EpiSearch. Identifying Ancient Inscriptions in Epigraphic Manuscripts

Abstract Hundreds of thousands of Greek and Latin inscriptions from the Roman world have survived until today, scattered across all continents and spanning fifteen centuries of ancient history. Epigraphic documents constitute an essential source of evidence for our knowledge of the ancient world and can be considered an authentic repository of big data. However, a significant number of inscriptions have not been preserved in their material form. In fact, their texts can only be recovered thanks to the so-called epigraphic manuscripts: crucial documents consisting of handwritten transcriptions made in post-classical times. In spite of their importance, these manuscripts have seldom received sufficient scholarly attention, and use of state-of-the-art digital tools for the study of the transcribed inscriptions is completely lacking. EpiSearch is a pilot project that explores the application of technologies deployed in the field of the Digital Humanities to recover the epigraphic evidence found in epigraphic manuscripts. Each step of the project is intended as a proof of concept, in view of a future large-scale and collaborative research plan. As a sample, we chose an epigraphic manuscript composed by the Venetian ecclesiastical antiquarian Giovanni Antonio Astori (1672-1743) and preserved in the Marciana Library in Venice: Marc. Lat. XIV, 200 (4336). Within this broader framework, this article focuses on the characteristics of Astori's manuscript and on the possibilities offered by Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to improve its study. The application of HTR to epigraphic manuscripts is a challenging task, given the nature and graphic layout of these texts. However, our research shows that, even with some limits, HTR technologies can be used successfully, especially to map legacy manual transcriptions on the manuscript facsimile and to improve the layout analysis of the document. These results will be used for one of the final goals of the EpiSearch project, that is the design of an Open Access web application for allowing users to browse the manuscript, which will be visually annotated and connected to the main online resources for digital epigraph