As a member of the US Epigraphy Project, I worked with a team of researchers to systematically collect, classify, organize and showcase inscriptions written in the languages of the Roman empire throughout the period of 800 BCE – 700 CE. Our database consists of about 3500 inscriptions from museums across the US, and my job has been to document Latin inscriptions, specifically from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. To “document” means to encode stone inscriptions in a markup language called XML. Following the internationally accepted guidelines of EpiDoc, I have used XML to tag semantic characteristics of inscriptions, such as their physical supports and materials (marble slab, stone tablet, etc.), their history and provenance, the inscribed words themselves, and much more. I have primarily focused on the transcription and translation of inscriptions, which involves careful scrutinization, notation of the text according to the well-established Leiden Conventions, translation into English, and finally transforming this information into a marked-up form in XML. The process is far from straightforward. Even reading the inscriptions can be a challenge; one often finds that words carved into stone 2000 years ago are faded and damaged. Moreover, the physical stone may itself be chipped, fragmented or even missing entire pieces, making it difficult to read parts of the text. Processing the text itself can be challenging as well. In many ways, inscriptions have an idiosyncratic language of their own, consisting of various formulae, such as “D.M.S.”, short for “D(is) M(anibus) s(acrum)” – “Sacred to the Divine Spirits.” Once I have fully understood the text, the subsequent encoding presents an entirely different task. The EpiDoc guidelines are rigorous, extensive and very particular. Each and every letter and marking, no matter how small, requires its own kind of tag. Names require their own system of tagging, along with abbreviations, symbols and highlighted characters. Each and every bit of information fits together like pieces of a puzzle, and deciphering the cryptic languages of inscriptions presents a unique challenge – and, as I have come to find, quite an enjoyable one.
Cheng, Justin Qihua,
"Digitizing Roman Funerary Inscriptions"
(2022).
Summer Research Symposium.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/8tmq-jc21
Each year, Brown University showcases the research of its undergraduates at the Summer Research Symposium. More than half of the student-researchers are UTRA recipients, while others receive funding from a variety of Brown-administered and national programs and fellowships and go …
