The EpiDoc Guidelines were created to describe, document and explain the use of the TEI-based EpiDoc encoding scheme, which provides for the realization of electronic epigraphic editions, corpora and similar materials in XML. The guidelines also provide directions and documentation for epigraphists and software developers who are engaged in creating or refining EpiDoc software tools, and even the Guidelines themselves.
The EpiDoc Guidelines embody more than prose and encoding examples for direct examination by human readers. They also contain carefully encoded data strings that are picked up and used by core EpiDoc software tools. As a result, the Guidelines function as the lone source from which the various converting and formatting mechanisms developed by the EpiDoc community draw the settings that specify their behavior, in particular with regard to mappings between traditional sigla for epigraphic transcription and the TEI/XML encodings specified by EpiDoc. Self-test mechanisms for the Guidelines, designed and implemented by Hugh Cayless during the
One of the great achievements of the 1931 Leiden meeting was the establishment of a set of common notational practices for epigraphic and papyrological transcription. In the 21st century, the next hurdle/challenge to be met is of the same sort: to migrate these practices into the digital arena and extend them in a way that takes advantage of the functional opportunities offered by the new medium. The goal of the EpiDoc consortium is to do just this (see further:
The EpiDoc toolkit is useful in a number of ways. It can help make basic activities such as transcription and sharing of documents much easier. For projects using standard XML tools and TEI/EpiDoc markup, sharing documents between projects becomes as simple as telling the software where to find the new file. For projects engaged in converting materials from Leiden notation to XML, manual conversion of data and re-entering of texts will become a thing of the past; the EpiDoc tools can convert directly from Leiden notation to EpiDoc markup without manual intervention.
But beyond the tremendous practical benefits to be realized from automated conversion and project-to-project data sharing, individual projects can gain other advantages from adopting EpiDoc techniques. One of the most significant is the ability to produce much more powerful user interfaces, which can be adapted easily to the needs of different user groups. One can imagine a website in which customizable user preferences dictate whether standard glosses for the various division types are presented to or hidden from the user (i.e., a helpful, student-oriented interface vs. a compact, streamlined view for scholars). Printed output in a variety of formats is also easy to produce from the EpiDoc-encoded source. Another important advantage is the ability to provide more nuanced searching, using the EpiDoc markup to identify specific search contexts and terms. Users can search for date ranges found only in 'description' divisions, for Latin abbreviations found only in 'edition' divisions, or for English words appearing only in 'translation' divisions. In assembling a large database of inscriptions, an automated process could easily be put to the task of reading all the entries from the 'bibliography' divisions of hundreds of individual texts prepared by a number of different projects, then collating the citations into a single master bibliography file for the entire database (for the major divisions of an EpiDoc document, see
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