Abstract
The proposed paper discussed the preliminary results of a pilot collection of digitised Ancient inscriptions.
The corpus of source epigraphic material, a part of the doctoral thesis of Velichka Ilieva, consists of text-bearing objects (inscriptions and graffiti) from the period of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. The inscriptions are in Cyrillic, most of them are understudied or virtually unknown to the wider scholarly public.
For the first time, Slavic inscriptional sources written in Cyrillic are encoded in EpiDoc according to a customised template, organised into an open dataset and visualised with lightweight front-end tools built in modular form using the Streamlit framework. The tool can display geographical information on an interactive map, recreate diplomatic editions alongside editorial texts using open-source fonts, generate tabular visualisations of predetermined fields of interest, and produce network representations of authority lists linked to the inscriptions. See: https://tinyurl.com/epigraphia-slavica.
In addition to the pilot collection of encoded inscriptions, several authority lists have been created to index different metadata across the collection.
The paper will discuss some of the issues in applying the existing Digital Epigraphy tools and methods to Old Slavic source material and the future perspectives before such a project, which is the first of its kind, not only in the EpiDoc community but also in the field of Digital Humanities as a whole.