EPIGRAF is a platform for collecting, annotating, linking, and publishing communication data. The data model can be flexibly adapted to cope with datasets ranging from letter editions to social media corpora. You want to learn more about the application or try it out? Feel free to contact us!
An example from the field of epigraphy can be found at https://epigraf.inschriften.net/iri/articles/object/1.
Modules in Epigraf
- Collection: The core of the application consists of functions for describing objects and texts - for each object an article is created. Articles and other records can be both edited in the application as well as imported from files.
- Annotation: Every article is composed of sections, that can be flexibly combined, containing text and all relevant metadata (descriptions, comments, categorizations via vocabularies) as well as embedded files or images. For the annotation of texts, a project-specific configurable toolbar is available.
- Linking: In order to publish data as Linked Open Data according to the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016), norm data identifiers (IRIs; W3C 2014) can be created for each article and category. This allows data sets to be reconciled between different databases.
- Publication: Data sets can be made publicly available in the web interface if required. In addition, standardized document formats such as TEI (TEI 2022; Elliott et al. 2020) or Word files can be generated using a pipeline system and XSL stylesheets. A programming interface makes the data available in CSV, JSON, or XML format. An R package for interacting with the data is under developement.
- Analysis: A full-text search is available for the entire database and the vocabularies used for indexing can be used to dive into the data. Tabular data allows statistical analyses such as cluster analyses - for such use cases, data is accessible via an application programming interface (API).
- Collaboration: Epigraf supports working collaboratively on a database. For the coordination of multiple workplaces, wikis and a file repository are used.
Development Context
Epigraf was created for the inter-academic edition projekt "The German Inscriptions of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period". It is used in the nine inscription research centers of the six participating academies of sciences. The application is developed by the Digital Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz and the research group Digital Media & Computational Methods at the University of Münster.