EpiDoc is an international community that produces guidelines and tools for encoding in TEI XML scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents, especially inscriptions and papyri.
The EpiDoc Guidelines were originally proposed as a recommendation for Greek and Latin epigraphy in 2000 by scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Tom Elliott, the former director of the Ancient World Mapping Center, with Hugh Cayless and Amy Hawkins. The guidelines have since matured considerably through extensive discussion on the community mailing list (Markup) and other discussion fora, at several conferences, and through the experience of various pilot projects. The first major epigraphic projects to adopt and pilot the EpiDoc recommendations were the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias and Vindolanda Tablets Online in 2002–4, and the guidelines reached a degree of stability for the first time in that period.
EpiDoc has since been adopted as the native format for the Greek Papyrology site, Papyri.info. The EpiDoc schema and guidelines may also be applied, perhaps with some local modification to related palaeographical fields including Sigillography, and Numismatics.
The EpiDoc community maintains the Guidelines and other tools, offers support through the mailing list and other fora, and runs several training events per year.
Guidelines and Schema
The EpiDoc Guidelines are available in two forms: the stable guidelines, released periodically the source code, available in its most up-to-date form in the EpiDoc SourceForge repository. The Guidelines source files are a series of XML documents, plus XSLT to transform them to the web version.
The EpiDoc Schema is also available in two forms: the latest stable version of the schema, which may be linked to directly by XML documents. the source code (a TEI ODD), available in its most up-to-date form in the EpiDoc SourceForge repository.
Tools
Other tools developed by and for the EpiDoc community include: The EpiDoc Reference Stylesheets (XSLT), available from the EpiDoc GitHub repository. These stylesheets are also used to deliver the online Guidelines. EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Services): an "out of the box" software package for the publication of EpiDoc collections. Transcoder: a Java tool for converting between Beta Code, Unicode NF C, Unicode NF D, and GreekKeys encoding for Greek script on the fly.
Projects
Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea, King's College London
Concordia, King's College London and New York University
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, King's College London, UK
Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica , King's College London, UK
Integrating Digital Papyrology (Duke University, Columbia University, Heidelberg University, King's College London, University of Kentucky) US Epigraphy Project, Brown University, Providence RI, USA Vindolanda Tablets Online, Oxford University, UK Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI, Oxford University, UK Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā, École française d'Extrême-Orient Epigraphic Database Heidelberg
Fuller list of projects maintained at: https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:EpiDoc