A semantically annotated corpus of tombstone inscriptions

Abstract

The digital preservation of funerary material is of interest to many different scientific disciplines. Textual information found on tombstones often goes far beyond the expected (name of the deceased, dates of birth and death), and may include information about commemorators, family roles, occupations, references to biblical or other texts, places of birth and death, cause of death, epitaphs and poems. Gravestones are multi-modal media, and besides text are often decorated with artistic symbols. To capture this information in a systematic way and make it available on a large scale for research purposes, a meaning representation based on linking entities by relations has been designed that will extend search capabilities beyond simple string matches. Concepts are represented as WordNet synsets, and a vocabulary of 32 relations make connections between concepts. This formalisation has been developed and evaluated based on a dataset of more than 1,000 Dutch tombstones.

Isabel Velázquez Soriano y David Espinosa Espinosa (Eds.), Epigraphy in the Digital Age. Opportunities and Challenges in the Recording, Analysis and Dissemination of Inscriptions, Archaeopress, Oxford, 2021, 239 pp. ISBN 978-78969-987-6.

“…Uno tiene la impresión de que, en epigrafía digital, hemos recorrido el camino contrario, es decir, se ha avanzado mucho en las técnicas digitales, que contribuyen a visualizar en su integridad el monumento epigráfico y mejorar su legibilidad (la parte 2 de este libro) y menos en el análisis y tratamiento de los textos (la parte 3). Convendría tal vez echar un ojo a algunas iniciativas sobre cómo registrar epigrafía funeraria en otros periodos históricos, centradas en el texto tanto como en la lápida (Bos, 2022: búsquedas semánticas de parejas casadas o de aquellos casos en los que la mujer precede al marido en la conmemoración, por ejemplo).…”