The role of digital humanities in Papyrology: practices and user needs in papyrological

research.

This Digital Humanities project investigates the application of digital methods to a discipline of
Classics – Papyrology, the study of (mostly) Greek and Latin texts preserved on papyrus fragments.
The aim of this project is to understand how papyrologists gather and organise information and how
digital approaches have influenced their research practices. I will analyse the impact of Web and
digital resources on papyrological research, and will address this topic from the perspective of the
history of Papyrology. However, although this work focuses on the role of digital technologies in a
specific discipline, it will have relevance and impact on other text-editing communities beyond
Papyrology.
The research questions that I will examine are the following. How do Web and digital technologies

affect papyrologists’ research methods? In what ways do digital practitioners – both “active” (who

develop innovative digital tools or approaches) and “passive” (whose work is improved by the

digital tools produced by others) – do philological research? What are the characteristics of the

generational divide between papyrologists?

My research will build both on primary sources such as digital papyrological projects and related
projects of Classics, and on secondary sources such as studies about digital projects, papyrologists’
work method and the history of the discipline. This will allow me to address the question of the
impact of changes in practices and resources. I will collect other data through observation,
placement and interviews, which will involve watching how papyrologists work and interact with
each other when they are given electronic tools, and visiting centres to experience digital research
practice and conduct interviews in their work places. Several papyrological institutes have been
contacted for prospective visits. I will thus gather accurate data about current papyrological research
and the digital divide, and investigate the practices with which digital practitioners do research in
both new and traditional ways – this includes delving into the difference between the use of general,
common tools only, such as online databases, corpora, dictionaries and digital maps; and, on the
other hand, the use of advanced tools like multispectral imaging, crowdsourced projects, treebank
data and geo-annotated documents.

My research will represent a much needed formal study into an area that is of wide importance, as
Digital Classicists are avant-garde Digital Humanities researchers (M. Terras, The Digital
Classicist: Disciplinary Focus and Interdisciplinary Vision, 2010). They were among the first
humanists to understand the benefits of computers for their studies, which are, by nature,
interdisciplinary and data-intensive. They need very diverse primary sources and, thus, various tools
for their interrogation. Hence, Digital Classicists have always been concerned with questions such
as the use of open standards and of Social Web and Linked Data resources, which foster networking
and openness in the research, and have always looked for best practice for digital analysis of large
datasets by using a “big data” approach. Because advances in Digital Classics will contribute to
disciplines like Web Science and Library Science and to the development of standards and complex
search tools, my conclusions will be relevant much beyond Classics into Humanities work in the
digital realm generally.