Creating and Connecting Data on Ancient People: the challenges of making a digital resource and the opportunities of using new technologies
Dr Charlotte Tupman is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Digital Humanities at the University of Exeter.
She is a member of the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion & Theology and am affiliated with the Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab) and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with research interests in Latin Epigraphy. As one of the authors of the EpiDoc Guidelines she is involved in the collaborative development of international standards for the encoding and publication of inscriptions and papyri. She has worked in the fields of Digital Humanities and Digital Classics for 20 years, specialising in the analysis and digital publication of ancient textual materials.
In this talk Dr Tupman will explore some of the challenges in working with both ancient and modern source materials to create digital resources that we can use for historical research. She will draw upon her experience of creating digital editions and databases that are used by researchers to advance our understanding of antiquity, including a recent project, Connecting Late Antiquities, which provides prosopographical information about some of the key figures in Late Antiquity, focusing on Roman and post-Roman territories between the third and seventh centuries AD. The project aims to connect multiple pieces of data about people in Late Antiquity to allow researchers to reveal the interconnectedness of religious and secular spheres that the scholarship had previously treated as separate areas of study. This will include looking at how we digitised and encoded the 3-volume Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, which was originally published as a set of print volumes in the 1970s.
Creating an up-to-date digital resource often requires close examination and re-reading of original source materials, so Dr Tupman will introduce some of the methods that we can now use to help us to interpret these sources, including ancient inscriptions. This will include examining whether artificial intelligence methods can be used responsibly to enhance the process of capturing and interpreting data about our source materials.
Admission: CAHMS members £2, non-members £5, including refreshments.