The U.S. Epigraphy Project

My talk will present a case study of the U.S. Epigraphy Project’s efforts to make available on the world wide web comprehensive research and study tools for accessing information about the ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions held in museum, university, and private collections in the United States. As Assistant Director of the Project since 1997, I have been principally responsible for web design and development since the second phase of the project began in late 1997. The Project was founded at Rutgers in the spring of 1995 with the aim of gathering and disseminating information about the ancient epigraphic texts held in American collections. Some 2,300 inscriptions (720 Greek, 1,575 Latin) registered by the Project by the middle of 1997 were recorded in summary fashion in a volume published by the American Academy in Rome, J. Bodel and S. Tracy, Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the USA. A Checklist (Rome and New York 1997). At the beginning of 1998 a comprehensive concordance of the 2,000 published Greek and Latin inscriptions in the USA, searchable by U.S. Epigraphy number (a code indicating current location, by which each inscription is uniquely identified) and publication information, was mounted at the Project website so that the most basic data could most immediately be made available. Photographs of these published inscriptions, when available, have subsequently been added and linked to the U.S. Epigraphy numbers, an initiative that continues. Currently the Project has begun producing full editions of these texts encoded with Extensible Mark Up Language (XML) in accordance with the guidelines established by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and employing a mark-up tool developed by Tom Elliott, Hugh Cayless, and Noel Fiser at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the Epidoc consortium, of which our work constitutes a pilot project. In my presentation, after a general introduction to the website (http://usepigraphy.rutgers.edu), I will give a practical demonstration of how to convert an epigraphic text edited with traditional typographical sigla into the semantic markup system developed by EpiDoc.