Describing Inscriptions of Ancient Italy. The ItAnt Project and Its Information Encoding Process

This article discusses the challenges addressed in the digital scholarly encoding of the fragmentary texts of the languages of Ancient Italy according to the TEI/EpiDoc Guidelines in XML format. It describes the solutions and customisations that have been adopted for dealing with the peculiarities of our epigraphical documentation and with the formalisation of epigraphical information deemed interesting for data retrieval in a historical linguistic perspective. The making of a digital corpus consisting of new critical editions of selected inscriptions is a work carried out in the context of the project “Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models”, which aims to investigate the languages of Ancient Italy by combining the traditional methods, proper to historical linguistics, with methods and technology proper to the digital humanities and computational lexicography. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to create a set of interrelated digital language resources which comprise: (1) a digital corpus of texts editions; (2) a computational lexicon compliant with the Web Semantic requirements; (3) a relevant bibliographic reference dataset encoded according to the FRBRoo/LRMoo specifications. Additionally, selected textual data and scientific interpretations will be encoded using CIDOC CRM and its extensions, namely CRMtex and CRMinf. The present contribution thus tackles one of the main aspects of the project, and proposes significant innovations in the encoding of critical editions for epigraphic texts of fragmentary languages, which will hopefully foster future interoperability and integration with other external datasets, a paramount concern of the project.