AnnaTwiddy_A1

Scholarly Communications: Classical Epigraphy and the Development of Digital Epigraphy

For this assignment, I am choosing to look at the field of Classical epigraphy, an area that I first became familiar with this past summer when I created instructional materials on navigating digital epigraphy corpora with Greta Boers, librarian for Classical Studies at Duke University, as a part of a SILS field experience. Classical epigraphy, broadly speaking, deals with the study of inscriptions from the ancient Mediterranean world, principally in Latin and Ancient Greek, but in various other languages as well. While the discipline has existed for several centuries at this point, beginning roughly with the 19^th century print publications of massive corpora, by a number of European institutions, meant to document all known Latin and Ancient Greek inscriptions, it has undergone a great degree of change within the last several decades owing to the advent of digital epigraphy corpora, an advancement that has completely upended the way publication plays out within the field (Rossi, 2020, p. 145).

Scholarship on Classical epigraphy has long depended on the publication of known inscriptions; at least a thousand are documented and added to existing corpora with each passing year, making the sheer number of data exceedingly difficult for scholars to access and work with (“Introduction to Inscriptiones Graecae,” n.d., para. 2). When digital approaches to Classical epigraphy were first developed in the 1970s, according to Rossi (2020),

the main concern of Graeco-Roman epigraphy was to systematize and ease the consultation and analysis of the huge amount of available data, thus initiating the debate on the digital approaches to epigraphy (p. 145).

Indeed, the digitization of Classical inscriptions has done much to make this “huge amount of available data” more workable, especially as nascent digital corpora, such as that of the Packard Humanities Institute, transitioned from being published via CD-ROM to being published online, making them more freely available to scholars (Cayless et al., 2009, paras. 12-13). While the amount of epigraphic data has obviously not been reduced in any way by these efforts (and in fact, it only continues to grow with the discovery and subsequent documentation of newly found inscriptions), it has become significantly easier to locate and compare inscriptions in one’s scholarship, as digital approaches make it possible “to assemble and search across collections of inscriptions that are otherwise scattered in both geographic and bibliographic space” (Rabinowitz et al., 2018).

As these digital corpora have become increasingly ubiquitous in scholarship, the field of digital epigraphy has managed to come into its own, with digital approaches to Classical epigraphy now reaching beyond the mere goal of assembling and rendering searchable the copious amount of existing data relating to Classical inscriptions. Newer approaches reckon with these inscriptions in increasingly novel ways. For example, PYTHIA, developed within the past few years, is an ancient text restoration model designed to fill in textual gaps in damaged inscriptions using machine learning (Assael et al., 2019). Yet, despite these advancements and their increased use in the field, scholarly communications relating to digital epigraphy remain in a somewhat disorganized state, at least in part owing to the complicated interdisciplinarity of digital epigraphy. As De Santis and Rossi (2018) write,

However, digital epigraphy is not yet considered a proper discipline. Digital epigraphers have acquired their skills in digitization methods and techniques informally, “in the field”, through a progressive refinement of those established in the digital humanities. Scholars interested in digital epigraphy are creating more or less formal networks in order to exchange ideas and suggestions, even in very different historical and geographical domains. Nevertheless, there are still no regular occasions to meet and discuss…[Scholars] continue to communicate the results of their scientific and technical activities in journals dealing with traditional epigraphy, or, at best, digital humanities in general. (XIII)

In this way, scholarly communications within the discipline of Classical epigraphy have evolved a great deal within the past several decades owing to the increased influence of digital epigraphy. And, since the field of digital epigraphy remains extremely dynamic and continues to become increasingly prominent, it is likely to continue rapidly changing in these forthcoming years.

References

Assael, Y., Sommerschield, T. & Prag, J. (2019, October 15). Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy. DeepMind. https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2019/Restoring-ancient-text-using-deep-learning-a-case-study-on-Greek-epigraphy

Cayless, H., Roueché, C., Elliott, T., & Bodard, G. (2009). Epigraphy in 2017. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(1). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000030/000030.html

De Santis, A. & Rossi, I. (2019). Introduction. In A. De Santis & I. Rossi (Ed.), Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy: From Practice to Discipline (pp. XIII-XX). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter Open Poland. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607208-001

Introduction. (n.d.). Inscriptiones Graecae. Retrieved October 18, 2021, from http://telota.bbaw.de/ig/ueber

Rabinowitz, A., Shaw, R. & Golden, P. (2019). Making up for Lost Time: Digital Epigraphy, Chronology, and the PeriodO Project. In A. De Santis & I. Rossi (Ed.), Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy: From Practice to Discipline (pp. 202-215). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter Open Poland. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607208-017

Rossi, I. (2020). Qualitative and quantitative approaches in digital epigraphy. Archeologia e Calcolatori, 31(2), 145-156. https://doi.org/10.19282/ac.31.2.2020.14

I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed Anna Twiddy