Distributed for University of London Press
Open Data in Ancient and Byzantine Studies
Exploring the impact of open-access and openly licensed data and code in classical and Byzantine studies.
Open Data in Ancient and Byzantine Studies shows how openness supports transparency, collaboration, the identification of biases, and new interpretive and data‑driven approaches to ancient sources. Through practical case studies, the book demonstrates how methods such as epigraphic transcription, textual criticism, and archaeological modeling have advanced open data standards and practices.
This book highlights the potential of interoperability, documentation, and open workflows for broader approaches to the ancient world. Bringing together work from classics, Byzantine studies, archaeology, linguistics, and digital humanities, it presents open scholarship as a transformative model for academic knowledge production.
Table of Contents
Valeria Vitale and Gabriel Bodard
1. Historical authority and the prosopography of the Byzantine world: from factoids to assertions
Tara Andrews
2. Connecting late antiquities: challenges and opportunities for prosopographical data
Charlotte Tupman & Richard Flower
3. Venetian officals in sixteenth-century Cyprus: An online database and a pilgrimage account
Tassos Papacostas
4. Connections through collections: linking archaeological and epigraphic archives through places and people
Alessandra Giovenco & Nurdan Atalan Çayirezmez
5. Engraving the soil: the challenges of defining spatial footprints in Cypriot cultural heritage
Stuart Dunn
6. You can’t step into the same dataset twice: iterative improvement through reuse of open Libyan place data
Valeria Vitale
7. The makeup of Ajax: reconstructing networks of interpretation through the commentary tradition
Charles Pletcher & Matteo Romanello
8. Traces of lost libraries in the works of Alexandrian and Byzantine scholars: bibliographic open data from antiquity to Wikimedia
Monica Berti
9. Digital epigraphy at Dura-Europos: toward a FAIR-er inscriptional corpus
Anne Hunnell Chen, Carl R. Rice, Ilaria Bucci & Jennifer A. Baird
10. Reception of Sapphic language in Hadrianic verse epigraphy: building on open philological data
Marja Vierros & Gabriel Bodard
11. The next decade of Byzantine sigillography: the impact of open data as collaboration
Martina Filosa, Jonathan Shea & Alessio Sopracasa