Joshua D. Sosin
Associate Professor of Classical Studies and History
Director, Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing
Duke University
Integrating Digital Epigraphies (IDEs) aims to provide core disciplinary infrastructure for the field of Greek epigraphy, such as we have built already for documentary papyrology. In the papyrological space Duke and its partners share direct control over all data (texts, images, translations, institutional catalog records, bibliography, geo-data, for ancient papyrus documents). But under IDEs, the Duke team enjoys no direct control over any partner data. Partners include Brill’s SEG Online, Packard Humanities Institute’s Greek Epigraphy Project, Diccionario Griego-Español’s Claros Epigraphy Database, JSTOR, as well as open-licensed images harvested from Flickr, which represent a variety of funding, licensing, and curation models. Thus, instead of building an environment that allows the community of epigraphists to curate these linked data streams directly (which our partners do not contemplate), we are building a set of services that align related data across the multiple resources, support user-based assertion of relationships across resources, mint and manage identifiers for those assertions and relationships, support annotation (comment, translation, text-to-image mapping, vel sim.) within and across resources. In short, we are trying to provide all of the full-bore community-driven curation that papyri.info delivers but in a fully abstracted and independent layer.