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

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this idea of personal ownership of objects and data was also strongly illustrated <strong>in</strong> archaeology (Harley
et al. 2010). While personal <strong>in</strong>vestment has its merits, Bagnall also proposed that “control is the enemy
of susta<strong>in</strong>ability; it reduces other people’s <strong>in</strong>centive to <strong>in</strong>vest <strong>in</strong> someth<strong>in</strong>g.” Regard<strong>in</strong>g the experience
of IDP, Bagnall worried that too much discussion centered upon revenue rather than expense, and
strongly doubted that there was any “viable earned-<strong>in</strong>come option for papyrology.” While the IDP
briefly considered direct subscription charges and also pondered creat<strong>in</strong>g an endowment, they
ultimately abandoned both ideas.
Although they considered it likely that they could raise some money, the IDP was uncerta<strong>in</strong> of how
much money would be needed and of what they wanted to “fund <strong>in</strong> perpetuity.” They <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly
realized that if neither the APIS nor the DDbDP were “defensible silos,” then neither was the
discipl<strong>in</strong>e of papyrology. Far more essential than preserv<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>dividual projects, Bagnall reasoned, was
develop<strong>in</strong>g a shared set of data structures and tools to exploit various types of ancient evidence. As
previously noted by Roueché <strong>in</strong> her overview of digital epigraphy, many of the discipl<strong>in</strong>ary divisions
so entrenched today are <strong>in</strong> many ways, as Bagnall eloquently expresses, “arbitrary divisions of a
seamless spectrum of written expression” that <strong>in</strong>clude numerous sources. Susta<strong>in</strong>ability for the IDP,
Bagnall proposed, “will come <strong>in</strong> the first <strong>in</strong>stance from shar<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> an organizational and technological
<strong>in</strong>frastructure ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed to serve a much wider range of resources for the ancient world (and perhaps
not necessarily limited to antiquity, either)” (Bagnall 2010). Technological <strong>in</strong>frastructure will be one
major cost; content creation and ma<strong>in</strong>tenance are two others. The way forward for papyrology, Bagnall
concluded, was to go beyond its limits as a discipl<strong>in</strong>e and <strong>in</strong> particular its separateness. Indeed, as
illustrated by this review, many scholars have commented on the fact that the digital environment has
rather unexpectedly provided new opportunities to transcend discipl<strong>in</strong>ary boundaries and to promote a
more <strong>in</strong>tegrated view of the ancient world.
EpiDoc, Digital Papyrology, and Reus<strong>in</strong>g Digital Resources
As illustrated above, EpiDoc is be<strong>in</strong>g used by the IDP project to <strong>in</strong>tegrate several papyrology projects.
The use of this standard has also allowed researchers to explore new questions us<strong>in</strong>g the V<strong>in</strong>dolanda
tablets. Recent work by eSAD 508 (eScience and Ancient Documents), a collaborative project between
the e-Research Centre and Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and Eng<strong>in</strong>eer<strong>in</strong>g Science at
University of Oxford, has exam<strong>in</strong>ed the various ways <strong>in</strong> which the highly granular encod<strong>in</strong>g of the
V<strong>in</strong>dolanda tablets can “be used to create a reusable word and character corpus for a networked e-
Science system and other e-Science applications” (Roued 2009). The eSAD project has two major
goals: (1) to develop e-Science tools that aid <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>terpret<strong>in</strong>g damaged texts; and (2) to develop new
image-analysis algorithms that can be used with digitized images of ancient texts. In terms of
V<strong>in</strong>dolanda, Roued <strong>in</strong>vestigated how the encoded EpiDoc XML of the tablets could be used to create a
knowledge base of Lat<strong>in</strong> words for an Interpretation Support System (ISS) that would assist users <strong>in</strong>
read<strong>in</strong>g other ancient documents.
The V<strong>in</strong>dolanda project had decided to use EpiDoc to support at least a m<strong>in</strong>imal level of semantic
encod<strong>in</strong>g for the tablets. Roued noted that even with standard conventions such as Leiden, not all the
conventions were applied evenly, as some scholars used “underdots” to <strong>in</strong>dicate partially preserved
characters while others used them to demonstrate doubtful characters. The use of EpiDoc consequently
addressed these types of issues with Leiden encod<strong>in</strong>g as it was commonly practiced:
508 http://esad.classics.ox.ac.uk