Articles by Irene Rossi

Introduction to Special section The H2IOSC project and its impact on digital antiquity within the E-RIHS infrastructure

Introduction to section

The In.Res.Agri project aims to optimize the understanding of Roman agricultural landscapes in Southern Italy by integrating topographical, archaeological, environmental, and textual data within an innovative data-science platform. It focuses on examining the resilience of Roman agrarian landscapes, specifically through elements such as centuriation, route networks, and settlement patterns. The project employs both traditional survey methods and advanced technologies to recover, interpret, and manage archaeo-topographical data related to centuriation. Key methods include using Machine Learning for the automatic detection of centuriated fields, spatial analysis of both legacy and new data, and the use of annotated epigraphic and literary sources. All collected data will be implemented into the Digital_Groma platform, which will feature a digital archive and a webGIS for data display and querying; data will be exposed adhering to FAIR principles. In.Res.Agri will focus on regions in Campania (Vesuvian Area, Irpinia) and Puglia (Tavoliere), exploring the link between contemporary landscapes and Roman centuriated agro-ecosystems. This research is crucial for understanding the impact of environmental changes on Cultural Heritage, aligning with the priorities of the European Commission and UNESCO. The Digital_Groma platform will be accessible to researchers, tourists, and public institutions involved in archaeology, urban planning, and cultural heritage protection.

The Open Digital Epigraphy Hub (EpiHub) is an open access digital platform developed to streamline accessibility and organization of resources in digital epigraphy. Created within the Humanities and Cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC), EpiHub addresses the fragmented landscape of digital epigraphic resources, which span disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology. Offering a comprehensive catalogue of national and international resources – such as datasets, digital tools, geographical and chronological gazetteers, dictionaries, and text-processing software – EpiHub structures these assets through descriptive metadata to facilitate discoverability and usability for researchers and practitioners across diverse cultural and temporal scopes. The platform’s flexible back-end architecture supports efficient data management and real-time updates to enhance front-end accessibility, organizing resources by thematic collections and allowing advanced searches based on specific epigraphic needs, such as language, geographic region, or historical period. Emphasizing FAIR principles, EpiHub standardizes metadata and controlled vocabularies to foster broader interoperability and data reuse across research projects. Integrated with related H2IOSC resources, including H-SeTIS and DHeLO, EpiHub aims to become a central resource, continuously enriched to support collaboration and innovation within the digital epigraphy community.

Scientific literature understanding benefits from visual resources, which is even more evident in the case of material cultural heritage. In recent years, journals and publishing platforms have been increasingly offering extensive access to publications via the contextual provision of visual media, such as images and 3D models. The diamond open access journal ‘Archeologia e Calcolatori’, founded in 1990, started publishing its articles in 2005 on its website and has always paid attention to giving proper value and presentation to visual contents related to publications. Indeed, it maintained an online image gallery displaying colour plates from volumes until coloured images started being embedded in the articles’ PDFs (since 2009). Then, in 2021, the journal added images and 3D models as resources together with publications and displayed them both as standalone content and in relation to articles. However, this later work did not include the previous thirty-year-long history of the journal, since it required close cooperation with authors. Thus a new dedicated web application was specifically developed to present a structured and visually appealing archive of about 4000 images. The paper illustrates this application, entitled A&C_IADI (Interactive Atlas of Digital Images).

Open Science best practices and policies have been increasingly promoted and adopted in Europe and worldwide to extend public availability of research data and publications, according to FAIR principles. In this context, the so-called ‘Diamond Open Access’ model is particularly relevant since it entails provision of scientific content entirely free of charge, both for authors and readers. The journal Archeologia e Calcolatori adopted this model at a very early stage, when - in 2005 - it started publishing online full-text PDFs and metadata of its articles according to recognised standards, as an Open Archives Initiative data provider. This paper addresses the evolution of ‘Archeologia e Calcolatori’ in the context of scientific publishing in the disciplinary domain of IT applications to archaeology. It focuses on the updates of its OAI-PMH repository, which led to the journal’s inclusion in OpenAIRE as a data provider, and on mapping its current position in the OA Diamond landscape. The paper also illustrates recent implementations of Archeologia e Calcolatori’s website to provide full access to visual and interactive resources, such as images and 3D models, related to its publications, and to relevant metadata, structured according to OpenAIRE’s most recent guidelines. The combined, contextual provision of full texts, visual and interactive resources, and structured metadata – including full annotations and relations turns out to be a pioneering publishingservice in the domain of IT applications to archaeology.

An epigraph is a complex historical document, whose significance is fully acknowledged only if its textual features (script, language, content, etc.) are studied in combination with the contextual information (on the textual support and its provenance). This is the reason why digital epigraphy lies at the crossroads of different disciplines applying ITs to textual and material sources, such as digital philology, computational linguistics, and computational archaeology. The specific interests and methods of those disciplines have exerted an influence on digital epigraphy, which is apparent in the documentary vs statistical approaches applied over time to the electronic treatment of the (re)source ‘inscription’. The aim of the paper is to trace those trends in the application of qualitative vs quantitative methods in the history of studies of digital epigraphy, highlighting the main moments of change, until the most recent developments.

Based on the case study of the journal 'Archeologia e Calcolatori', the authors investigate specific issues related to the promotion of Open Science in archaeology. The first part analyses the initiatives undertaken in order to foster the dissemination of the journal's digital resources on the web, such as the use of descriptive metadata (Dublin Core), the attribution of unique identifiers (DOI), the uploading of the full texts on institutional repositories for long term preservation (CNR-SOLAR), the collaboration with initiatives aiming at the aggregation of cultural and scientific digital contents (MiBACT-CulturaItalia). The second part illustrates many initiatives and projects promoted by the editorial committee to spread the principles of the 'open access' philosophy, nationally and internationally. The journal has thus become a record and memory of the progress in the theoretical, as well as applied, aspects of the Open Access movement. This study shows the relevance of the continuous experimentation of the practices for publishing scientific initiatives, adhering to and promoting the Open Access and facilitating the accessibility to its own resources.