IRT = Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania

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The digital version of this corpus, outlined in the second paragraph below, is a data/functionality deliverable for the project.

This corpus of 950 texts was originally published by Joyce Reynolds and John Ward-Perkins in 1952 (British School at Rome). It was digitized a few years ago by a third party with the intention of distribution on CD ROM, but the project never came to publication. A particular aim was to add full illustration, which had not been possible in the circumstances of the early 1950s and remains prohibitively expensive in print today. Online publication, combined with the dissemination of a research dataset, is now clearly the appropriate form for such a production. It has also become clear in the interval that such a republication -- truly, a second edition -- should also include editorial improvements by Reynolds, and further discoveries (some of which have been included by Reynolds in later articles). Translations into a modern language are now also essential. The digital files have been acquired and somewhat improved by the British School at Rome, but are still only in Microsoft Word documents and simple HTML files and not deemed suitable for general access.

Using JISC funding under the Concordia grant, CCH will undertake to prepare an EpiDoc-conformant digital version of the 1952 publication, which is now out of print, incorporating full illustration. This edition will be prepared for release by March 2009 under a Creative Commons Attribution license as a downloadable dataset, ready for final approval and release by Reynolds. Combining this release with the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (IRCyr: already in preparation) will provide, for the first time, a full digital corpus of the inscriptions of Roman Libya. Such a resource is particularly timely given that Libya is just reopening to the world and looking for outside help in such massive projects as restarting excavations at Cyrene. The Concordia release of IRT will also provide a firm, standards-compliant foundation for a follow-on effort to incorporate translations, new finds and additional unpublished corrigenda and amendments now in Reynold's notes. Separate funding will be sought for this second phase. Under Concordia funding, CCH will migrate all the digital texts now held by BSR to EpiDoc XML via an automated process, using the EpiDoc Toolset. An epigraphically trained encoder will be assigned to bring the converted texts and the markup in line with the original publication, incorporating certain essential changes collected by Reynolds.