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Epigraphy is the study of texts that are inscribed onto durable materials, typically (though not always) stone. These texts include honorary and memorial inscriptions (on statue bases or gravestones), laws and decrees, and even graffiti. Although stone does not rot or burn, it can be broken or worn, and inscribed stones were often re-used as building materials. As a result, many inscriptions are fragmentary texts.
...Over the last few years, several of the major epigraphic
corpora have begun digitization projects. The epigraphic
community also hopes to create a unified database of
information about all known Greek and Latin inscriptions. A
digitized corpus of inscriptions can include several different
representations of the inscriptions:
Many projects also find it convenient to store meta-data about the inscriptions in a database, to facilitate searching. The most useful meta-data fields include the date of the inscription, its language, the types of letter forms in use in it, where it was found, what material it is on, and its size.
The EpiDoc initiative, under the leadership of Tom Elliott
of the Ancient World Mapping Center, University of North
Carolina, is working out ways to encode epigraphic data with
the TEI. EpiDoc's basic assumption is that Ancient
epigraphic texts ought to be widely available in digital form
for sharing and use in a variety of environments for a variety
of scholarly and educational purposes. Individuals,
organizations and projects require digital epigraphic texts
for personal or internal use as well; if standard tools and
formats were available, such needs would be more easily
met
(EpiDoc Collaborative). The obvious standard for
sharing and presenting texts is XML. Rather than writing a
DTD for epigraphy from scratch, moreover, the EpiDoc group
uses the TEI because TEI has already addressed many of the
taxonomic and semantic challenges faced by epigraphers,
because the TEI-using community can provide a wide range of
best-practice examples and guiding expertise, and because
existing tooling built around TEI could easily lead to early,
effective presentation and use of TEI-encoded epigraphic
texts.
The epigraphic community has a long-established practice of...
The EpiDoc guidelines are emerging as one standard for...