Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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To beg<strong>in</strong> this process, Roueché and others started the Epidoc Aphrodisias Project (EPAPP) 351 <strong>in</strong> 2002
to develop tools for present<strong>in</strong>g Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>scriptions on the Internet us<strong>in</strong>g EpiDoc. The project
held two workshops <strong>in</strong> the United States and United K<strong>in</strong>gdom to get <strong>in</strong>put from <strong>in</strong>terested experts, and
the <strong>in</strong>itial outcome of this project was ALA 2004. After secur<strong>in</strong>g more grant fund<strong>in</strong>g, the project
expanded ALA 2004 and also published IAph 2007 (the whole corpus is now referenced as InsAph).
As ALA 2004 is considered to be the second edition of her book, Roueché articulated that the website
that has been produced is stable and all <strong>in</strong>scriptions are citable. Furthermore, Roueché believed that
simply creat<strong>in</strong>g ALA 2004 was important to demonstrate what was possible for an electronic
publication of <strong>in</strong>scriptions. Although she obta<strong>in</strong>ed an ISBN for the website, she had trouble gett<strong>in</strong>g
librarians at her <strong>in</strong>stitution to create a catalog record for it, thus re<strong>in</strong>forc<strong>in</strong>g the idea that the website
was not a real publication, a problem also reported by archaeologists <strong>in</strong>terviewed by Harley et al.
(2010).
Despite this difficulty, even more daunt<strong>in</strong>g were the challenges of data <strong>in</strong>tegration among different
epigraphy projects. As demonstrated through even the brief survey conducted by this review, there are
numerous epigraphy projects onl<strong>in</strong>e, and Roueché reported that more pioneer<strong>in</strong>g work <strong>in</strong> digital
epigraphy has <strong>in</strong>volved Lat<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>scriptions. Nonetheless, as listed above, one of the major Greek
<strong>in</strong>scriptions projects is PHI Greek Inscriptions, which also conta<strong>in</strong>s all the <strong>in</strong>scriptions from
Aphrodisias published through 1993. In the future, Roueché hopes to embed PHI Greek identification
numbers <strong>in</strong> the XML of <strong>in</strong>scriptions <strong>in</strong> ALA 2004 so that the PHI website can automatically receive
updated <strong>in</strong>formation from ALA 2004.
Fundamental to the problem of data <strong>in</strong>tegration, Roueché asserted, is conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>g more epigraphists to
take up the EpiDoc standard. One means of do<strong>in</strong>g this, she concluded, was to demonstrate that EpiDoc
was not a radical shift but rather an extension of how epigraphists have always worked:
The aim is to get epigraphers to perceive that EpiDoc encod<strong>in</strong>g simply represents an extension
of the approach which produced the Leiden conventions. As often <strong>in</strong> humanities comput<strong>in</strong>g, it
is important to demonstrate that the <strong>in</strong>tellectual activities and processes <strong>in</strong> what appear to be
separate fields are <strong>in</strong> fact closely related (Roueché 2009, 165).
Another problem, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Roueché, was that many humanities scholars wanted simply to def<strong>in</strong>e a
problem and then have technicians solve all of the challenges <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g a digital solution, a situation
she rightly concluded was not viable. Key to solv<strong>in</strong>g this difficulty is the development of a common
language, for she noted that both epigraphists and computer scientists have their own acronyms (CIL,
XML). The most critical task, Roueché <strong>in</strong>sisted, is to demonstrate the added scholarly value of
electronic publication to epigraphists. Among the many benefits of electronic publication, perhaps the
most significant Roueché listed was the ability of electronic publication to better accommodate the
<strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary nature of <strong>in</strong>scriptions as both literary texts and archaeological objects. The new ability
to both dissem<strong>in</strong>ate and <strong>in</strong>tegrate <strong>in</strong>scriptions not only with other collections of <strong>in</strong>scriptions but also
with papyri, manuscripts, or seals, Roueché hoped, would help “break down what have been
essentially false dist<strong>in</strong>ctions between texts which all orig<strong>in</strong>ate from the same cultural milieu, but are
recorded on different media” (Roueché 2009, 167). As illustrated throughout the earlier discussion of
archaeology, the ability to re<strong>in</strong>tegrate the textual and material records <strong>in</strong> a digital environment is a
critical issue that must be addressed. In addition, Roueché suggested that it is far easier to update a
351 http://www.epapp.kcl.ac.uk/