Help evolving digitalEPIGRAPHY by being a part of it – How to submit an article, recommend a tool or provide a tutorial

News

Mar 7, 2019

Dear Reader,

You may have stumbled upon our site as an Egyptologist looking for documentation ideas for your future project or as an artist/epigrapher working in Egypt, creating drawings of various monuments, or, for that matter, just by being a passerby interested and invested in ancient Egypt’s fascinating visual history. Either way, your desire to know more about documentation may be in accordance with our mission statement and ultimate goal, which is to provide digital documentation solutions for our colleagues working in the field or at home and to present up-to-date information about the latest methods, trends and tools utilized in digital epigraphy. In the past four months, we’ve been working thoroughly on building the framework to get the discussion going in this highly important segment of Egyptology. Now, it is time for us to reach out to our growing community to exchange views on digital documentation or documentation in general by utilizing the channels provided through the digitalEPIGRAPHY website.

As you may have already noticed scrolling through our selection of past and more recent articles, our site was designed first and foremost to create an up-to-date and detailed showcase of the techniques the Epigraphic Survey developed (and has been refining ever since) for their digital documentation program. In this aspect, this website is the direct successor of the book, Digital Epigraphy, which I wrote back in 2014. All the material from the book was seamlessly integrated into the website when it went live in November 1st, 2018, and remains the core material of our online operation. However, our long-term goal with this project is for it to be a lot more than just a collection of OUR thoughts about digital documentation. We’d like digitalEPIGRAPHY to be a platform, a hub, a conversation starter among all the colleagues who are involved with documentation either in the field or back home.

As you’ve probably realized by now, this site is operated by only a few enthusiastic people who feel deeply responsible for shaping the future of documenting ancient Egyptian monuments. Needless to say, creating articles for the site while actively involved in several projects can be challenging at times. Nonetheless, I feel hundred percent confident about the sustainability of digitalEPIGRAPHY in the future as long as there is interest in the topics we offer. Naturally, we can only do so much on our own, therefore I would like to turn to my colleagues to help us keep this project going in the long term. In the meantime, we, as the Epigraphic Survey, have laid out a multiple-year plan for the site and will gradually include more and more projects from the various sites we are working on. However, we would also like to encourage and involve as many of our colleagues as possible to contribute with their experience in the field of epigraphy, be it digital or more traditional.

I think having different visions, methods and perspectives alongside what we offer is essential to stay relevant in our subject, which is documenting ancient monuments. Therefore, I would like to approach you, dear Reader, to share your own experience in epigraphic documentation. I know that you’re all very busy, but there are many different options offered on our site tailored to the time you might have for such a project. You could write either a short article about a specific problem, a tutorial about practical drawing techniques or a multiple-part long-form project description elaborating on any documentation-related subject. But it could be all three and more! I leave it up to you, dear colleagues! We'll be more than happy to share any article you can offer for our site! You could also help us by spreading the word about our site and encourage your own colleagues to share their documentation experience.

As you might have already noticed when visiting our site, we provide two different sections that are dedicated to projects utilizing interesting documentation methods. They can be found under the following categories: READING (to present shorter articles) and PROJECTS (to present more complex epigraphic efforts). Needless to say, articles included in these categories have already proved to be among the most read on the site. Eventually we are hoping to build a worthwhile corpus of different documentation methods (digital and traditional alike) through these specific channels, therefore these are the most notable sections where we’d like to rely on your contribution! Please, check out (if you haven’t yet) our latest case study about one particular documentation effort at Luxor temple, an experience which we decided to share on the website to encourage our colleagues to publish their own documentation challenges. For the same purpose, we are including more and more examples of other projects' documentation solutions as well. However, we would gladly accept any contribution you’d like to offer, be it a tool, article or book recommendation, a tutorial or a description of your own project.

Additionally, I’d like to share our guidelines regarding how certain types of material can be presented on our site, which you should be able to download from here. I sincerely hope that you will be able to find the time to participate! If you'd like to discuss the matter or have any further questions, you can reach us through our site by commenting on any article, or via e-mail.