I.Sicily, open scholarship, and the epigraphic landscape of Hellenistic/Roman Sicily

This paper presents the development of the I.Sicily digital corpus of the inscriptions of ancient Sicily within the context of current debates about open scholarship. The evolution of the I.Sicily project is situated within the framework of Sicilian epigraphic publication and in turn within the framework of humanities publication practices. The approach of the I.Sicily project to open data practices, and the challenges which these pose, is examined through two case studies: the first offering a brief survey of Sicilian epigraphic culture in antiquity; the second considering the possibilities such datasets and corpora offer for collaborative and progressive research