Papyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information on the Ancient World. Around 80,000 papyri written in ancient Greek have already been published, covering a millennium between the time of Alexander the Great and the Arab conquest of Egypt. However, their large number, their diversity and their current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, as the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil who, where and when a text has been written, still relies on experts’ assertions which rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science allow now building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. The goal of EGRAPSA project (literally "I have written" in Ancient Greek) is to provide a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute at organising the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The aim of the project is to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings in some 2000 precisely dated papyri, ranging from the end of 4th c. BCE to early 8th c. CE. This is to be done within the frame of Nodegoat virtual research environment.
We shall demonstrate the immediate utility of the Nodegoat for the DH projects from the very early stages on. Within just a few months, we could have a dynamic and fully adjustable database that now contains about 1/3 of the project materials, including such objects as images, links to the IIIF images, writing regions of those, metadata and the cliplets containing individual greek letters, as well as the linked data, i.e. integrated queries to FOAF, and the ready pipelines for the import of the new data.
The frontend being presently under construction, therefore, the visualisations shall be shown from the backend perspective, i.e. a researcher working with Nodegoat data with advanced rights.
Particular attention shall be given to the ease of navigation between various pieces of data, search and filtering, especially from visual graph node directly to database data, as well as to the possibility of integration of the external software solutions, such as READ (https://github.com/readsoftware/read) and R.
Project website: https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/
