Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

98
step, because epigraphic texts should also be “fully queryable and manipulable” <strong>in</strong> a digital
environment:
By the term “queryable”, we do not simply mean that the text may be scanned for particular
patterns of characters; we mean that features of the text <strong>in</strong>dicated by Leiden should be able to
be <strong>in</strong>vestigated also. So, for example, a corpus of <strong>in</strong>scriptions should be able to be queried for
the full list of abbreviations used with<strong>in</strong> it, or for the number of occurrences of a word <strong>in</strong> its full
form, neither abbreviated nor supplemented. One can imag<strong>in</strong>e many uses for a search eng<strong>in</strong>e
able to do these k<strong>in</strong>ds of queries on text (Cayless et al. 2009).
The ability to do searches that “leverage the structures” embedded with<strong>in</strong> Leiden, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Cayless
et al. (2009), first requires marked-up <strong>in</strong>scription text that could then be parsed and converted <strong>in</strong>to data
structures that could be used to support the operations listed above. Such pars<strong>in</strong>g requires lexical
analysis that produces token streams that can be fed <strong>in</strong>to a parser, which can produce parse trees that
can be acted upon and queried <strong>in</strong> different ways. The authors granted that while EpiDoc is only one
“possible serialization of the Leiden data structure,” it does have the added advantage of hav<strong>in</strong>g many
tools available to already work with it.
Rather than mak<strong>in</strong>g use of standards such as EpiDoc, Cayless et al. stated that the databases that
supported most onl<strong>in</strong>e epigraphy projects typically <strong>in</strong>cluded various metadata fields and a large text
field with the Leiden <strong>in</strong>scription directly transcribed without any markup or encod<strong>in</strong>g (a fact supported
by the survey <strong>in</strong> this review). The convenience of such a database setup is that it permits various
fielded and full-text searches, it is easy to connect with web-based front ends for forms, data can be
easily extracted us<strong>in</strong>g Structured Query Language (SQL), and data can also be easily added to these
systems. This makes it easy to <strong>in</strong>sert new <strong>in</strong>scriptions as they are discovered. Nonetheless, this
standard database approach has two major flaws, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Cayless et al.: (1) <strong>in</strong> terms of digital
preservation, each “digital corpus” or database does not have distributed copies as a pr<strong>in</strong>t corpus does;
and (2) these databases lack the ability to “customize queries” and thus “see how result sets are be<strong>in</strong>g
constructed.”
Another significant issue is that the way databases or their <strong>in</strong>terfaces are designed can greatly <strong>in</strong>fluence
the types of questions that can be asked. Mak<strong>in</strong>g arguments similar to those of Dunn (2009) and
Bodard and Garcés (2009), Cayless et al. argued that technical decisions such as the creation of a
database are also “editorial and scholarly decisions” and that access to raw data is required to provide
users the ability to both exam<strong>in</strong>e and correct decisions. Long-term digital repositories for <strong>in</strong>scriptions
thus have at least two major requirements: (1) the ability to export part or all of the data <strong>in</strong> standard
formats; and (2) persistent identifiers (such as digital object identifiers [DOIs]) at the level of a digital
object so that they can be used to cite these objects <strong>in</strong>dependent of the location from where they were
retrieved. As Cayless et al. expla<strong>in</strong>, <strong>in</strong> a future where published digital <strong>in</strong>scriptions may be stored <strong>in</strong>
various locations, the ability to cite items us<strong>in</strong>g persistent identifiers will be very important. They see
EpiDoc as a key component of such a future digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure for epigraphy, because it could serve
not only as an <strong>in</strong>terchange format but also as a means of stor<strong>in</strong>g, distribut<strong>in</strong>g, and preserv<strong>in</strong>g
epigraphic data <strong>in</strong> a digital format.
All of these arguments lead the authors to one fundamental conclusion about epigraphy, namely, that
<strong>in</strong>scriptions are texts <strong>in</strong> complex environments, not just physical objects:
This fact argues for treat<strong>in</strong>g them from the start as complex digital packages with their own
deep structure, history, and associated data (such as images), rather than as simple elements <strong>in</strong> a