Current Epigraphy
ISSN: 1754-0909

CurEp will soon play host to a virtual seminar on some unpublished Greek and Latin inscriptions from Corinth. The seminar will be directed by Donald Laing and Paul Iversen, with collaboration from Gabriel Bodard and myself. These inscriptions were unearthed on Temple Hill during excavations conducted under Henry Robinson† in the 1970s. We are particularly grateful to Guy Sanders (Director of the ASCSA dig at Corinth) and Charles Watkinson (Chair, ASCSA Publications Committee) for their support of this project.

Starting in mid to late May, about every two weeks throughout the summer Iversen and Laing will upload a preliminary text of an unpublished Greek or Latin inscription along with a photo. They will then invite comments and suggestions for restorations, context, date, etc. The ideas that result from this virtual seminar will then be incorporated into the final print article for Hesperia, with proper attribution to those who proposed any particular idea or reading. Elliott and Bodard will also work up an EpiDoc version of the resulting texts.

The idea behind the seminar is to promote a new model of collaboration and publication of epigraphical texts with the following benefits: a preliminary text will be made available very quickly; scholars or those interested will be able to “attend” the seminar at their leisure from anywhere in the world with an internet connection; students will see how epigraphers work and it may raise more interest in the discipline; the project will introduce epigraphers to the advantages of EpiDoc; there should be more interest in the final print version, which will include comments on this experiment.

Those who monitor CurEp via a feed reader will receive automatic notification whenever a new inscription is posted. The editors of CurEp will also post a corresponding notice to the Inscriptiones-l discussion list.

Yesterday Mark Liberman over at the Language Log posted a short comparison of abbreviations in ancient Latin inscriptions, and the shorthand comminly used (and much reviled) in text-messaging and instant-messaging today (article titled “pont max tr pot lol“).

While this article is light-hearted and only skims the surface of issues such as space saving, the ability of a fluent community to understand abbreviated jargon, and the potential ambiguity of messages sent in this way, there may be a serious point in all this. Is there value in the comparison with other cultures of condensed writing (including but not restricted to text messaging and 1337-speak) as a tool in the teaching and the study of epigraphic and palaeographic abbreviation?

Why do ancient scribes abbreviate? Is there any evidence that abbreviation ever led to ambiguity and misunderstanding of important documents? Is epigraphic abbreviation a completely different phenomenon from digital shorthand, or is there something to be learned from comparisons of this kind–or contrasts?

(Thanks to JLavagnino for pointing out this web log.)

My query about a Hadrianic boundary marker from Bulgaria was occasioned by a demo that Sean Gillies and I (mostly Sean) worked up for online epigraphic image annotation using some free, open-source software called OpenLayers. Sean blogged about the demo, and this has provoked some inquiries from folks in the geospatial computing community, like this one from Paul Ramsey:

What’s the use case for digitized inscriptions? I don’t comprehend.

I thought readers of CurEp might be interested in the demo. I also hope I can encourage a discussion on the potential merits and pitfalls of digitally tracing and annotating inscriptions. Can we answer Paul’s question, both for him and ourselves?