CONTENT

Editorial

A Selection of Papers from the Digital Classicist Seminar Berlin (2012–2015)
Matteo Romanello, Martina Trognitz, Undine Lieberwirth, Francesco Mambrini, Felix Schäfer

Digital Classics Online Artikel

Collaborative Mapping in the Age of Ubiquitous Internet: An Archaeological Perspective
Piraye Hacıgüzeller

Over the past decade, collaborative mapping projects have become widespread, allowing for and promoting voluntary participation in cartographic processes. A major factor in the increasing popularity of collaborative mapping in recent years has been the developments in digital cartographic media in general and internet mapping in particular. In this paper the aim is to discuss the possibilities of online collaborative mapping in archaeology. Following an overview of collaborative mapping and its current state in today‘s increasingly online and digital world, four potential modes are introduced through which collaborative mapping in archaeology can be carried out: psychogeography, local community involvement, an online archaeology map system and spatial narratives.

Presenting Fragments as Quotations or Quotations as Fragments
Alexandra Trachsel

In this paper, we shall present some reflections on issues that arise when scholars prepare new editions of fragmentarily preserved works from antiquity. Our focus will be on those fragments that are transmitted as quotations in other extant texts from antiquity. In such cases, the textual sequences considered as fragments have to be dealt with in a particular way, as they are the results of several selection processes that have not been taken into account adequately previously. A digital approach provides better means to represent this special form of fragments, so that the complexity of the transmission of these pieces of evidence can be understood more accurately.

Standards for Networking Ancient Person data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space
Gabriel Bodard, Hugh Cayless, Mark Depauw, Leif Isaksen, K. Faith Lawrence, Sebastian Rahtz†

Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor.

Romans 1 by 1 v.1.1 New developments in the study of Roman population
Rada Varga

The proposed paper documents Romans 1by1, a population database working on Roman-era inscriptions. The database architecture is built for accommodating all categories of people attested epigraphically. Besides the structure, we will present the difficulties faced and questions raised when expanding and diversifying the metadata, as well as the solutions we opted for and our motivation(s) in doing so. The last section of the presentation will focus on some applications of the database. The most obvious ones, which were the focus of our interest so far as well, refer to prosopographical reconstructions (linking people which have not been linked/identified as the same person throughout more inscriptions and reconstructing relatively fluent life courses) and network analyses.

The life cycle of the Book of the Dead as a Digital Humanities resource
Ulrike Henny, Jonathan Blumtritt, Marcel Schaeben, Patrick Sahle

This contribution tracks and analyzes the life cycle of the Book of the Dead as a digital project and a rather complex research resource. It gives an account of how the digital archive “Das altägyptische Totenbuch – Ein digitales Textzeugenarchiv” was constructed in the context of the digitization efforts of the Academy for Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. From the beginning, the design of the archive has factored in a life of the digital archive beyond its funding period and has sighted to create a sustainable information resource. The main issues to be discussed here are what experiences have been made with sustainability, use and reuse of the Book of the Dead archive since the official end of the project in December 2012, with a focus on conceptual, technical and organizational aspects. The lessons learned can be of interest for future undertakings in the creation of XML and web-based digital platforms in Digital Classics and beyond. In a nutshell, they are: (a) the importance of wary technological choices in an initial phase cannot be underestimated, (b) the application and presentation layers of a digital resource, if present, are an essential part of it, (c) a certain degree of commitment from the research community and funding bodies alike is indispensable for maintaining a web-based complex Digital Humanities resource.

Illuminating the Herculaneum Papyri: Testing new imaging techniques on unrolled carbonised manuscript fragments
Kathryn E. Piquette

This article describes the results of advanced imaging pilot testing on unrolled Herculaneum Papyri undertaken in 2014 as part of a collaboration between the Universität zu Köln and the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.1 Building on results obtained by a Brigham Young University team in 1999–2002 using near infrared (NIR) photography, the aim was to test the potential for improving legibility and documentation of surface structures by combining the non-destructive techniques of NIR and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). The results show that, in addition to achieving super high-resolution images with enhanced contrast between the black ink and carbonised papyrus, NIR-RTI enables more accurate recording of surface morphology and enables the user to clarify the relationships between the ink constrate and the papyrus substrate. The article also identifies areas for improving image acquisition and usability.

Mapping the Words: Experimental visualizations of translation structures between Ancient Greek and Classical Arabic
Torsten Roeder

The article deals with presentation forms of linguistic transformation processes from ancient Greek sources that were translated into classical Arabic from the 9th to 11th century AD. Various examples demonstrate how visualizations support the interpretation of corpus structures, lexical differentiation, grammatical transformation and translation processes for single lexemes in the database project Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum. The database contains about 100,000 manually collected word pairs (still growing) from 76 texts and their translations. The article discusses how the project utilizes Sankey diagrams, tree maps, balloon charts, data grids and classical coordinate systems to point out specific aspects of the data. Visualizations not only help beginners to understand the corpus structure, they also help editors and specialized users to identify specific phenomena. A well-documented interface design is crucial both for usability and interpretative work.

Gods, graves and graphs – social and semantic network analysis based on Ancient Egyptian and Indian corpora
Frederik Elwert, Simone Gerhards, Sven Sellmer

In this paper, the authors show the application and use of automated text network analysis based on ancient corpora. The examples draw from Ancient Egyptian sources and the Indian Mahābhārata. Different text-based network generation algorithms like “Nubbi” or “Textplot” are presented in order to showcase alternative methodological approaches. Visualizations of the generated networks will help scholars to grasp complex social and semantic text structures and serve as a starting point for new research questions. All tools for applying the methods to ancient corpora are available as open source software.

Social Networks in Late Hellenistic Northern Etruria: From a multicultural society to a society of partial identities
Raffaella Da Vela

This contribution concerns the perception of local cultural identities in Hellenistic Northern Etruria. I aim to answer the following question: how did the evolution of the economic and politic relationships between settlements condition the perception and the expression of the local identities? During the Romanization, the Region of my case study presents a complexity of patterns, as result of the interaction of local needs and backgrounds with the global process of institutional and economic unification of the Mediterranean following. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been chosen as methodology to approach this complexity. I propose some parameters to detect local identity markers, then I present an integrated method to relate their development to the evolution of the relational networks between the communities.