The Herculaneum Graffiti Project: Initial Field Season, 2014

This article describes the goals and activities for the first field season of The Herculaneum Graffiti Project. Our project fo-cuses on documenting and digitizing to make more broadly accessible the first-century handwritten wall-inscriptions, also called graffiti, in Herculaneum. Following an overview of the presence of ancient graffiti in Herculaneum, this report details the methodology we used to locate and document the inscriptions and the preservation status of ancient graffiti in each insula, or city-block, of the excavations. We further describe the preliminary results of the project’s documentation efforts. We are currently studying, processing, and digitizing these inscriptions and contributing them for inclusion in the Epigraphic Database Roma and EAGLE, the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy. We conclude with a brief mention of development of The Ancient Graffiti Project, the digital resource and search engine devoted to ancient handwritten inscriptions

Discovering Novelty Patterns from the Ancient Christian Inscriptions of Rome

Studying Greek and Latin cultural heritage has always been considered essential to the understanding of important aspects of the roots of current European societies. However, only a small fraction of the total production of texts from ancient Greece and Rome has survived up to the present, leaving many gaps in the historiographic records. Epigraphy, which is the study of inscriptions (epigraphs), helps to fill these gaps. In particular, the goal of epigraphy is to clarify the meanings of epigraphs; to classify their uses according to their dating and cultural contexts; and to study aspects of the writing, the writers, and their “consumers.” Although several research projects have recently been promoted for digitally storing and retrieving data and metadata about epigraphs, there has actually been no attempt to apply data mining technologies to discover previously unknown cultural aspects. In this context, we propose to exploit the temporal dimension associated with epigraphs (dating) by applying a data mining method for novelty detection. The main goal is to discover relational novelty patterns—that is, patterns expressed as logical clauses describing significant variations (in frequency) over the different epochs, in terms of relevant features such as language, writing style, and material. As a case study, we considered the set of Inscriptiones Christianae Vrbis Romae stored in Epigraphic Database Bari, an epigraphic repository. Some patterns discovered by the data mining method were easily deciphered by experts since they captured relevant cultural changes, whereas others disclosed unexpected variations, which might be used to formulate new questions, thus expanding the research opportunities in the field of epigraph