Facilitating Access to Latin inscriptions in Britain's Oldest Public Museum through Scholarship and Technology

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The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns around 300 Latin inscriptions, which it has accumulated over the centuries since 1683. The core of the collection consists of the Arundel marbles, but the museum has made further acquisitions since the seventeenth century, most recently of inscriptions from the estate of the late Sir Howard Colvin. The main publication of the collection is that of Chandler (1763), who included the 134 inscriptions then owned by the museum. No modern edition of the collection exists. No photographic record of the inscriptions has ever been published. The inscriptions originate from Britain and other parts of the Roman world and date from the late Republic down to mediaeval times. The collection includes a wide range of types of inscriptions: many are monumental inscriptions such as epitaphs, religious dedications, and commemorative building-inscriptions, but many more are inscribed upon everyday objects, including pewterware, pottery, and even a set of panpipes. None of the inscriptions on its own is of any especial historical consequence, but together they offer insights into the Roman world, its commemorative habits, social hierarchy, economic networks, and uses of literacy. Specifically too, the place of the frontier province of Britain within the cultural, social, religious, and economic networks of the wider Roman empire can be illustrated by the inscriptions found there.Despite the fact that they offer a direct line of communication with the ancient world, Latin inscriptions seem inaccessible and incomprehensible to the general public. This project aims to create an online corpus and critical edition of the museum's collection of inscriptions for a scholarly readership, and then to use this as a springboard for further online resources and interactive activities, and to incorporate more Latin inscriptions into the museum's displays in order to open up this type of first-hand source material to as wide an audience as possible. It will show how Latin inscriptions can illuminate the society, economy, and religion of the past, and will explore the ways in which Latin continued to be used in Britain even after the end of 'Roman Britain'.As well as containing a research core relating to Roman history and to the history of collections and museums, this project will make a valuable contribution to understanding better how digital resources can be embedded into different contexts peopled by professional scholars, students, teachers, schoolchildren, & museum-visitors. The AHRC has been at the forefront of funding innovative digital epigraphic projects, such as Inscriptions of Aphrodisias & MAMA XI, and of supporting new imaging techniques via the project e-Science and Ancient Documents. These projects have clearly demonstrated the advantages of publication in EpiDoc XML, but we wish to explore this potential further in several ways: by exploring the integration of an EpiDoc corpus into a Museum's cataloguing system; by discovering how it can be used to enhance current displays within the Museum; by seeing how the XML can be used to produce teaching resources for use by institutions elsewhere. In particular, it will seek to put into practice the potential in EpiDoc to produce resources suitable for the visually impaired.Several audiences will be the potential beneficiaries of this project. Visitors to the museum will be able to engage more easily with the Latin inscriptions on display; interactive activities will target schoolchildren. Schools will be able to use new online resources in the Education Centre during their visits to the museum and to engage in follow-up activities afterwards. Students and scholars will be able to access the electronic EpiDoc corpus of the inscriptions. By publishing an electronic corpus, the museum's collection will be made accessible to a worldwide audience, and it will be possible to integrate its data into the existing major online databases of Latin inscriptions.