Elliott Addresses Conference on Digital Epigraphy

In September, Tom Elliott (ISAW's Associate Director for Digital Programs) traveled to Paris to deliver the opening keynote address for the EAGLE 2014 International Conference. The event focused on information technologies for epigraphy and digital cultural heritage in the ancient world. Elliott has posted a transcript of his remarks — entitled "Eighteen Years of EpiDoc. Now What?" — on his blog, Horothesia. He reflects, in part, upon a technological approach for epigraphic documentation that he launched in the late 1990s and which has seen increasingly wide adoption around the world. Several of the online resources in which ISAW participates make use of EpiDoc, including: Papyri.info and the Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā.

The conference featured three days of stimulating papers and posters addressing a variety of topics relevant to the conference theme. Among the projects presented, several were noteworthy for their use and refinement of digital techniques also used by ISAW and its collaborators (including EpiDoc, Linked Open Data, digital imaging, and 3D modeling). The program and a digital poster exhibition remain online and provide a glimpse of the range and depth of the discussion.

The conference was organized by EAGLE Europeana (another EpiDoc-using project), which is uniting collaborators from around the globe to build a single, user-friendly portal to the inscriptions of the ancient Greek and Roman world. It was co-hosted by the École Normale Supérieure and the Chair for Religion, Institutions, and Society of Ancient Rome of the Collège de France, with support from the European Commission under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme.