The Challenges of Epigraphy: From Metadata to Museums and SchoolsRaffaella Santucci, Pietro Liuzzo, Vittore Casarosa, Francesco Mambrini, Anita Rocco, Donato Fasolini and Valentina Vassallo
EAGLE, The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy is a best-practice network co-funded by the European Commission, under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme. EAGLE is collecting, in a single readily searchable database, more than 1.5 million items, currently scattered across 25 EU countries. Eventually, the project will make available the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions of the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, a translation into English.
Due to the double nature of inscriptions as both archaeological objects and documentary texts, the study of epigraphy has diverse aspects and involves different research fields. Epigraphy scholars usually study these objects with a holistic approach but traditionally with a more philological attitude towards the text; museum curators are careful about the provenance and the different collections, and treat the text and information about the object as metadata; archaeologists pay more attention to the object in its context and the relation it has with other finds. Only in the last years the attention has shifted to the relation between text and object and the decoration of the object as well as to the context in which it was first set up and its subsequent history.
The panel will include curators of Epigraphic Archives, Museums professional and metadata architects as well as information technologies experts, all part of the EAGLE Best Practice Network. Through short presentations and case studies, the panellists will address a number of topics:
- Challenges in the definition of an inscription: borderline cases.
- Metadata modelling challenges. Texts and objects: what is the Cultural Heritage Object?
- Epigraphy projects with primary and secondary school pupils in Europe
- The issue of metadata categories, definitions and taxonomies
- Vocabularies for epigraphic resources and Linked Open Data best practices
- The EAGLE mobile applications
- The EAGLE Storytelling Application
- Inscriptions in (digital) context: how to enrich epigraphic content with related items
- Mirroring collections and involving users: working with (and learning from) Wikimedia Commons
- Exploiting Social Network’s potential for Epigraphy
