At the Digital Classicist work in progress seminar, held at the Insititute for Classical Studies in London on Friday August 8th, Charlotte Roueché gave a presentation under the title, ‘From Stone to Byte: Implications of the XML publication of inscriptions’. She discussed several categories of ancient and mediaeval texts, not only inscriptions, in a whirlwind history of how scholars have developed both “markup” and “citation schemes” to aid in the discussion of texts with other scholars. Editorial conventions and stable citation, both staples of modern scholarship, are the “semantic and structural markup” that are the keystones of TEI XML (and therefore EpiDoc).
Like all of the Digital Classicist seminars this year, Roueché’s presentation is available to download as a pocast audio file and attached slideshow.
Other seminars in this series treated explicitly epigraphic topics, including Porter, Baumann, and Tupman, but most would be worth following for anyone with an interest in the application of computer science to the study of ancient texts.
