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Inscriptions of Aphrodisias: Paradigm of an Electronic Publication.
(Gabriel Bodard)
- Gabriel Bodard
- gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk
- King's College London
- London
- United Kingdom
Inscriptions, as studied by epigraphers, ancient texts inscribed on stone or other
durable materials, are an important source of access to various ancient societies,
and particularly the worlds of Ancient Greece and Rome. The conventional
publication of inscriptions has however tended to keep them in an academic
limbo — not quite literary text and not quite archaeological object. By publishing
the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias1 — a corpus of over two thousand texts, mostly
in Greek, and from a single, marble-rich city in Asia Minor spanning nearly a
thousand years — in electronic format, we are taking the opportunities offered by
the medium for a radical reappraisal of this body of material, setting it both in
a literary and in an archaeological context.2
I have identified six primary advantages of electronic over traditional
publication: accessibility; absence of size and space restrictions; use of new
media; hyperlinking and interactive materials; ability to update and correct
publication; accuracy and verifiability of reference materials.3 Of these areas, the greatest advantages to
the project of epigraphic reappraisal are to be gained from increased size and
space, new media, and hypertext (although the improved accessibility also makes
the inscriptions available to a wider audience than usual).
The availability of near-unlimited space has significant impact on the
possibilities for the nature of the publication of this corpus. At the simplest
level, as compared to a book which will include relatively few, black-and-white
images of inscriptions, focusing by necessity on the face of the stone and the
letters themselves, the web publication is unlimited as to the number of useful
photographs that can be presented. The site includes images in colour and in high
resolution, of all sides of the inscribed object and its physical context, as well
as scans of squeezes, sketches, and notebooks reporting the original condition of
the text. Addition significance of the increased space available can be found in
our ability in this publication to provide multiple presentations of the content
text. Not only can we display a choice of diplomatic and interpretive editions of
the Greek (with the underlying XML also accessible for view or download), but the
materials can be presented in a range of outputs focussing on different aspects of
the analysis. Two outputs might place different emphases on the philological and
archaeological contexts, for example. Rather than a single table of contents and
linear presentation of the inscriptions, the corpus is accessible via several
tables of contents and a couple of dozen indices and bibliographical concordances,
allowing readers to choose their route through the material.
The good, colour images mentioned above are one example of new media that the
electronic medium allows us to publish. Another is the use of scalable and linked
maps and plans, including archaeological plans encoded in SVG, with a range of
information about findspots and locations of inscribed objects embedded within
them.
The advantages of hypertext in an electronic publication are many, and include the
ability to link internally within the text, making cross-references easier to
follow up (and return from), and the navigation within a user-defined route
through the publication. In addition, and in particular in this case, the ability
to hyperlink to external objects is of great value to the project of this
publication. We have been able to refer readers directly to other textual sources,
encyclopedias, and prosopographies for comparison or further information, and to
the archaeological reports both in printed articles (available through JStor) and
the detailed materials on the NYU excavators website4 and elsewhere.
In this paper, I shall use the example of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias project
and the particular needs and opportunities of its publication to argue for what I
believe are some of the most promising possibilities of electronic publication.
There will also be some discussion of the hazards and shortfalls of this approach,
and ways in which we can address them. Although not yet a complete replacement for
traditional printed books, digital publications are an unavoidable part of modern
scholarship, and we owe it to ourselves to be as familiar as possible with the
issues surrounding research and publication in this medium.
References
- ALPSP, ed. 2002. Authors and electronic
publishing.
- Aphrodisias Excavations. <http://www.nyu.edu/projects/aphrodisias/> (April
2006)
- Clarke, J. 2001.
'Questions raised by electronic publication in archaeology'
,
BAR International Series 931: 351-6.
- Kasdorf, W. 2003. The
Columbia guide to digital publishing. Columbia University Press.
- Marnett, L. 2005.
'The
impact of electronic publication'
. Chemical
Research in Toxicology 18: 1-2.
- Roueché, Charlotte. 1989. Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity. London: Roman Society Monographs.
- Roueché, Charlotte. 2004. Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity. <http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/ala2004/> revised electronic
edition.
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