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Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor. Digital Classics Online, Bd. 3,2 (2017)

The Digital Euclid project aims to publish an open, digital edition of every extant witness to the text and diagrams of Euclid’s Elements. This paper discusses the required groundwork and is divided in two parts. It first covers a survey of the surviving manuscript and print sources for the Elements that intends to identify the extent of these materials, how many of these works have already been digitally imaged, and what challenges they pose to current data extraction methods. The latter part of the paper discusses the methods used to produce machine-actionable texts and diagrams and focuses especially on the development of tools for the identification and extraction of diagrammatic data.

In Digital Humanities, computer-generated visualizations are viewed as highly significant in obtaining scientific insights. However, only through a reflection on their theoretical foundations can we exhaust the epistemological potential of visualizations abiding by the principles of validity and reliability. Digital Humanities is still lacking both an epistemological basis and a best practice for an (hermeneutic) interpretation of visualizations generated by algorithms. This paper will address precisely this research gap in raising the question whether, and to what extent, approaches to the hermeneutic interpretation of computer-generated visualizations in the natural sciences can be applied to analyses in the Digital Humanities. It will provide an answer to this issue with recourse to Don Ihde’s theory of Postphenomenology. Though Postphenomenology supplies an epistemology and a visual hermeneutics for visualizations, both originate from and target solely the natural sciences. Whether the theory is applicable in the Digital Humanities is subject of further research. Digital Classics Online, Bd. 2,3 (2016)

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At the end of the 19th century, the orientalist Julius Euting traveled several times to the Middle East to investigate and to record pre-Islamic monuments, artifacts, and inscriptions. His journals and sketchbooks are preserved in the University Library of Tübingen where they recently were completely digitized. The aim of the presented project is to connect these texts with additional sources and data in a common interface.[1]This system is based on the web-framework Neatline,developed at the University of Virginia, which is able to manage and visualize heterogeneous data in a common interface. The system was extended with a functionality to store and display XML-encoded texts according to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Furthermore, every entry in the journals is connected to a date or a time-span displayed in a timeline which could also be used to access the text. Beyond this, it is possible to upload or to link scientific articles to monuments, artifacts or archaeological sites mentioned by Euting. All geographical information in the diary can be directly connected to different maps provided within the system. [1] http://ecenter.uni-tuebingen.de:8012/neatline/fullscreen/start

Manche Beiträge über die Vorteile digitaler Editionen sehen in der kritischen Edition allein ein Überbleibsel aus Zeiten, in denen man durch die Notwendigkeit, sich räumlich zu beschränken, zu einer Auswahl gezwungen war. Die Möglichkeit, beinahe unbegrenzte Datenmengen zu speichern, führt oftmals dazu, unkritische, rein dokumentarische Editionsformen allgemein zu favorisieren, da diese durch eine größere Nähe zur Materialität der Überlieferung einen höheren ontologischen Wert beanspruchen könnten. Der Artikel versucht darauf hinzuweisen, dass solche vor allem an jüngeren Medientheorien geschulten Ansätze nur begrenzt auf klassische Texteditionen, wie sie in den Altertumswissenschaften üblich sind, anzuwenden sind, und stellt gleichzeitig die Frage nach Anwendungsmöglichkeiten digitaler Editionsformen.

The eManual Alte Geschichte is a digital introduction to Ancient History and contains mostly Open Educational Resources. Users can learn about Ancient history by using podcasts, ancient sources in translation (and with comments), secondary literature, and other material (such as lists of Roman emperors). Under the direction of Werner Riess, a team of seven contributors created the contents and layout of the blog from November 2015 until June 2017. In a second phase of the project in 2018, the blog will be extended and re-launched in 2019. Digital Classics Online, Bd. 3,3 (2017)

The paper argues that the (obviously fictional) quote attributed to the legendary Scythian sage Anacharsis in the work of the sceptic Sextus Empircus is more likely to be understood as some kind of ironical twist than as a substantial hint towards a specific philosophical background: At the time of Sextus, Anacharsis was best known as the proverbial wise man. As such, he denies the existence of a criterion of truth that is discussed in the respective passages. At the same time, the figure of the wise man itself is seen as a criterion of truth by several dogmatic philosophers Sextus is arguing against. This leads to a paradoxical situation in which the criterion denies the existence of the criterion explicitly, and, on a more structural level, even the wise man per se the existence of wise men in general. Several tools for the visualization of significant co-occurrences such as the eAQUA co-occurrence-analysis or the eXchange TagPies are used supportively to show that in the time of Sextus the connections between the figure of Anacharsis and the concept of sagacity are indeed much stronger than those between Anacharsis and any specific philosophical school. Digital Classics Online, Bd. 3,1 (2017)

This paper was originally presented during the Conference „Wikipedia trifft Altertum: Freies Wissen, Neue Medien, populäre Wissensvermittlung und Enzyklopädien in den Altertumswissenschaften“ on 10. / 11. June 2011 at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. It focuses on the history and evolution of digital tools in Papyrology, which began as early as 1982 with the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and is currently growing and continuing with a Multilingual Online Dictionary of the Administrative Terms of Graeco-Roman-Byzantine Egypt.

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