Paper

From Stone to Byte: defining literature.

Abstract

Since the middle ages, scholars of the ancient graeco-roman worlds have based their work on the great literary texts of antiquity world, preserved in a manuscript tradition. Indeed, those texts, some of the greatest achievements of the world’s literary output, provide the central reason why most people study those periods. At a later date, the artefacts of the period became the subject of study – firstly as works of art, and later as matter for cultural history. A special category of material is the documents which have survived from antiquity – written artefacts, whose status in the among the material to be studied is not entirely clear. The deluge of papyri, and of inscriptions, which have been published since 1840, has been difficult to deal with using the categories of earlier, literature based, study; and book-based publication has created a gulf between texts preserved in this way, and those in the literary tradition. Online publication, using TEI, offers an opportunity to bridge that gulf.

Biography

Charlotte Roueché trained as a classicist (in Cambridge) and a Byzantinist (in Paris). She teaches Classical and Byzantine Greek language, culture and history at King’s College London. For many years she has worked on Greek inscriptions on stone excavated at sites in Turkey – particularly Aphrodisias (working with the New York University excavation, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/aphrodisias/) and Ephesus (working with the Austrian Archaeological Institute). The need to publish an adequately rich account of this important material led her to explore and develop web publication: this was made possible by a partnership with Tom Elliott, formerly of UNC Chapel Hill, and now of ISAW, New York. Together they received funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC, which has enabled her two first publications in TEI-compliant XML, to be found at http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk.

Homepage: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/bmgs/staff/roueche.html