Athenians Project: Persons of Ancient Athens

Athenians Project

The 14th International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University, Berlin, will take place in Berlin from 27 to 31 August 2012.

Logo of the 14th International with symbol of the Quadriga of the Bradenburg Gate Professor Emeritus John Traill, a world-renowned expert and instructor in “Latin and Greek Scientific Terminology” at the University of Toronto and head of the Athenians Project, will be presenting by a demonstration his paper on Inscriptions in the Digital World of Attic Prosopography for this conference.

“This paper is based on my continuing work in applying digital techniques to the restoration of partially preserved names and demotics in Attic prosopography. In the preparation of broken names for Volume 20 of Persons of Ancient Athens, I have utilized our constantly increasing body of digital information accumulated by the ATHENIANS Research Project over the past 35 years, and I have exploited some extremely resourceful tools offered by the sophisticated relational database management system EMPRESS, our software from the inception of the project. By employing simultaneous searches on multiple attributes I have discovered a surprising number of new restorations in long known texts of the Corpus and ancillary publications. In this paper I will illustrate with specific examples taken largely from the editio tertia of the first volume of I.G. techniques for restoring traditional epigraphical texts in the modern digital world.” stated Prof. Traill.

Poster at Berlin 2012 Epigraphical Congress. "This poster is based on our continuing work in applying digital techniques to the restoration of partially preserved names and demotics in Attic epigraphy. In the preparation of broken names for Volume 20 of Persons of Ancient Athens we have utilized our constantly increasing body of digital information accumulated by the ATHENIANS Research Project over the past four decades, and we have exploited some extremely resourceful tools offered by EMPRESS Embedded Database, our software from the inception of the project. By employing simultaneous searches on multiple attributes in several relational databases we have discovered a surprising number of new restorations in long known texts of the Corpus and ancillary publications. In this poster we illustrate, with three specific examples taken from the single inscription I.G. I.3 433, techniques for restoring traditional epigraphical texts in the modern digital world.", commented Prof. Traill.