The interdisciplinary Working Group is included in a public infrastructure (Equipex+) funded by the French government called Biblissima+[1], which brings together 16 public institutions and a private company. The Biblissima digital portal (https://portail.biblissima.fr/en/) provides comprehensive data on the transmission of texts and their images from Antiquity to the Modern Times, encompassing a diverse range of supports, languages, and scripts. To date, metadata and images from 41 datasets are interoperable on the Biblissima Portal.
The Biblissima+ network (https://projet.biblissima.fr/en/project/presentation) comprises seven Working Groups (clusters), each gathering researchers, curators, and engineers from national centers of expertise. Our working group, n° 5A, TEI and Epigraphy, coordinated by Michèle Brunet (Lyon 2 University and HiSoMA Lab) and Estelle Ingrand-Varenne (CNRS, CESCM, Poitiers), brings together epigraphists affiliated with leading French research centers in Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Lyon, Nanterre, Poitiers, Alexandria, Cairo. We are developing digital corpora of inscriptions from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Roman World, Gaul, Middle Ages (East and West) and Modern Period. This cross-cultural approach contributes to refining the conceptual definition of the epigraphic document, emphasizing its material, graphic, and iconographic dimensions.
Consequently, we developed an integrated digital editing environment that combines a generic XML-TEI/EpiDoc template (GenEpiTemplate), a multilingual thesaurus (GenEpiTheso) still under development, and a Zotero shared library (GenEpiBiblio), which consolidates essential bibliographic epigraphical references. Each of these resources will be accessible through the PETRAE portal next spring, powered by the PATRIMONIVM editor, an eXist-db application developed by Vincent Razanajao and Nathalie Prévôt for the Ausonius Institute.
Our enhanced template extends EpiDoc with a broader range of TEI elements to accommodate a more extensive corpus of epigraphic material. It is fully annotated and connected to our multilingual thesaurus, which compiles and harmonizes a descriptive vocabulary for the common characteristics of epigraphic documents across various periods. The thesaurus is organized into seven thematic domains (artifact, material, text, language, script, production, and field of study), and each concept is provided with definitions written from the perspective of epigraphers, translations, conceptual alignments, and URI. It is managed using Opentheso, a thesaurus manager conforming to SKOS, ISO 25964-1:2011 and ISO 25964-2:2012, distributed as an open-source under the CeCILL_C license. It is hosted by the IR* Huma-Num, the French research infrastructure dedicated to research projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences to develop and preserve their data and productions over the long term in an open science context.
This working environment has been designed for French-speaking users with two primary objectives. First, pedagogical, to be utilized during regular epigraphy courses or introductory courses on digital epigraphy. Second, to assist more advanced editors, as the PETRAE platform enables the use of generic templates tailored to a specific digital project.
However, all our work on modeling epigraphic documents also aimed at the creation of a core format for integrating epigraphic datasets into the Biblissima+ portal, by making them available through a new entity Inscription, which was not present before. As a preliminary step, the first two volumes of the Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale, which were already available on the Persée digital library (https://www.persee.fr/collection/cifm), can be viewed directly via IIIF in the portal’s Mirador viewer [example: CIFM I, 60]. Work on the subsequent volumes and other digital epigraphic corpora will continue in the upcoming months.
Bruno Baudoin (1) , Rémi Bonnin (2) , Michèle Brunet (3, 4, 5) , Coline Ruiz Darasse (6) , Léontine Fortin (2, 7) , Estelle Ingrand-Varenne (2) , Emmanuelle Morlock (3) , Blandine Nouvel (1, 8) , Nathalie Prévot (6) , Vincent Razanajao (9, 10) , Stéphanie Satre (1) , Nicolas Souchon (11, 12, 13) , Damien Strzelecki (2)[2]
[1] Biblissima+ has received government funding managed by the National Research Agency as part of the Future Investment Programme integrated into France 2030, under the reference ANR-21-ESRE-0005.
[2] (1) CCJ – Centre Camille Jullian – Histoire et archéologie de la Méditerranée et de l’Afrique du Nord de la protohistoire à la fin de l’Antiquité ; (2) CESCM [Poitiers] – Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale [UMR 7302] ; (3) HiSoMA – Histoire et Sources des Mondes antiques ; (4) EfA – École française d’Athènes ; (5) UL2 UFR LESLA – Université Lumière – Lyon 2 – UFR Lettres, Sciences du langage et Arts ; (6) Ausonius-Institut de recherche sur l’Antiquité et le Moyen âge ; (7) CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ; (8) FRANTIQ – Fédération et Ressources sur l’Antiquité ; (9) CEALEX – Centre d’études Alexandrines ; (10) Collège de France – Chaire Civilisation de l’Égypte pharaonique ; (11) EPHE – École Pratique des Hautes Études ; (12) AOROC – Archéologie et Philologie d’Orient et d’Occident ; (13) IFAO – Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire.
