About
EAGLE (acronym for Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy) is an international three-year (2013-2016) project funded by the European Commission under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme and part of Europeana, a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections. The project is the natural consequence of a network born in 2003 as a federation of four epigraphic databases that had agreed to make their separate collections accessible through a common online interface. EAGLE’s aim is indeed to provide a user-friendly portal to collect the inscriptions of the Ancient World from aggregated databases participating in the Project (for which, see Collections) offering a single search mask (Inscriptions Search Engine), which allows full-text searches or more advanced queries, including the possibility to upload an image and search for inscriptions. Texts are encoded in EpiDoc-XML and often accompanied by translations available on the EAGLE MediaWiki (open for contributions).
The EAGLE portal offers other useful resources for the epigraphy community such as the EAGLE Vocabularies, controlled vocabularies for epigraphic metadata, which allows to align data and harmonize content providing unique identifiers, definitions of terms, relations of concepts and translations. In the field of public dissemination, two projects are worth mentioning: EAGLE Mobile Application and EAGLE Storytelling Application. EAGLE Mobile Application allows the user to get information about one visible inscription by taking a picture with a mobile device and sending it to the EAGLE portal through image recognition. EAGLE Storytelling Application allows the user to create narratives on epigraphic content including images, videos and links to external resources. Another interesting tool is the EAGLE Virtual Exhibition, a presentation of selected inscriptions from the EAGLE portal presented to the public in a virtual environment and a narrative hypertext. Furthermore, the network has an EAGLE Zotero Bibliography, an open group library continuously implemented with useful resources in the field of epigraphy and digital epigraphy.
After the end of the project, in order to keep pursuing the EAGLE purposes, IDEA (acronym for International Digital Epigraphy Association) has been founded, a non-profit association open to anyone, which, according to its statutory goals, aims at:
“the promotion of the use of advanced methodologies in the research, study, enhancement, and publication of “written monuments,” beginning with those of antiquity, in order to increase knowledge of them at multiple levels of expertise, from that of specialists to that of the occasional tourist. promotes the use of advanced methodologies in the research, study, enhancement, and publication of ancient written artefacts”.
IDEA promotes and organizes conventions, conferences, exhibits, prizes, and training courses alongside the maintenance and efficiency of the EAGLE portal and initiatives in the field of the digital treatment of ancient written artefacts.
Resources
EAGLE: https://www.eagle-network.eu/
EAGLE major components:
- EAGLE Search Engine: https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/search-inscriptions/
- EAGLE Vocabularies: https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/vocabularies/
- EAGLE Virtual Exhibition: https://www.eagle-network.eu/virtual-exhibition/
- EAGLE Mobile Application: https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/flagship-mobile-app/
- EAGLE Storytelling Application: https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/flagship-storytelling-app/
- EAGLE Media Wiki: https://wiki.eagle-network.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- EAGLE Zotero Bibliography: https://www.zotero.org/eaglebpn/library
- IDEA Association: https://www.eagle-network.eu/about/who-we-are/
Bibliography
Liuzzo, Pietro. “EAGLE continued: IDEA. The International Digital Epigraphy Association”. In Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy. From Practice to Discipline, edited by Annamaria De Santis and Irene Rossi, 216-230. Warsaw – Berlin, De Gruyter 2018. DOI: 10.1515/9783110607208-018
Liuzzo, Pietro, Franco Zoppi, Antonio Enrico Felle, and Giuseppe Amato. 2019. “IDEA e la conservazione dei dati epigrafici di EAGLE”. Umanistica Digitale 3 (7) (2019): 105-110. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8704
Orlandi, Silvia. “Ancient Inscriptions between Citizens and Scholars: The Double Soul of the EAGLE Project”. In Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, edited by Gabriel Bodard and Matteo Romanello, 205-221.
London: Ubiquity Press 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bat.l
Orlandi, Silvia. “Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy e le sue molteplici sfide”. In Strumenti digitali e collaborativi per le Scienze dell’Antichità, edited by Paolo Mastandrea, 49-60. Venezia: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing 2017. DOI: http://doi.org/10.14277/6969-182-9/ANT-14-4