rather than just the specifics of the formatting. So, where the Leiden Conventions would have us use parentheses to mark the editorial expansion of an abbreviation, the TEI gives us XML elements that mean "abbreviation" and "expansion." Where a modern Latin epigraphic edition would use a subscript dot to indicate that the identity of a character is ambiguous without reference to context, the TEI gives us the "unclear" element.

This encoding approach pays off. I'll give just one example. For a few years now, I've been helping Arlo Griffiths (who directs the Jakarta research center of the École française d'Extrême-Orient) to develop a corpus of the surviving inscriptions of the Campa Kingdoms. This is a small corpus, perhaps 400 extant inscriptions, from coastal Vietnam, that includes texts in both Sanskrit and the incompletely understood Old Cam language. The script involved has not yet made its way into the Unicode specification. The standard transliteration scheme for this script, as well as some of the other editorial conventions used in the publication of Cam inscriptions, overlaps and conflicts with the Leiden conventions. But with TEI/EpiDoc there is no confusion or ambiguity. The XML says what the editor means to say, and the conventions of transcription are preserved unchanged, perhaps someday to be converted programmatically to Unicode when Unicode is ready.

EpiDoc transitioned from a personal project to a public one when another potential use case came along. For some time, a committee commissioned by the Association Internationale d'Épigraphie Grecque et Latine had been working under the direction of Silvio Panciera, then the chair of Latin epigraphy at La Sapienza in Rome. Their goal was to establish a comprehensive database of Greek and Latin inscriptions, primarily for the purpose of searching the texts and associated descriptive information or metadata. It was Charles Crowther at Oxford's new Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents who put me in contact with the committee. And it was Charles who championed the eventual recommendation of the committee that the system they envisioned must be able to import and export structured documents governed by a standard schema. He was thinking of EpiDoc.

Many years have passed and many things have changed, and I'm forced to leave out the names of so many people whose hard work and acumen has brought about those changes. Here in Paris today Panciera's vision stands on the cusp of realization. It has also been transcended, for we are not here to talk about a standalone textual database or a federation of such, but about the incorporation of Greek and Latin epigraphy -- in all its historiographical variety and multiplicity of reception -- into the digital cultural heritage system of Europe (Europeana) and into the independent digital repository of a global people: Wikipedia and Wikidata. That EpiDoc can play a role in this grand project just blows me away.

And it's not just about EAGLE, Europeana, Wikipedia, and EpiDoc. It's about a myriad other databases, websites, images, techniques, projects, technologies, and tools. It's about you and the work that you do.

Even as we congratulate ourselves on our achievements and the importance of our mission, I hope you'll let me encourage you to keep thinking forward. We are doing an increasingly good job of bringing computational approaches into many aspects of the scholarly communication process. But plenty remains to be done. We are starting to make the transition from using computer hardware and software to make conventional books and digital imitations thereof; "born digital" is starting to mean something more than narrative forms in PDF and HTML, designed to be read directly by each single human user and, through them, digested into whatever database, notebook, or other research support system that person uses. We are now publishing data that is increasingly designed for harvesting and analyzing by automated agents and that is increasingly less encumbered by outdated and obstructive intellectual property regimes. Over time, our colleagues will begin to spend less time seeking and ingesting data, and more time analyzing, interpreting, and communicating results. We are also lowering the barriers to appreciation and participation in global heritage by a growing and more connected and more vulnerable global people.

Will we succeed in this experiment? Will we succeed in helping to build a mature and responsible global culture in which heritage is treasured, difference is honored, and a deep common cause embraced and protected? Will we say three years from now that building that database or encoding those texts in EpiDoc was the right choice? In a century, will our work be accessible and relevant to our successors and descendants? In 5? In 10?

I do not know. But I am thrilled, honored, and immensely encouraged to see you here, walking this ancient road and blazing this ambitious and hopeful new trail. This is our opportunity to help reunite the world's people and an important piece of their heritage. We are a force against the recasting of history into political rhetoric. We stand against the convenient ignorance of our past failures and their causes. We are the antidote to the destruction of ancient statues of the Buddha, to the burning of undocumented manuscripts, to papyri for sale on eBay, to fields of holes in satellite images where once there was an unexcavated ancient site.

Let's do this thing.

New in Electra and Maia: I.Sicily

I have just added the following blog to the Maia and Electra Atlantides feed aggregators:

title = I.Sicily
url = http://isicily.wordpress.com/
creators = Jonathan Prag
license = None
description = Building a digital corpus of Sicilian inscriptions
keywords = None
feed = http://isicily.wordpress.com/feed/

New in Electra: EpiDoc Workshop

I have just added the following blog to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator:

title = EpiDoc workshop
url = http://epidocworkshop.blogspot.co.uk/
creators = Simona Stoyanova, et al.
description = Share markup examples; give and receive feedback
keywords = EpiDoc, epigraphy, inscriptions, XML, TEI
feed = http://epidocworkshop.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

New in EpiDig: Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions

I've just added a reference for the following resource to the EpiDig Zotero library:

• Avanzini, Alessandra. DASI: Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-islamic Arabian Inscriptions, 2013. http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/.
  

New in EpiDig: Sabellian Spreadsheets

I've just added a reference for the following resource to the EpiDig Zotero library:

• McDonald, Katherine. “Sabellian Spreadsheets.” Greek in Italy, February 10, 2014. http://greekinitaly.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/sabellian-spreadsheets/.
   

New in EpiDig: EAGLE Europeana Portal

I have just added bibliographic information for the new EAGLE Europeana Project portal (Greek and Latin inscriptions) to the open-access EpiDig Zotero Library (digital resources for the discovery, publication, study, and teaching of epigraphy).

New in Electra and Maia: EAGLE News

I have just added the news feed (RSS) for the new EAGLE Europeana Project portal (Greek and Latin inscriptions) to the Electra and Maia feed aggregators.

Updated In EpiDig: Epigraphic Database Roma

I've just updated bibliographic information about the Epigraphic Database Roma in the Zotero EpiDig Library.

Text of my talk at CIEGL 2012

CIEGL 2012 Paper: Efficient Digital Publishing for Inscriptions
cc-by

2. I considered giving this talk the following title:

why build a submarine to cross the Tiber?

It's a question we've heard a lot over the years in various forms. And by "we" I mean not just digital epigraphers -- if you'll accept such an appellation -- but the large and growing number of scholars and practitioners across the humanities who seek to bring computational methods to bear on the evidence, analysis, and publication of our scholarly work.

3. To build a submarine.

The phrase implies something complicated, expensive, time-consuming. Something with special capabilities. Perhaps a little bit dangerous.

4. To cross the Tiber.

Something we know how to do and have been doing for years using a small number of well-known techniques (bridges, boats, swimming). Something commonplace and, given its ubiquity, easy and inexpensive (at least if calculated per trip over time).

Whether asked rhetorically or in earnest, it's a question that deserves an answer. Time is precious. Funds are limited. There are many texts.

But maybe we don't just want to cross the Tiber. Maybe we want to explore the oceans.  And this is the point: for what reasons are we publishing inscriptions in digital form? Are the tools and methods we use fit for that purpose?

5. Why are we digitizing inscriptions? Why are we digitally publishing inscriptions? What uses do we hope to make of digital epigraphy?

I think it's safe to say that no sane person would prefer to lose the ability to search the epigraphic texts that are now available digitally. By my calculations, that's perhaps fifty or sixty percent of the Greek and Latin epigraphic harvest, probably a bit less if we successfully resolved all the duplicates within and across databases. Do you look forward to a day when all Greek and Latin inscriptions can be searched?

So we agree that "search" is a righteous use of digital technology and that we are making good progress toward the goal of "comprehensive search" we set for ourselves in Rome.

6. The relationship between "search" and digital epigraphy was treated at length by Hugh Cayless, Charlotte Roueché, Gabriel Bodard and myself in a 2007 contribution to Digital Humanities Quarterly, part of a themed volume entitled Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure, which was assembled in honor of the late Ross Scaife.  Authors were asked to review digital developments in various subfields and to imagine the state of that field with respect to digital technology in ten year's time. When we wrote, we observed that the vast majority of digital epigraphic editions were still published solely in print, but we predicted that, by 2017, the situation will have changed drastically. We imagined a world in which computing will be as central to consuming epigraphic publications as it is now in making them.

Yet, the biggest challenge we still face in meeting the goals we identified in the DHQ article by 2017 is in making the transition to online publishing a reality by producing tools that are fit for the purpose. It's now no harder to create a traditional print-style epigraphic edition and put it online in HTML or PDF format than it is to get it ready to publish in print. A growing number of journals and institutional repositories -- though few yet devoted specifically to classics or epigraphy -- can now provide a publication venue for such born-digital editions that meets minimum expectations for stability, accessibility, citation, and preservation. Moreover,  I can't imagine that any of the major database projects would refuse the gift of clean digital texts and basic descriptive data corresponding to new publications in print or online, although the speed with which they might be able to incorporate same into their databases would be a function of available time and manpower.

7. But this scenario still assumes the old underlying assumptions inherited from a dead-tree era: an epigraphic publication is the work of an individual or small number of scholars, brought forth in a static format that, once discovered, must be read and understood by humans before it can be disassembled -- more or less by hand -- and absorbed into someone else's discovery or research process. From that process, new results will eventually emerge and get published in a similar way.

This is inefficient.

Time is precious. We are few. There are many texts and many questions to answer. Why are humans still doing work better fit for machines?

8. If we are to embrace and exploit the full range of benefits offered by the digital world, we have to remake our suppositions about not only publication, but about the entire research process. To the extent possible, our epigraphic publications must not only be online, but they must also meet certain additional criteria: universal discoverability, stability of access, reliability of citation, ubiquity of descriptive terminology, facility for download, readiness for reuse and remixing. Further, they must become open to incremental revision and microcontribution at levels below that of the complete text or edition.

Universal discoverability means that our editions -- and the discrete elements of their context -- must be discoverable in every way their potential readers and users might wish. So, yes, we must be able to search and browse for them via the homepage of an individual database or online publication, but they also must surface in Google, Bing, and their successors, as well as in library catalogs, introductory handbooks, and course materials. Links, created manually or automatically, ought to bring users to inscriptions from other web resources for ancient studies. Other special-purpose digital systems ought to be able to discover and access epigraphic content via open application programming interfaces. Changes and updates to contents should be reflected not only in a human-readable web page or printed conference handout, but also with a live web feed on the site that can be consumed and syndicated by automatic readers and aggregators.

Stability of access means that I should be able to revisit a given online publication at exactly the same web address I used to read it a month ago. A year ago. Ten years ago. For as long as the web exists. Don't make me run the query again. Ideally, that web address -- the Universal Resource Identifier or URI -- will be as short and easy to remember as possible.

Then there's Reliability of citation. If we cannot cite digital publications in a consistent and dependable way, those publications are of no value to the scholarly enterprise. I cannot cite your text for comparison, acknowledge your argument in making my own, or do any of the other things for which we must make scholarly reference if your online publication is not readily citable. This implies more than just stability of access, though that is essential. It also means that you must give me a way to include a reference to the appropriate part of the publication in the URI. So, if you're publishing 10 or 1,000 or 100,000 inscriptions online, you should give me a URI for each one of them. Just posting a PDF or returning a composite page of search results containing all of them doesn't cut it.

[[[Ubiquity of descriptive terminology]]]

Suppose I want to find all funerary inscriptions that have been published online that were originally written in Greek or Latin and that likely date to the third century after Christ. What if I want to narrow that group of inscriptions to a particular geographic context or pull out only those whose texts that contain Roman tria nomina?  We need an agreed mechanism for structuring and expressing the requisite descriptive elements in a standard, discoverable manner on the web.

There is an emerging web standard for this purpose. It is called Linked Data and, though we do not have time to explore it in detail here today, I believe that there is an urgent and immediate need for a collaborative effort, with real but modest funding behind it, to define and publish descriptive vocabularies for epigraphy that can be used in linked data applications. This work should build upon the metadata normalization efforts already well underway within the EAGLE consortium, and it might well benefit from the complementary work done a few years ago by EpiDoc volunteers to produce multi-language translations of many of the terms used by the Rome database. This would allow us to use a common set of machine-actionable terms for such key aspects as material, type of support, identifiable personages and places, mode of inscription, and date.

There is already a collaborative Linked Data mechanism for communicating geographic relationships in ancient studies. It is called Pelagios, and it already links XYZ different projects in various subfields of ancient studies to the Pleiades online gazetteer.

By joining Pelagios, epigraphic databases and publications would make their contents immediately discoverable by geographic location alongside the contents of the Perseus digital library, the DAI object database Arachne, the holdings of the British Museum, the archaeological reports published by Fasti Online, the coins database of the American Numismatic Society, and the documentary papyri (among others).

Facility of download and readiness for reuse and remixing. It is here perhaps that the epigraphic community faces its greatest twenty-first century challenge. We must decide no less than whether to embrace or forfeit the full promise of the digital age, for if scholars are unable to use digital surrogates -- programs designed to retrieve, analyze, and reformat data for a specific research need -- and use them across the full corpus of classical epigraphy, we will have forfeited the digital promise.

It is no secret that there is a history of disagreement and conflict in our community around the mere idea of putting published epigraphic texts in a digital database. Though such digitization and distribution is now established practice, the resulting databases and publications still assert a hodge-podge of rights and guidance for use, or else are distinguished by silence on the issue. In some cases, users are debarred from reuse of texts or other information in their own publications.

Let me offer, ex cathedra, a prescription for healing.

First, the social and institutional steps. Each person, project, institution, journal or publisher that puts inscriptions online should make a clear and complete statement of the rights it asserts over the publication, and the behavior it allows and expects of its users. "All rights reserved" or "for personal use only" are regimes that preclude most of the best of what we could do in the digital realm this century. If you choose such a path, you are in my opinion, standing in the way of progress. Moreover, you will find many colleagues who, depending on the legal jurisdiction and their experience, will contest any copyright claims to the text itself, and reuse it anyway. Far better than that fraught scenario is to use a standard open license, or even to make a public domain declaration. There are now several licenses crafted by the Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation that preserve the copyright and data rights that are permissible by law in your jurisdiction, while freely granting users a range of uses that are consistent with academic needs and practice. By choosing an appropriate CC or OKF license for your epigraphic publication, you will help bring the future.

Technologically, we need to make downloading and reusing easier. "Click here to download" is a good start, but to make serious change we will have to move beyond the PDF file to provide formats that can be chewed up and remixed by computational agents without losing the significance of the more discipline-specific aspects of the presentation. (We will pass over in silence the abomination of posting Microsoft Word files online).

So, an epigraphic edition in HTML or plain text, using standard Unicode encodings for all characters, is an excellent improvement over the PDF. I'd urge you, whenever possible, to go further and provide EpiDoc XML for download. The chief additional virtues of EpiDoc being (with regard to reuse) that the constituent elements of the edition (text, translation, commentary) are distinguished from each other in a consistent, machine-actionable manner, and that the semantics of the sigla you use in the text itself are represented unambiguously for further computational processing.

And here let me offer another parenthetical call for action. If EpiDoc is to live up to position of esteem it has now obtained in Greek and Latin epigraphic circles, we must make it easier and cheaper to use. I'll speak more about some aspects in a minute, but allow me to observe here that there is a critical need to identify and obtain funding -- probably a relatively small amount -- to convene some working meetings aimed at completing and updating the EpiDoc guidelines, and to pay for a postdoc or graduate student to support and contribute to that effort steadily for an academic year or so. The present state of the Guidelines is, I'm sad to say, close to useless. Many good people have tried to redress the problem, but job pressures and the lack of resources necessary to create real working time have so far stymied progress. The state of the EpiDoc Guidelines is a train wreck waiting to happen. We need to fix it.

I'd like to wrap up the discussion of digital benefits with a few words on subject of microcontribution. Microcontribution is another area in which we could enhance scholarly progress in epigraphy. By microcontribution I mean the incorporation into an online, scholarly publication of any contribution of content or interpretation in a unit too small to have been given its own article in a traditional journal. Have you ever read someone else's text and thought "I'd emend this bit differently?" Can you provide a realiable identification for a personal or geographic name that puzzled the original editor? We do have in print articles the genre of "notes on inscriptions" of one type or another -- and the annual bibliographic reviews strive mightily to keep these connected to the published editions for us, but what if that were made to happen automatically in an online environment?

So, are the tools now at hand for digital publication of epigraphy fit for purpose? Do they do all these things for us? Are they effective? Efficient? User-friendly?

No.

Of course, that's partly because we've had such a huge task of catching up to do. But we're making good, consistent progress on retrospective digitization. We cannot ignore the future.

And we are seeing important gains in some areas. The new interface to the Heidelberg database, for example, uses clear, stable URIs for each inscription's record (and for each image and bibliographic entry). Similar URIs were always available, but they were not foregrounded in the application and so required extra effort on the part of a user to discover. But I think you'll all agree that consistency of citation is better supported in the new system. On the reuse front, Heidelberg has long given clear guidance on expectations -- a reused text should indicate its origin in EDH.

But we have a long way to go in other areas. I would encourage those who currently manage (or are planning) large databases or digital corpora of inscriptions to look closely at what the papyrologists have been doing with papyri.info. Not only does the system provide descriptive information, texts, translations, and images -- at varying levels of completeness -- for some 80,000 papyri in a manner consistent with many of the desiderata I have enumerated above, but also it serves as the publication of record for a small but growing number of born-digital papyrological editions and microcontributions, all created and managed in EpiDoc.

The papyrologists have benefited, of course, from the significant largesse of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, in bringing this resource to life. Fortunately, both the institutions involved and the funders felt that it was essential to produce the software under open license, so it's ripe for reuse. But it's a complex piece of software that would require modification and extension to support the needs of epigraphers. It, like the major databases we already have in the field, would need an institutional home, tech support staff, and on-going funding. At NYU we are waiting for the National Endowment for the Humanities to tell us if they will give us funding to begin the customization work that would lead to a version of Papyri.info for epigraphy. If funded, this effort will move forward in collaboration with EAGLE and other major database projects, but we will also seek to provide, as soon as possible, an online environment for the creation, collaborative emendation, and digital publication of epigraphic texts from individuals and projects.

My talk at CIEGL 2012: Efficient Digital Publishing for Inscriptions

I just noticed that the program page for the 14th International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy doesn't have a link to the abstract for the talk I'm giving in John Bodel's panel on "Inscriptions in the Digital World" tomorrow afternoon. So, here it is:


Efficient Digital Publishing for Inscriptions
Tom Elliott
Associate Director for Digital Programs and Senior Research Scholar
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University

No one would argue at a gathering such as this that it will ever be possible to make it “easy” to publish inscriptions. But we should at least remind ourselves of the range of expertise and the quantity of effort the task demands. For a long time it has been the common – and justified – expectation that preparing digital epigraphic editions requires much more effort and expense than doing the work in print, especially when one attempts to seize opportunities that are unique to or enhanced by the digital context. Indeed, this has sometimes been offered as a sufficient reason not to adopt a digital approach, or to limit oneself to the dissemination of digital facsimiles of a print object (e.g., PDF files).

My paper will focus on struggles and successes in making the EpiDoc approach to epigraphic publication efficient and effective: capitalizing on the benefits of semantic markup and digital access while lowering hurdles to adoption. In particular, we will consider recent developments in open-source software for the iterative, collaborative, and “born-EpiDoc” digital publication of inscriptions and papyri.

Open-Access Epigraphic Evidence for Boundary Disputes in the Roman Empire

I've been sitting on the dissertation way too long. So here it is, unleashed upon the world under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license.

I have visions of hacking it up into a super-cool, linked data, ever-updated information resource, but there's no reason -- even though it's pretty niche in a lot of ways -- why anyone who might benefit from having, using, or critiquing it meantime should have to wait for that to happen.

Comments, questions, and post-release reviews are welcome via comment here, or via email to tom.elliott@nyu.edu, or on your own blog. And feel free to fork the repos and play around if you're mob-epigraphically inclined.

Warping History: John Hessler's blog

How is it that lo, these many years I've missed the existence of John Hessler's blog, Warping History: Analytical Methods in Historical Geography? No longer! I've added it to Electra Atlantis and my newsreader.

Flavia Faustina, version 3: chi-rho, dolium, multiple editors, rationale

Ryan Baumann and Georgia Tsouvala have joined the mob!

Ryan forked my Mob Epigraphy repository on github and added markup to the EpiDoc XML file to represent the Chi-Rho and dolium(?) that appear below the inscribed text. Then he sent me a pull request. I merged his changes and pushed them back to github, and then I pushed a few more modifications to show his contribution in the EpiDoc/TEI header and to modify the stylesheets to handle whitespace and multiple editors better (and to write out an HTML doctype). Here's the result:

• Flavia Faustina 3 HTML
• Flavia Faustina 3 EpiDoc XML

Ryan's change -- which parallels the treatment in ICVR II as reported via EDB -- raises some questions in my mind:

1. Is the second illustration really a dolium? It doesn't look that much like what's illustrated at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolium. Why would a dolium appear on a Christian sepulchral inscription? Maybe someone like Sebastian Heath or Charlotte Tupman will have an idea about that.
2. Are those two items really glyphs that should be "read" as part of the inscription and therefore marked up using the TEI "g" element (as Ryan has done), or should they be treated as figures or illustrations and therefore marked up a different way? If they are "glyphs", then what would be the corresponding glyph definition markup (if any) and where should it go in an EpiDoc file? Maybe someone like Gabriel Bodard or Marion Lamé will have an opinion about that.

Meanwhile, Georgia wrote to me as follows:

I like version 2. For one, I could see it and read it without any problems; something I could not do with version 1. I like the idea of being able to see pictures, texts, and translations of inscriptions on a single page. My question is: what are you trying to do here? What's the purpose, goal, etc. of Mob Epigraphy? And how can others help, contribute, etc.?

My goal with Mob Epigraphy is two-fold. First, I want to create more on-line, open examples of real inscriptions marked up in EpiDoc. Secondly, I want to see how far we can push an openly collaborative model in the practice of digital epigraphy, welcoming all interested parties in editing the text and pushing the boundaries on what we can and can't do with standard encoding and web publication.

How to contribute? There are many ways. This post highlights two examples. Ryan saw something missing and, exploiting the digital collaboration infrastructure provided by github, pitched in to fill the gap. Georgia had comments and questions and, after having some trouble with Blogger's comment functionality, sent me an email. Both are great ways to contribute, and I bet readers of this post can come up with more -- like suggesting answers to my questions above, or proposing more robust or interesting documentation of the inscription or elaboration of the encoding or HTML representation.

Previous post.

Flavia Faustina, version 2: style

This is a follow-on to my initial posting about the Flavia Faustina inscription from St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome. Another contribution to the "Mob Epigraphy" thread. Still a mob of one, alas ... if you see something you think could be done better -- epigraphically or technically -- please chime in! There are deliberate (and no doubt accidental) omissions and mistakes.

Not much substantive change, just style and inline image:

• Flavia Faustina 2: HTML
• Flavia Faustina 2: EpiDoc XML