Digital editions

Work in the “Stone Witnesses Digital” project takes place exclusively in a collaborative digital editing environment. Epigraphy uses the server-based editing environment epidat, which has been developed at the Steinheim Institute since 2002. The integration of the inscriptions in epidat ensures that the international user community can carry out text-based research and research in the context of the numerous editions already contained there in a form that has been tried and tested over many years while adhering to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). The plan is to make the first inscription corpora (Walsdorf and Kriegshaber) accessible to the public at the end of 2025.

The MonArch research data management system, which specializes in the spatial digital documentation of buildings and enables the assignment of semantic information to the building structures, has proven itself for the fine-grained object description on the part of building research. This system is being further developed on a project-specific basis as part of a cooperation. In order to offer all the recorded data as an interdisciplinary, integrated digital copy, preparations are currently underway to transfer the epigraphic holdings to the MonArch system, where they will be aggregated with the results of imaging techniques and building research and analyzed on an interdisciplinary basis.

The development of a publicly accessible web application, which will include a mapping of the data in a web-based presentation portal (with external interfaces), is planned for the second project module (2026-2028).