Project rationale

Digital transformations in the cultural heritage sector have empowered the work of curation, made it easier for people to use cultural heritage for education, research, creation and recreation, and contributed to an open and knowledgeable society. Specialized disciplines in the humanities like papyrology, epigraphy, paleography, dealing with ancient written artefacts, embraced digital change developing tools for new forms of participatory research and collaborative publishing: these innovations require new competences and training both for graduate students and researchers in the rapidly evolving field of Digital Humanities and AI, in order to prepare new professionals contributing to preserving and giving access to the intercultural heritage of ancient texts spelled in multiple ancient languages and writing systems.

ENCODE is grounded in the research-training experiences of other transnational initiatives, some of which already involve team members of the partners’ organizations: it primarily relies on the transnational EpiDoc community, and also considers experiences of other transnational initiatives such as Papyri.info, the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, Trismegistos, EAGLE, and SunoikisisDC.

ENCODE target are: graduate students in Ancient History, Archaeology, Classics, Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities; stakeholders in the fields of cultural heritage curation, digital collections of artefacts and texts, and digital publishing; academics in the relevant disciplines.