1 What Is a Research Infrastructure?
“ ‘Research infrastructure’ means facilities, resources and related services that are used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research in their respective fields and covers major scientific equipment or sets of instruments; knowledge-based resources such as collections, archives or structures for scientific information; enabling Information and Communications Technology-based infrastructures such as Grid, computing, software and communication, or any other entity of a unique nature essential to achieve excellence in research. Such infrastructures may be ‘single-sited’ or ‘distributed’ (an organized network of resources).”2 The concept of research e-infrastructures, or cyberinfrastructures3 is based on expanding the research infrastructures with digital means, offering an enhanced research resource with greater accessibility, but also coming with its own set of challenges, particularly interoperability, technology updates, and sustainability,4 but also a distance of the researcher from their physical resource.5
There is a debate concerned with the roles of research infrastructures—do they provide data, or can they also set research agendas and shape research experience? It has been argued that they can do both.6 The research epistemology and methods are influenced by digital research infrastructures and in turn contribute to their formation. Digital humanities infrastructures often present also a “spatial/visual” turn,7 especially where the potential of spatial humanities, such as a “deep map” is being explored.8
Anderson, in her insightful outline on research infrastructures, proposed “that we need to view infrastructure as a material and experiential presence that is embedded in the practices and experience of research, which builds on and enhances that which already exists, that unites scholars with archivists, librarians, and museum curators, and that also finds a place for the amateur.”9 In this incarnation, cyberinfrastructures may be particularly adaptive for the tasks of encompassing the wide historical span of records in humanities—from legacy to newest born-digital data. This aspect makes them particularly useful for archaeology and epigraphy.10 The other aspect is enhancing accessibility—a diaspora of academic data across institutions and countries can become reachable, leveling somewhat the inequalities of access to hardcopy libraries and archives.11
2 Why a Research Infrastructure on “Secondary Epigraphy”?
Secondary epigraphy—also known as graffiti—represents a visual and written communication that reflects different social worlds of the past, from the elites to the people marginalized in other records. Secondary epigraphy12 is a large corpus of texts and figures of non-monumental character, widespread in, but not limited to, the ancient world. Egypt is particularly rich in secondary epigraphy, and its ancient corpus from 3000 BC to 400 AD is multilingual and multicultural, as indeed are the subsequent corpora until the present day.
Graffiti, i.e. texts and figures added to man-made structures and in anthropogenic landscapes, are a widely known but underestimated resource, although they illustrate cultural patterns and personal agency expressed by a large part of past populations, elite and non-elite alike.13 They represent a unique access to the history of humanity—and the research of their “siblings,” the rock inscriptions and art, is already using digital technology with increasing quality and quantity of results,14 and enabling a qualitative change in mapping and interpreting this vast resource.15
Within the discussions on the multilingual corpus of secondary epigraphy,16 we have identified fragmented research efforts, and a compartmentalization of study of secondary epigraphy at Egyptian archaeological sites, particularly where diachronic development is concerned.17 Many ancient sites had a role in local communities for generations after the demise of or change in their original function, and this role was attested in graffiti. Can we emphasize the complexity of historical continuity and change by harnessing the capability of digital infrastructures to map secondary epigraphy?
The SEE project proposes that we can. Its intended result, a gazetteer on Egyptian graffiti locating and linking available graffiti information, with links to other research infrastructures, should provide information concerning site, monument, date, script, and language of the graffiti. This is essential for a contextual study of secondary epigraphy advocated explicitly at least since 1976.18 The infrastructure would not be limited to one type of writing, one language, or one historical period, but would pool data on all secondary epigraphy features present at a site, and information about their spatial and geographical location.19
3 Egyptology, DH and Research Infrastructures
The present volume showcases a number of approaches to and uses of digitization in Egyptology as of 2019/2020.20 Digital photography, multispectral photography and other related techniques—the next generation of photographic and related documentation—are illustrated in other papers in this volume and elsewhere.21 Digital epigraphy has been well-documented at least since the mid-1990s.22
Mapping all digital initiatives in Egyptology would, by now, require a small volume, and it can only be drafted here. The texts and digital approaches to text analysis are a prominent concern. Developments of this area of interest were mapped by Rosmorduc.23 Computational linguistics approaches were considered for Egyptology as early as in the 1960s.24 Here Egyptology has faced a particular problem of encoding the hieroglyphic script. The Egyptian writing system presents specific issues for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or various automated text mining approaches. But presenting texts is becoming less of an issue.25 Creating digital editions, a powerful tool where collaboration and accessibility are concerned, is helped by TEI and EpiDoc platform.
A general overview of the ongoing Egyptological discussions from the 1970s onwards can be gleaned from the volumes of the series of the workshops “Informatique et Égyptologie.”26 It is of interest to note that “I&E” was contemporary with or even preceding some other digital humanities publications.27 As a glimpse of their tables of contents may show, making Egyptological practice digital,28 the digitization of texts, and creation of text corpora, as well as of digital access to museum collections (or to corpora of particular artefacts, coffins, shabtis, sealings, etc.), were at the forefront, with the manual for encoding hieroglyphic texts being developed since the 1980s. The dictionaries and text data banks are by now a stable part of the Egyptology digital landscape and developed in successful viable projects over the years—Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae29 and Ramsés30 being a case in point.
Other topics were discussed as well, if less prominently. Possibilities of Egyptological publishing in the developing digital environment were presented and debated.31 Artificial Intelligence appeared in the discussion as early as 1986.32 Digital organization of archaeological data has been addressed since the 1980s as well.33 Since 1989, specialist presentations on relational databases and data management34 were discussed by Dag Bergman and Nigel Strudwick.35 Strudwick and Adams presented an example of a relational database oriented to Egyptian iconography—a model of a viable research infrastructure that was developed in discussions at the I&E. They were also clear that in thinking about information, the digital turn is a new generation, but does not constitute a radical change in work with organized data. “A database is a collection of related data. Not all databases are in computers: the telephone book, dictionary, and encyclopedia are all databases of sorts … Computerized databases have the advantage of being searched quickly and changed easily. More importantly, they can be organized in several different ways … creating indexes.”36 At present, this quote may seem superfluous because it apparently states the obvious. Nonetheless, the “manual database system”37 has been a useful precursor, especially if a manual database had already been well organized.
Equally, it is important to note that past data do not become obsolete with the digital turn—indeed, organized data in bibliographies or encyclopedias can be and are being used as excellent starting points for complex digital infrastructures.38 Similarly, museum catalogues and registers are incorporated in new digital presentations of museum collections, again growing incrementally.39
A step toward the idea of an interconnected information system or infrastructure was proposed by Fathi Saleh,40 who proposed a universal coding system for museum databases with Egyptian objects and a plea for a technology-assisted international Egyptological communication was made by Fekri Hassan.41 Further advancement was proposed by Pawel Wolf42 who discussed a shared standard of information in a rapidly growing landscape of diverse datasets and databanks. More recently, Vincent Razanajao has underscored the need for consistency in digital datasets and formats used to record and keep them.43
However, the tendency to establish data standards and shared points of reference did not come with the digital initiative but again has had a longer tradition. To follow these pre-digital developments, we must return deeper into the Egyptological past. An early Egyptological bibliography was introduced by the Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth as the so-called “fiches bibliographiques”, available on subscription in the 1930s. Its successors became known as the Annual Egyptological Bibliography (after 1947), and the Online Egyptological Bibliography in its current digital incarnation.44
The organization of Egyptological knowledge in research infrastructures also has a pre-digital tradition as georeferenced infrastructure—the Topographical Bibliography. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Rosalind Moss developed an idea of a topographical bibliography. Her intellectual effort aimed at a systemization of the Egyptological information. It is remarkable that her project makes Egyptology an early participant of the making of the Information Age,45 as her infrastructure was aiming at achieving a hub for scholars. It was discipline-specific, but a coeval and a small-size parallel to substantially larger cross-disciplinary projects of Paul Otlet or Wilhelm Ostwaldt.46 These projects had roots in the social and cultural developments of the late nineteenth century, and did not immediately succeed, but their concepts were poised to suggest a quantitative as well as a qualitative change in research, and circulation of information in general.
Rosalind Moss developed her concept of a topographical bibliography as a categorization of sites, monuments, parts of monuments and finds organized according to sites. The Topographical Bibliography has been developed to include a geo-referencing aspect from its outset, recently fully used in its present incarnation with GIS.47
The first volume of the Topographical Bibliography was dedicated to the Theban area and appeared in 1927, being followed to date by eight others, moving from geographically situated archaeological locations to unprovenanced finds. The first book was in the making for nearly three decades and required a painstaking collection of bibliographical data, but also an organization according to a geographical-spatial key.
The description of monuments gradually gained more granularity. The 1960 revised edition of the first Theban volume “differs in many respects from its predecessor, and the scope has been enlarged to provide a brief description of all scenes in accessible tombs, many still unpublished, together with tomb-plans, and maps showing their position in the necropolis.”48 The scope of included documentation and records pertaining to individual monuments had also developed: “Besides the references to new publications, it has been thought worthwhile to include certain important series of photographs, notably those taken by Harry Burton for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, by the Chicago Oriental Institute, and by Professor Siegfried Schott.”49 Both published and unpublished archive documentation was increasingly included in the concept of this dataset. It was an adventurous mind-set, integrating the field and the archive, and not fully implemented until today, as diverse funding, organizational, and institutional settings are not always in position to facilitate a practical and prompt accessibility of emerging fieldwork material, ideally layered with archival data.
These historical, or legacy, records of Egyptology are also an important historiographical resource that feeds into history of Egyptology, its self-fashioning and its public image and reflections. Records preserved in the archives document a visual and written culture of Egyptology50 influenced by a network of circumstances, interests, and audiences.51 The digital datasets including legacy records are in a good position to be effective tools enabling access to a combined body of historical and contemporary evidence.52 A practical example of making unpublished research archives available digitally, building on Moss’s legacy, is the Howard Carter archive presented in Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation,53 a comparable well-organized project is the Digital Giza.54
The infrastructures, be it the dictionary or the bibliographies, were and are growing organically, in a good practice identified later as crucial for a successful infrastructure: “Infrastructure development and take up is far more successful if it emerges from researchers own practices: if it fills gaps in existing provision, or it is a solution to identified problems and perceived difficulties. Infrastructure will be taken up if it is seen to be integral to the achievement of research goals.”55
4 A Case for a Secondary Epigraphy Infrastructure—Identifying a Corpus
Is there a case for a secondary epigraphy infrastructure that would be “seen to be integral to the achievement of research goals”? There is, after all, the Topographical Bibliography with site-specific date on rock texts, inscriptions, and select corpora of secondary epigraphy, especially if containing hieroglyphic texts. There is also Trismegistos—“an interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources.”56 These are valuable resources in operation as of the time of writing, and it is to be hoped that they will remain cornerstones of Egyptological information landscape, linked also to any secondary epigraphy infrastructure that may be developed later. However, they were not intended to cover fully the area of secondary epigraphy in its specific character, namely: strong relation to the site, location, and placement within the monument (requiring georeferencing and visualization), or long-term multilingual character, requiring metadata and digital presentation of texts from multiple languages. At the same time, the need to relate and link information in the Topographical Bibliography or Trismegistos (not to mention other datasets) is also evident, as the following case for SEE will show.
Secondary epigraphy in Egypt has been studied since the early days of Egyptology. The following paragraphs will introduce but a few milestones in its analysis.57 In the 1890s, Wilhelm Spiegelberg noted that a set of New Kingdom documents relating on Western Thebes indicated that there must have lived a community of specialized artists and artisans. He also noted that there were many inscriptions in the West Theban hills and suggested that these texts and figures could have been related to West Theban communities.58 He saw graffiti of Western Thebes as a corpus with local historical significance. In the 1920s, Jaroslav Černý followed Spiegelberg’s idea and began a long-term, systematic “graffiti hunt” in Western Thebes.59 Although site-specific graffiti editions were by that time nothing new, the idea that there was a corpus with a particular, localized, historical content that could be connected spatially to other local resources had not yet been implemented elsewhere.
In the 1930s, Battiscombe Gunn observed that the graffiti in the Step pyramid complex at Saqqara were part of a larger corpus that spread across Egypt, and contained repetitive formulae, which changed over time. Gunn thus set a schema for perceiving graffiti as a corpus substantiating social and cultural history evolution. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, something of a historical interest could be seen, contrasting with later times, when prayers and devotional concerns took the front seat.60 In the 1970s, Ricardo Caminos noted that graffiti added on the surface of Egyptian monuments “cannot be disregarded.” Furthermore, “They often are, or may later prove to be, of highest significance and interest historically, philologically, and in many other ways. They may consist of writing alone, of figures, or a combination of both; they occur in a variety of languages and scripts; and as regards time range, they may be as old as the monument itself and as recent as today.”61 Yet again, graffiti were perceived as an eloquent witness of Egyptian history, locally as well as comprehensively. Caminos was also very sensitive to the context of graffiti: they belonged to their wall, and the wall belonged to them.
These Egyptologists contributed significantly to the study and methodology of study of epigraphic features, and largely took the term “graffiti” for granted. However, the “graffiti” are a complex category, defying a technical description or a strict categorization.62 In 1999, Richard Parkinson defined text graffiti as “an integral part of Egyptian writing practice and of official culture.”63 In addition, figural graffiti have a wider appeal.64 They appear everywhere where humans have passed.
The numbers are large: We are looking at hundreds of sites and thousands to tens of thousands of texts and figures, published and unpublished. Essentially every site in Egypt comes with secondary epigraphy attached. The historical examples of graffiti corpora mentioned above referred to texts and figural images, to hieroglyphs as well as hieratic and Demotic texts, and to locations involving temples, tombs, and natural features such as rock cliffs, the latter being part of a landscape substantially shaped and marked by human hand. Eventually, secondary markings appear on statues and stelae.
To name such a diverse material by one name, be it “graffiti,” or “secondary epigraphy,” may be rather bewildering, especially as neither a precise location nor a technique of execution can be agreed to prevail and characterize graffiti.65 Yet, the unifying name also has a certain legitimacy. It comprises epigraphical features that are not part of a primary decorative scheme (if such there be), but have been added as derivative, auxiliary, subsequently, even repeatedly as a reaction to a site, and as a factor in change and adaptation of the historical sites.66 The sites have a life, and edifices have a life cycle, hence by exploring graffiti we are looking for more than just an epigraphy record, but for a biography of a place. But it is the epigraphy record and its data that are our starting points.
Graffiti are written in a range of scripts and a multitude of languages, corresponding to multiple written cultures that have come in and out of being, sometimes overlapping, sometimes consecutively, in the geographic region of the Egyptian Nile valley since pharaonic times. Often by necessity (cf. Caminos 1976), diverse groups of texts and figures on one and the same monument might have been published in separate editions and often without an explicit relation to their location.
Using an example of the temples at Abydos, it is striking that information on graffiti, their readings and spatial analysis of their location is dispersed across a number of publications, which, though they generally acknowledge the presence of graffiti, give no details of number, place, contents, etc. In addition, graffiti in Abydos (as in many Egyptian sites) also have unpublished, legacy records, largely in the Griffith Institute Archive, Oxford (Sayce, Gunn and Černý MSS in the Griffith Institute Archive, University of Oxford), and the Dumbarton Oaks Archive, Washington, DC. The case of Abydos illustrates a more general problem. Egyptian material from one site is frequently split among several disciplines. Hieroglyphic to Demotic graffiti, are studied by Egyptologists and Demotists, Greek and Roman graffiti by Classicists, and so on.67
Also, even existing epigraphy databases typically focus on one language, script, or site, and do not integrate evidence from different periods.68 Whilst this is understandable due to practical demands and disciplinary boundaries, it also inadvertently blurs the historical continuity of the existence of a site. A corpus that would be dedicated specifically to secondary epigraphy would benefit the understanding of this continuity, and the indications offered by secondary epigraphy for the study of social and cultural history as well as localized microhistory of sites or buildings.
5 SEE—A Digital Research Infrastructure
The SEE therefore proposes a different concept compared to the proposal of a visitors’ graffiti database69 as it is multilingual and multicultural and enables mapping of cultural and religious change, as opposed to an idea of a specific limited text corpus. The previous proposal, albeit it would have enabled a work with a significant corpus (as its embryo phase on spreadsheets had begun to do),70 would not have provided fully for the cultural biography aspect of study of monuments and landscapes.71 In the Thaller definition of dataset approaches, the visitors’ graffiti database was method-oriented, categorizing a particular set of texts, whereas SEE is intended as a source-oriented infrastructure.
The SEE team believes that there is an urgent need to systemize and synergize the somewhat fragmented ongoing research in secondary epigraphy. Its ontology and methodologies have evolved, but standards for recommended and best practices in recording, archiving, and publication are needed. Also needed are a close attention to individual case studies, and a research practice that is flexible and open to changes in paradigm (as was demonstrated by modern graffiti studies).72 There is a large body of ongoing graffiti research in Classical studies, using the concepts of materiality of text, and concepts based on or similar to an “anthropology of the text,”73 embedding the graffiti and graffiti writers in their social world. Regionally based projects also attempt to provide a comprehensive map of textual and visual communication within a geographical region.74 The secondary epigraphy across Egypt has a comparative perspective to offer, and its impact goes beyond the study of the ancient world. There is in addition a future scope for including of modern Arabic and European epigraphy in Egypt. The tools offered by digital humanities may provide a practical approach.
A pooling of research information on secondary epigraphy among different disciplines that study material from Egypt will make it possible to develop research networking that allows for a timelier circulation of research data, as well as for a consolidation and development of standards. SEE proposes a knowledge-based digital resource with legacy and contemporary records to deliver up-to-date research information, i.e., a research infrastructure. The research infrastructure software and interface solutions will be addressed, integrating the EpiDoc description scheme,75 and geographical coordinates, with a URL for each graffiti group or individual graffito and information about its spatial location. The spatial aspect has proved crucial for analysis of secondary epigraphy—the practice is best evaluated in a highly contextualized approach.
As the research resource will contain data that are also open to change with ongoing archaeological and epigraphical work, differentiated levels of description are proposed. The epigraphic features are proposed to be presented with three levels of description, depending on available data and allowing for a modular work on individual sites and monuments.
Level 1 concerns presence and quantity of secondary epigraphy on site, and indication on approximate historical periods, scripts and languages represented in the body of secondary epigraphy evidence. Level 2 concerns individual monuments and adds location and placement of the secondary epigraphy features and their spatial relations if applicable. Level 3 is a description of individual graffiti or graffiti groups and will include a digital edition in EpiDoc. This level may be fully included only for published graffiti for which the copyright and other legal issues have been adequately addressed. In all cases bibliography of graffiti on the site and in any given monument should be included, with links to existing specialized bibliographies. The sites and monuments or individual texts should be also linked to other relevant research infrastructures, including but not limited to Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, EAGLE, Topographical Bibliography, and the Pelagios platform.
6 Technical Summary
SEE is proposing to set up a research infrastructure that is open on both the epistemological and the technological side. The epistemological side contains several historical and philological disciplines—Greek, Egyptian, Coptic, and potentially Arabic material would be made accessible. Technically, the concept envisages API communications with other datasets, as well as an alignment with the Thot project76 to join the proposed semantic web of Egyptian cultural heritage linking different thesauri.
There are three levels of description in the research infrastructure using XML as the main descriptive language, enabling preservation of data in a non-proprietary form. The ideal technical solution was proposed by the project partner, King’s College Digital Lab in London, along the following guidelines:77 Using the open-source web framework Django, King’s Digital Lab would create an online resource that facilitates the creation, storage, and discovery of the three levels of data. Django will interface with the platform EFES (EpiDoc Front End Services), a readily customizable platform for publication and search/indexing of EpiDoc files, based on the Kiln platform developed and maintained by KDL. An online interface will allow team members to enter level 1 & 2 data directly into the resource and KDL will explore the possibility of building an EpiDoc editor in Django to enable direct creation of inscription editions, too. Users will be able to drill down through the levels of data using either faceted browse functionality or map visualizations. Inscription texts will be displayed in diplomatic and edited versions and the underlying XML will also be viewable. The qualities of being user friendly, and open, and linkable, are essential, and in terms of Egyptological context, the aim would be to liaise with the Topographical Bibliography as one of the project’s priority goals, but other epigraphy-oriented databases and relevant projects are equally important.
7 Why SEE Matters?
The research infrastructures are still perceived as both a national and an international asset. Anderson listed a Taiwanese, Canadian, and European approach, all coinciding in their emphasis on competitiveness in research and success in economy as motivations for research infrastructures—which is not necessarily boding well for infrastructures in humanities.78 Thus Anderson: “the European Commission established the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) to create a roadmap that would guide significant funding for research infrastructures. The Roadmap says that the aim is ‘to develop the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its international outreach’ with the goals of keeping Europe at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation, to help drive economic development. There is also an underlying political aim to support and enhance European unity and to promote a sense of European unity internationally.”79 These are bold aims, and not ones that would always prove helpful to building and developing infrastructures in the humanities, because they may set short-term, as opposed to long-term, goals, and may impose directives not allowing for an organic growth of the infrastructure.
Consequently, it is fast becoming a trend to build large and small infrastructures with a defined thematic target, to create a tangible, measurable asset.80 Yet, it is also needed to interconnect these datasets, or to build such infrastructures that are designed purposefully as overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Thot initiative very helpfully suggested building standards these infrastructures should ideally use in Egyptology.81
The core elements of the SEE project—a proof of concept for an Egyptian graffiti research resource, and an identification of recording standards and an analytical and interpretive framework for secondary epigraphy—would answer pressing issues regarding multifaceted Egyptian material in particular, but also research on secondary epigraphy in general. Its target is also to overcome disciplinary boundaries. The vulnerability of secondary epigraphy on site as well as of modern records of it intensifies the need to build an accessible and reliable digital resource, concentrating diverse evidence and references at one port of call.
The project concept has an unusually long chronological scope (from 3000 BC to 400 AD, with potential for extension), and it involves complex textual and visual material. It aims to extend and develop the scope of earlier studies which focused narrowly on graffiti in one particular language by offering a broader, synoptic approach arranged on the basis of geographical context. Its general applicability as a case study goes beyond individual Egyptian locations, fostering interdisciplinary communication relevant for an understanding of history and changes of archaeological sites.
The appeal of the project is to international scholars including Egyptian scholars as key stakeholders and decision makers. The compilation of a significant dataset within the research resource pilot would improve accessibility of material for Classicists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists, and would allow them to explore the geolocation and visualization of the material, offering a succinct presentation comprehensible across disciplines. A range of specialized subjects would benefit, from archaeology to anthropology, and to ancient history.
The concept would build on and expand the legacy of existing e-infrastructures and contribute to further integrated use and development of “big and deep data” in ancient history. Existence of a multilingual accessible corpus of secondary epigraphy, showcasing its applicability in historical research, also opens up the possibility of involving communication and media specialists in their analysis. It should also become a helpful resource for future academic activity—from undergraduate studies to advanced research in ancient history, including in context of archaeological fieldwork. Eventually, the project could offer a methodology applicable to other graffiti corpora not only within, but beyond the ancient world, as secondary epigraphy has been produced in all historical periods including the present.
The contribution draws from a number of project planning discussions and grant-writing sessions at the University of Reading and the King’s College, London. A number of colleagues (listed further in a random order, but all having had a decisive input) contributed to the development of the idea of a secondary epigraphy infrastructure. I would like to thank Ian Rutherford, Rachel Mairs, Kathryn Piquette, Paul Caton, Pamela Mellen, Emma Aston, Samantha Sherry, Charlotte Johnson and the University of Reading research development team. In addition, input and ideas for this concept were gained over a number of years, going back to an early idea of a more limited graffiti database presented in 2004. A great impetus was provided by the Informatique et Égyptologie meetings in Oxford in 2006, and in Vienna in 2008, as many other colleagues contributed by being willing discussants. I have learned a lot about research infrastructures during my time (2008–2011) at the Topographical Bibliography, at the Griffith Institute, Oxford, under the supervision of Jaromir Malek and working alongside the “TopBib” team. Inconsistencies and mistakes in this paper remain, of course, my own responsibility.
A definition promoted by RISCAPE (European Research Infrastructures in the International Landscape),
Cf. Anderson 2013, 4.
On an example of a technology & equipment infrastructure that had faced challenges, Foka et al. 2018, with further references. In case of digital datasets and specially designed applications, the software interoperability issues, financial sustainability, data migration and memory demands represent further challenges.
Barker et al. 2012, 185.
Anderson 2013.
Barker et al. 2012, 185.
Bodenhamer, Harris and Corrigan 2013, see further in more detail Bodenhamer, Harris and Corrigan 2015.
Anderson 2013, 4.
There are many examples of good practice around—a large site-specific case study is represented by the Giza Archives online—the address being, as of November 2019,
As noted, e.g., by Quirke 2013 on a particular example of materials for history of Egyptology.
Ragazzoli 2018.
Keegan 2014, compare Darnell et al. 2002, and also Grajetzki 2008.
See Wilding Brown 2017, and for visualization Urcia et al. 2018.
On the social and cultural history potential see most recently Brown 2017, and Polkowski 2016, with references.
I am grateful for the input of Rachel Mairs and Ian Rutherford in particular, on the multilingual context.
As noted by Rutherford 2003.
Caminos 1976.
There is an awareness of the challenges posed to spatial humanities, especially when using historical and ambiguous data, or when dealing with a changing landscape and cityscape. Nonetheless: “Finding ways to make the interaction among words, location, and quantitative data more dynamic and intuitive will yield rich insights into complex sociocultural, political, and economic problems, with enormous potential for areas far outside the traditional orbits of humanities research. In short, we should vigorously explore the means by which to advance translation from textual to visual communication, making the most of visual media and learning to create ‘fits’ between the messages of text and numbers and the capabilities of visual forms to express spatial relationships.” Bodenhamer, Harris and Corrigan 2013, 173.
The number, or even categorization of digital projects in Egyptology is beyond the scope of this paper and even the volume, as they range from complex digital paleography tools such as AKU (
Compare Vértesz 2019 for an accessible outline.
Der Manuelian 1998.
Rosmorduc 2015.
See Rosmorduc 2015.
Rosmorduc 2015.
The Informatique & Égyptologie series now has a number of volumes, the latest published volume being Polis and Winand 2013.
For a 1990s overview, contemporary to the quickly developing I&E series, see Greenstein 1994, with references to computer-aided history research reaching to the 1960s.
For an introduction see Bergman 1990.
Cf. Strudwick 1987.
Marx 1988.
Sinclair and Troy 1988.
At that point, a large part of discussion on databases in historical research was also oriented at the type of database approach—whether they ought to be method-oriented, or source-oriented. The distinction was spearheaded by Manfred Thaller. “By method-oriented, he means the approach adopted by historians using relational methodologies … where the historical resource is converted into a set of strict and well-defined conceptual categories. With the source-oriented approach, on the other hand, the historian always enters the original text into the computer, only later deciding on the categories …” Harvey and Press 1996, 190.
Adams and Strudwick 1990; Adams and Strudwick 2008; see also Bergman 2008.
Adams and Strudwick 1990, 9–10.
Greenstein 1994, 61.
See Online Egyptological Bibliography—
Digitization of the Journal d’entrée of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo—Kamrin 2015.
Saleh 1990.
Hassan 2007.
Wolf 1993.
See the Book of Abstracts, the International Congress of Egyptology 2019, V. Razanajao.
The transfer begun in 2008 at the I&E Vienna meeting, cf. Preface in Strudwick 2008.
Compare Wright 2014 on the topic.
On these see Wright 2014.
For development of the Topographical Bibliography in Digital Topographical Bibliography see
Or, in other words “A GIS is a combination of a database and a computer mapping system in which every item of data is georeferenced to give it a real-world location.” The potential to use with corpora of finds, or with text corpora, is evident: “This structure offers a number of advantages: it allows the researcher to explore the database by location to ask questions such as What is here? and What is near here?; it allows data to be mapped to summarize the geographies that the database contains; it allows data from different sources to be integrated because all data are underlain by real-world coordinates; and it provides a platform for spatial analysis, a form of statistical analysis in which the locations of the items under study are explicitly included with the analysis (Gregory, Cooper, Hardie and Rayson 2015, 152).”
Moss, in Burney et al. 1960, vii.
Moss, in Burney et al. 1960, vii.
Borrowing from the title of a book by John Baines (Visual and Written culture, Oxford 2007).
Aptly summed up by Lewis 2016, 9.
Compare digital collections such as the Griffith Institute Archive
Cf. above,
Anderson 2013, 11.
Gülden 2008; Verreth 2016.
See further Navratilova 2011, also outline of research in Navratilova 2015, and upcoming volume of conference proceedings “Clamour from the Past”.
Spiegelberg 1895 and 1898.
First articulated the idea to Lexa in 1926; the IFAO mission led by B. Bruyère accepted this research plan. On early research plans of Černý see Navratilova 2021.
Griffith Institute Archive, University of Oxford Battiscome Gunn Collection, Gunn Mss. XIII.3.
Caminos 1976, 20–22.
For Egyptian material see Cruz-Uribe 2008a and b; Navratilova 2010. In more general terms contributions in Taylor and Baird 2011, also Keegan 2014.
Parkinson 1999, 92.
Staring 2018; Pelt and Staring 2019.
Navratilova 2010. Salvador 2020.
Ragazzoli 2013; 2017; Frood 2013.
for Abydos see Crum, Milne and Murray 1904; Perdrizet and Lefebvre 1919; Gunn in Frankfort 1933; Kornfeld 1978; Rutherford 2003; Bucking 2014; Westerfeld in Choat and Giorda 2017.
Compare e.g., Packard Humanities Institute database,
Navratilova 2004.
Cf. Navratilova 2006.
Articulated by the outcomes of the workshop Walking Dead II, October 2019, Cairo, the Ministry of Antiquities, with a forthcoming publication in 2022.
Samutina and Zaporozhets 2015, for instance in interpretive changes of reading graffiti as articulating subversion vs. graffiti articulating establishment values or debating both.
So defined by Hilgert 2017.
Seidlmayer et al. 2013.
EpiDoc is a tool for encoding scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents. It uses a subset of the Text Encoding Initiative’s standard for the representation of texts in digital form. See
In more detail
With many thanks for technical outline to Paul Caton, Pamela Mellen, Ariana Ciula, and Samantha Callaghan, King’s College Digital Lab, London.
Barker et al. 2012.
Anderson 2013, 5.
Compare Egyptological and related projects, such as Lowe 2016; Dilley 2017; Kalchgruber and Hudáková 2017; Töpfer 2018; Reggiani 2019 to name but a few projects in the last five years. A number of projects was presented in Polis, Winand and Gillen 2013; Hafemann 2003; a Topographical Bibliography-inspired approach but applied on a single site Buongarzone 2003; an outline of earlier text databases focused on religious texts was offered by DuQuesne 2001.
Polis and Razanajao 2016 and see following note. An earlier call for standardization Plas 1996.
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