During the week of 20-24 March, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College (London) is playing host to a group of EpiDoc practitioners and Text Encoding Initiative experts for the purpose of an “EpiDoc Development Sprint.” This event proceeds under the auspices of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias Project (also at King’s) and with funding support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Other participants represent the U.S. Epigraphy Project and the Scholarly Technology Group (both at Brown University); the Ancient World Mapping Center (UNC-Chapel Hill); and Lulu.com. Sprint participants are collaborating to achieve major advances in published guidelines and free tooling to support the encoding of Greek and Latin inscriptions using the TEI tagset.
The week’s efforts are organized into a pair of two-day sprint sessions, the first of which has now closed. Herewith a brief summary of accomplishments to date …
A full report will be posted before the end of March to the Stoa-sponsored EpiDoc Markup listserv, which interested readers are invited to join.
EpiDoc Sprint 1 status:
- Training of sprint participants in EpiDoc development practices
- Comprehensive review and documentation of recommendations for typed division structure within EpiDoc documents, with specific reference to practice and desiderata of the InsAph and USEP teams
- Mechanisms developed for embedding regular expressions required by the Chapel Hill Electronic Text Converter (CHETC) in the guidelines themselves and conducting both automated and supervised unit-tests of the guidelines, xslts and chetc
- Census of epigraphic conventions in Greek and Latin aimed at identifying editorial sigla and practices that are not fully addressed by the EpiDoc guidelines and/or xslts, and correcting these deficiencies (corrections are in progress, with anticipated completion by end of second sprint)
- Resolution of outstanding issues previously discussed on the markup list, to include appropriate modifications to the guidelines and xslts, including:
- identification and supplementation of abbreviations
- nonsensical, vestigal and unclear characters
- Greek numbers
- measurements
- Correction of minor encoding and organizational errors in the guidelines
Pre-sprint static releases of the EpiDoc guidelines and tools can be obtained via the EpiDoc Sourceforge Site. Working versions, under near-continuous modification during the sprint, can be browsed via the EpiDoc CVS Web Viewer, or checked out anonymously (using the branch name “sandstorm”) from the EpiDoc CVS Repository (instructions here).
