On 20 January our team hosted Jimmy Daccache (Yale) and Flavia Ruani (CNRS) from the project ‘E-Twoto: Digital Paleography of Syriac Inscriptions’ which has just been launched thanks to the funding of PSL-Scripta, Paris, while the third member of this project, Simon Brelaud (University of California, Berkeley), joined us online. 

Their experience proved invaluable to boost our research ideas and a discussion of different ways of employing EpiDoc for the study of Syriac inscriptions, which we had before the seminar, was a thrilling methodological experience! The E-Twoto team also developed an impressive mask for the Oxygen XML editor for efficient encoding of inscriptions according to the EpiDoc standards which requires minimum digital skills from the end users.

At the seminar, the E-Twoto team spoke about their pioneering digital tool for the study of Syriac epigraphic palaeography. We saw its technical functionalities, and the potential historical research that it may generate. Their study focuses for the time being on the inscriptions from Turkey and, and some of them even were presented as case studies. Their digital archive comprises, however, many, many more – which will be released in due time in a digital corpus.

A post-seminar dinner with other faculty members marked a good day for our future cooperation!