Digital Antiquity Use case: inscribed texts

Charlotte RouechéKing’s College London

Den Haag, 25 April 2015

“Researchers and cultural heritage institutions should publish use cases of their reuse of digital cultural

heritage.” What is the motivation for

them to do so?

Motivations:

• Esteem• The demands of the subject

• Dissemination• Sustainability

• Esteem/Advancement

Esteem (1)My first publications (2004, 2007) were funded under a

Resource Enhancement programme, which was then

discontinued:Digitisation is not considered

Real Research

Fair copies of texts at

Aphrodisias by Robert ‘Palmyra’

WoodOctober

1750

The demands of the subject:A full, clear account

Page from the

notebook of John

Deering, 1812

CIG I

Boeckh, 1828From the copies

of others.A careful

attempt to represent the appearance of

the text

CIL IMommsen, 1863

Detailed comments, occasional measurements

An Austrian notebook, 1893

Photography: Anatolia in 1926

Over the centuries there has been a huge growth in the volume of information about inscriptions which is accessible, and therefore

becomes required

From the 1980s scholars were thinking about handling inscribed texts digitally; the aims were to

deal with volume, and to facilitate search, within a closed body of

material: for early adopters there was no Web.

In 2000 Tom Elliott proposed the EpiDoc TEI compliant XML markup schema

Dissemination

Eagle is usingEpiDoc to create a

new, exemplary,

resource

Esteem (2) Academics will use this – but will they cite it? Humanists don’t like URLs

Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity 2004:The publication has an ISBN:

access to library catalogues is still a problem

Esteem (3)The standards for digital

epigraphic publications are higher than for other formatsBut this is not the perception:

they are not reviewed in academic journals.

Why not?

One example of re-use – by computer scientists

http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/

An example of non-reuse – by traditional academics

Published in 2012

Eagle is an example of a project by which scholarship can reach

entirely new audiences. What is not clear is whether the scholars

are ready for this.Reuse is a difficult concept: we need to develop the idea of a

knowledge journey: see Pelagios

Sustainability?

We cannot advocate digital publication without having

answers to the sustainability question.

I learned a great deal about the usage of one of my publications

only when the site went down . . .

New Research Data Management requirements may be changing the

landscape: Europeana could be presented as part of a LOCKS

strategy. There are repositories in various EU countries: scholars need

to be told where they are.

But the digital presentation of materials from Libya should provide

an argument for digitisation as a means of conservation!