Digital Italy Part 1

It was a real treat to host the first part of our Digital Italy seminar from my new office in Durham. We had participants and speakers from all over the world today, and we heard about a range of new and existing digital projects linked to ancient Italy.

This post serves as a link round-up, in case you want to follow up on any of the projects that were discussed today. If you want to watch a recording of the talks, please email me to register as a participant (recordings will be available for one week only). And if you want to register for next week’s papers, just email me for the link at katherine.mcdonald@durham.ac.uk.

Saskia Roselaar – An interactive map of Italian individuals in the Roman Republican Mediterranean area

Saskia’s map is an appendix to her 2019 book, Italy’s Economic Revolution (OUP). Her interactive map of Romans and Italians in the Republican period allows readers to build up a picture of individuals’ and families’ across the Mediterranean.

John Mucigrosso (Drew University, Madison) – An on-line database of temples

This database of temples has lots of material from ancient Italy, but also covers other areas of the Mediterranean.

Dan Diffendale and Leah Bernado-Ciddio – Putting the epigraphy of pre-Roman Italy into its peninsular context

This work-in-progress paper discussed possibilities for building a map of Italian inscriptions. What information should be included? How should it link to other data? Watch this space!

Annie Burman (Uppsala) – Corpus of Etruscan Squeezes at Uppsala: issues of digitisation and access

Annie showed us the early stages of her project, CESU, based on squeezes taken in the late 19th century. You can read more about her project on her blog.

Corinna Salomon (Vienna) – Lexicon Leponticum, Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum, and Semantic MediaWiki as a DH tool

Corinna gave us a tour of two existing tools, the Lexicon Leponticum and the Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum, both of which use a wiki format for presenting information. She also gave us a really helpful run down of the pros and cons of using this method for presenting inscriptional information online.

Header image: detail of a relief in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, K. McDonald.