I.Sicily as a tool for the study of Roman Sicily: an experiment in institutional annotation

Journal article

The study of Roman Sicily has a long tradition in modern research, among whose results are two of the most robust and renowned epigraphic repositories – CIL X (1883) and IG XIV (1890) – dating from the late 19th century. While  I. Sicily  was designed to offer easy and up-to-date access to the growing, and increasingly dispersed, epigraphic evidence of Sicily, its digital nature also allows for the adoption of new approaches and the formulation of novel working hypotheses. In this respect, the  open access  dataset has recently been expanded to include institutional annotations, which offers significant possibilities, especially in fields of study that depend on extensive and detailed datasets, such as administrative and onomastic history (prosopographical annotations will be included later). This article, through an initial case study on the practice of dedications to the Roman emperor in Sicily, aims to demonstrate both the potential and limitations of a digitally annotated dataset as a tool for historical research. In this regard, current historiography has suggested that provincials also contributed to shaping the notion of and expectations surrounding the emperor, which were not imposed solely by the central administration. The data-driven approach facilitated by an annotated corpus is well-suited to the new bottom-up perspective , although, as will be shown in this article, it is not without methodological challenges.

Authors: Prag, JRW; Tosques, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Journal: Gerión Revista de Historia Antigua
• Volume: 42
• Pages: 73-91
• Publication date: 2024-12-05
• Acceptance date: 2024-09-24
• DOI: 10.5209/geri.95520
• ISSN: 0213-0181
• Language: English
• Keywords: Roman provinces; digital epigraphy; FAIR epigraphy; Digital Humanities; Roman emperor