EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML
EpiDoc represents a growing, global collaboration of humanists and information technologists (a.k.a., the “EpiDoc Community”) whose joint aim is the creation of flexible but rigorous standards and tools for the digital encoding and interchange of scholarly and educational editions of ancient texts, especially those preserved on stone, metal and other durable materials, as well as on papyrus.
Getting Started
To learn more about EpiDoc, or to get started using it, please take advantage of the following resources:
Principles
Five important principles have governed the elaboration of EpiDoc techniques and tools from the beginning:
- EpiDoc and its tools should be open and available to the widest possible range of individuals and groups; therefore, all documents and software produced by the EpiDoc Community are released under the GNU General Public License
- Insofar as possible, EpiDoc should be compliant or compatible with other published standards: we should strive to avoid re-inventing wheels or creating data silos
- EpiDoc projects work collaboratively and supportively with other digital epigraphy initiatives, especially those sanctioned by the Association Internationale d’ Épigraphie Grecque et Latine
- In the arena of transcription, EpiDoc must facilitate the encoding of all editorial observations and distinctions signaled in traditional print editions through the use of sigla and typographic indicia
- We avoid encoding the appearance of these sigla and indicia; rather, we encode the character (or semantics) of the distinction or observation the human editor is making. The rendering of typographic representations of these distinctions are accomplished using XSLTs or other methods.
About EpiDoc
EpiDoc was started in the late 1990s by Tom Elliott, then a graduate student in Ancient History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (U.S.A.). Elliott made public his initial work on epigraphic encoding in XML in response to the promulgation, by Prof. Silvio Panciera and colleagues, of a manifesto recommending the establishment of an on-line, free and unrestricted “database ... of all surviving Greek and Latin epigraphical texts produced down to the end of Antiquity.”
The manifesto itself had emerged from a round-table meeting on the subject of “Epigraphy and Information Technology” in Rome, convened by Prof. Panciera in May 1999 in his capacity as President of the “Commission for Epigraphy and Information Technology” of the Association Internationale d’ Épigraphie Grecque et Latine. A second round-table meeting, held at Aquileia and Trieste in 2003, refined the initiative as a federation of epigraphic databases. This important project is well underway, under the rubric: Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (EAGLE); its constituent databases, at present, are:
- Epigraphic Database Bari (EDB)
- Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg (EDH)
- Epigraphic Database Roma (EDR)
Among the salutary recommendations embodied in the report of the Rome meeting was a provision recognizing the importance of a platform-independent format suitable for backup, archiving and data interchange (i.e., XML):
È importante che siano utilizzati programmi che consentano l'esportazione dei documenti in “Document Type Definition (DTD) format”
It is important that the software used for the database support the export of data in a structured format definable by a Document Type Definition (DTD).
It was this provision that encouraged Elliott to post to the web, in the summer of 1999, a description of his work on XML for epigraphy. He hoped that this step might facilitate the realization of the Rome meeting's recommendations. ...