Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Ancient History, Archaeology, Classics, Digital resources, Digitisation

Research keywords:

Ancient People, Epigraphy, Papyrology, Digital Editing, Ancient Geography

Regions:

Africa, Europe

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Gabriel Bodard works in the field of digital classics, applying approaches, technologies and quantitative methods of digital humanities to the study of the ancient world. His main interests in classics include ancient (especially handwritten) texts, including curse tablets and magic papyri, the Greek heritage of North Africa. His digital expertise includes the encoding and publication of epigraphic and papyrological documents in digital form, and the capture and sharing of data about ancient people and places through Linked Open Data and the semantic web. He organizes the Digital Classicist seminar in London, and teaches classes and workshops on digital methods for classicists and archaeologists nationally and internationally. He has edited several volumes of essays in the area of digital classics, and is the author of guidelines for encoding ancient texts (EpiDoc) and sharing person databases (SNAP:DRGN).

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	Fluent	Fluent
Spanish	Good	Good
Latin	-	Intermediate

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
01-Jan-2021	Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People Articles Bodard, Gabriel (2021). Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People. In Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean: Structures, Practices, Prospects (edd. Bond, Dilley, Horne). ISAW Papers 20. ISSN 2164-1471.
01-Jan-2021	Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania Monographs Roueché, Charlotte, Caroline Barron, Gabriel Bodard, Joyce M. Reynolds, Irene Vagionakis and others (2021). Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania. Society for Libyan Studies. ISBN 978-1-912466-25-2.
01-Jan-2020	Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica Monographs Reynolds, Joyce M., Charlotte M. Roueché & Gabriel Bodard (2020). Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica. Society for Libyan Studies. ISBN 978-1-912466-22-1.
01-Jan-2020	Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc editing process Journal articles Bodard, Gabriel and Polina Yordanova, 2020. Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc editing process. Studia Digitalia Universitatis Babe?-Bolyai 65 (1), pp. 17–35. ISSN 2559-6721.
01-Jan-2017	Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space Articles “Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space.” (with Hugh Cayless, Mark Depauw, Leif Isaksen, K. Faith Lawrence, Sebastian Rahtz†). Digital Classics Online 3.2 (2017). Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/dco.2017.0.37975
01-Dec-2016	Digital Approaches to the Ancient World Edited Book Digital Approaches to the Ancient World, with Yanne Broux and Ségolène Tarte. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 59-2 (December 2016). Available: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bics.2016.59.issue-2/issuetoc (currently Open Access)
01-Dec-2016	Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy Articles "Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy" (with Simona Stoyanova) in Bodard/Romanello (eds.) Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement. (London: Ubiquity Press, 2016). Pp. 51–68. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bat.d
01-Jul-2016	Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement Edited Book Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement, with Matteo Romanello. (Ubiquity Press, 2016). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bat (Open Access)
01-Jan-2014	SNAP:DRGN Cookbook SNAP:DRGN Cookbook (with Hugh Cayless, Mark Depauw, Leif Isaksen, Faith Lawrence, Sebastian Rahtz), King's College London, 2014
01-Jan-2011	EpiDoc Guidelines EpiDoc Guidelines (with Tom Elliott, Elli Mylonas, Simona Stoyanova, Charlotte Tupman, Scott Vanderbilt, et al.), version 8, Stoa Consortium, 2011-
01-Jan-2010	Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity Digital Research and the Study of Classical Antiquity, with Simon Mahony (Ashgate Press, 2010)
01-Jan-2009	Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, by J. M. Reynolds and J. B. Ward-Perkins, enhanced electronic reissue by Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché (2009)
01-Jan-2008	Though much is taken, much abides: Recovering antiquity through innovative digital methodologies Edited Book "Though much is taken, much abides": Recovering antiquity through innovative digital methodologies with Simon Mahony, Digital Classicist special issue, Digital Medievalist 4 (2008), available: https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/4/volume/4/issue/0/
01-Jan-2007	Inscriptions of Aphrodisias Monographs Joyce Reynolds, Charlotte Roueché, Gabriel Bodard, Inscriptions of Aphrodisias (2007), available , ISBN 978-1-897747-19-3.

Publications available on SAS-space:

Date	Details
Apr-2016	Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy PeerReviewed This chapter will discuss the EpiDoc (TEI markup for epigraphy and papyrology) training workshops that have been run by colleagues from King’s College London and elsewhere for the past decade. We shall explore some of the evolving approaches used and strategies taken in the teaching of digital encoding to an audience largely of classicists and historians. Prominent among the assertions of EpiDoc training is that “encoding” is not alien to, in fact is directly analogous to, what philologists do when creating a formal, structured, arbitrarily expressed edition. We shall share some of the open teaching materials that have been made available, and consider paedagogical lessons learned in the light of EpiDoc practitioners who have progressed from training to running their own projects, as opposed to those who have learned EpiDoc directly from the published Guidelines or via the TEI (cf. Dee, q.v.). We shall also compare the teaching of EpiDoc to the teaching of epigraphy to students, and ask what the paedagogical approaches of both practices (which overlap, since many epigraphic modules now include a digital component, and very rarely teachers of epigraphy are treating EpiDoc as the native format for editing inscriptions) can offer to teachers and learners of both traditional and digital epigraphy.
Apr-2016	Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy PeerReviewed This chapter will discuss the EpiDoc (TEI markup for epigraphy and papyrology) training workshops that have been run by colleagues from King’s College London and elsewhere for the past decade. We shall explore some of the evolving approaches used and strategies taken in the teaching of digital encoding to an audience largely of classicists and historians. Prominent among the assertions of EpiDoc training is that “encoding” is not alien to, in fact is directly analogous to, what philologists do when creating a formal, structured, arbitrarily expressed edition. We shall share some of the open teaching materials that have been made available, and consider paedagogical lessons learned in the light of EpiDoc practitioners who have progressed from training to running their own projects, as opposed to those who have learned EpiDoc directly from the published Guidelines or via the TEI (cf. Dee, q.v.). We shall also compare the teaching of EpiDoc to the teaching of epigraphy to students, and ask what the paedagogical approaches of both practices (which overlap, since many epigraphic modules now include a digital component, and very rarely teachers of epigraphy are treating EpiDoc as the native format for editing inscriptions) can offer to teachers and learners of both traditional and digital epigraphy.
Nov-2017	Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space NonPeerReviewed Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor.
Oct-2020	Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc editing process PeerReviewed EpiDoc is a set of recommendations, schema and other tools for the encoding of ancient texts, especially inscriptions and papyri, in TEI XML, that is now used by upwards of a hundred projects around the world, and large numbers of scholars seek training in EpiDoc encoding every year. The EpiDoc Front-End Services tool (EFES) was designed to fill the important need for a publication solution for researchers and editors who have produced EpiDoc encoded texts but do not have access to digital humanities support or a well-funded IT service to produce a publication for them. This paper discusses the use of EFES not only for final publication, but as a tool in the editing and publication workflow, by editors of inscriptions, papyri and similar texts including those on coins and seals. The edition visualisations, indexes and search interface produced by EFES are able to serve as part of the validation, correction and research apparatus for the author of an epigraphic corpus, iteratively improving the editions long before final publication. This research process is a key component of epigraphic and papyrological editing practice, and studying these needs will help us to further enhance the effectiveness of EFES as a tool. To this end we also plan to add three major functionalities to the EFES toolbox: (1) date visualisation and filter—building on the existing “date slider,” and inspired by partner projects such as Pelagios and Godot; (2) geographic visualization features, again building on Pelagios code, allowing the display of locations within a corpus or from a specific set of search results in a map; (3) export of information and metadata from the corpus as Linked Open Data, following the recommendations of projects such as the Linked Places format, SNAP, Chronontology and Epigraphy.info, to enable the semantic sharing of data within and beyond the field of classical and historical editions. Finally, we discuss the kinds of collaboration that will be required to bring about desired enhancements to the EFES toolset, especially in this age of research-focussed, short-term funding. Embedding essential infrastructure work of this kind in research applications for specific research and publication projects will almost certainly need to be part of the solution.
Oct-2022	EpiDoc and Epigraphic Training in the Era of Remote and Hybrid Teaching PeerReviewed Die Notwendigkeit, die meisten akademischen Aktivitäten aufgrund der COVID-19-Pandemie ganz oder teilweise ins Internet zu verlagern, zwang die epigraphische Gemeinschaft, neue Wege zu finden, um EpiDoc und epigraphische Schulungen aus der Ferne oder in hybriden Formen anzubieten. Die Experimente der letzten zwei Jahre haben zu einer Vielzahl von Lehrkonzepten geführt, die von vollständig synchronen bis zu vollständig asynchronen Schulungsveranstaltungen reichen. Ziel des Papiers ist es, solche Konzepte zu veranschaulichen und ihre Auswirkungen zu untersuchen, wobei auch die verschiedenen Instrumente und Methoden beschrieben werden, die in den letzten zwei Jahren eingesetzt wurden. Der Beitrag befasst sich auch mit den Lehren, die aus den verschiedenen Erfahrungen und den Rückmeldungen der Studierenden gezogen wurden, und enthält einige Überlegungen zu Fragen der Nachhaltigkeit im Zusammenhang mit Fernunterricht und Hybridunterricht.
Jan-2021	Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People PeerReviewed This chapter discusses the kinds of information that are recorded about persons and names from antiquity and other periods of pre-modern history, and the ways in which this information can usefully be modelled in Linked Open Data and integrated with the Linked Ancient World Data graph. It begins by introducing some key concepts, in particular the importance of understanding data ‘modelling,’ and limiting the scope of the discussion to fairly basic information about historical persons. The body of the paper summarises the main trends in recording and encoding prosopographical, onomastic and other personal data in previous and current scholarship, both traditional and digital. As an example of the use of Linked Open Data to encode person- and name-data, the recommendations of the SNAP:DRGN project are outlined, noting that these are designed only to represent a small set of disambiguation data to enable interoperability and cross-platform searching among projects, rather than the full richness of prosopographical and onomastic data. The chapter concludes by pointing out the limitations of the current model, and suggesting some areas for future work and development.

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
Pelagios- Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites (CALCS) Institute of Classical Studies Project period: 07-Jan-2016 - 30-Nov-2016 Research interests: History, Literatures in a modern language, Medieval History
Communal art reconceptualizing/rethinking metrical epigraphy network (CARMEN) Institute of Classical Studies Project period: 01-Jan-2021 - 31-Dec-2024 Research interests: Classics
Connecting Late Antiquities Institute of Classical Studies Project period: 01-Feb-2023 - 31-Jan-2025 Research interests: Classics
Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea The aims of the project include a new study of all Ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions originating from the Northern Coast of the Black Sea; and publication of Russian and English critical editions of the inscriptions in print and digital formats. The region of the Northern Black Sea was home to numerous ancient Greek settlements from the third quarter of the 7th century BCE until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE.
Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials (COACS) Principal Investigator, Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials, Feb 2017–Feb 2018; Jan–Aug 2019
Communal art reconceptualizing/rethinking metrical epigraphy network (CARMEN) CARMEN explores Roman verse inscriptions as an important manifestation of communal art in Roman literary and visual culture. Carmina Latina Epigraphica, a corpus of some 4000 inscribed poems and poetic texts, were inscribed on publicly exposed monuments or objects used in public or private contexts. Exposed on lasting material such as stone, these poems accompanied the Roman Empire in its ever-changing configurations from the early third century BCE to Late Antiquity in an unbroken tradition that continues into the early Middle Ages and beyond. Studying poetry in the epigraphic Roman tradition will help to regain an eminent body of European folk art tradition that could be produced and consumed by everybody, even semi-literates, perhaps even illiterates.
Connecting Late Antiquities Co-Investigator. AHRC and DFG funded research project, jointly led by Professor Richard Flower, University of Exeter (https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/projects/classics/late-antiquities/) and Professor Julia Hillner, University of Bonn (https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/research/connecting-late-antiquities). Connecting Late Antiquities is a collaborative project to create open, digital prosopographical resources for the Roman and post-Roman territories between the third and seventh centuries AD. Its main aim is to digitise, unite and link existing resources to make them more accessible and enhance their reach and utility. The enterprise will dramatically improve access to information about late-antique people for all scholars of this period and allow the easy integration of prosopographical material with online geographical, textual, epigraphic and papyrological resources. Runs February 2023 – March 2025.
Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites Principal investigator, Cross-cultural After-Life of Classical Sites (CALCS), Pelagios micro-grant (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). 2016.
EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) Principal Investigator, EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES), Jun 2017–May 2018.
Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies (Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names) The SNAP:DRGN project aims to address the problem of linking together large collections of material (datasets) containing information about persons, names and person-like entities managed in heterogeneous systems and formats. SNAP:DRGN began by piloting a new approach to working with diverse person data, using as a starting point three large datasets from the classical world: the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, an Oxford-based corpus of persons mentioned in ancient Greek texts; Trismegistos, a Leuven-run database of names and persons from Egyptian papyri; Prosopographia Imperii Romani, a series of printed books listing senators and other elites from the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. We modeled a simple structure using Web and Linked data technologies to represent relationships between databases and to link from references in primary texts to authoritative lists of persons and names. Moving forward, the SNAP project will expand the services provided, and incorporate more person-data from the ancient and mediaeval Mediterranean and neighbouring worlds.

Current PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 25-Sep-2023 Until: 30-Sep-2028	A Diachronic Analysis of Key Political Structures from the Late Republic to the Principate Elizabeth Koch Kölük, ICS, A Diachronic Analysis of Key Political Structures from the Late Republic to the Principate. Part time.
From: 01-Oct-2023 Until: 31-Dec-2027	Le culte du dieu Liber Pater Maxime Guénette, Université de Montréal, external supervision.
From: 01-Oct-2020 Until:	The function of magic in Roman society c. 2nd century AD Ms Nicole Iu, The function of magic in Roman society c. 2nd century AD ‘Magic’ is a complex concept that has been obscured by modern popular associations, but has existed in various forms throughout history. Defining ‘magic’ in an Ancient Roman context is challenging because Roman ‘magical’ practices were often carried out in a religious or medical context, particularly in times of crisis. My project aims to identify the function of Roman magic, its intersection with ancient medicine and religion, and its relationship with the concept of healing in the second century AD and in response to the Antonine Plague, a pandemic that swept across the Roman Empire at this time.
From: 01-Jan-2024 Until: 31-Dec-2024	The investigation of Roman urbanism in Italy through archaeological geophysical prospection Stephen Kay, ICS, PhD by publication.

Past PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 01-Oct-2016 Until: 31-Dec-2019	Cultural contact in Early Roman Spain through Linked Open Data Paula Granados García, Cultural contact in Early Roman Spain through Linked Open Data, Classics and Digital Humanities, Open University (external supervisor). Awarded 2019.
From: 01-Oct-2016 Until: 30-Apr-2022	The Role of Digital Humanities in Papyrology: practices and user needs in papyrological research Lucia Vannini, ICS, Full-time PhD (completed 2022)
From: 01-Jan-2018 Until: 01-Jan-2024	Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia Tamara Kalkhitashviki, Ilia State University, Tbilisi Georgia (external supervisor), Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia (started 2017)
From: 01-Jan-2017 Until: 31-Dec-2019	Kretikai Politeiai: Cretan Institutions from VII to I century BC Irene Vagionakis, University of Venice Ca’ Foscari (external supervisor), Kretikai Politeiai: Cretan Institutions from VII to I century BC (completed 2019)

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Professional Affiliations

Professional affiliations:

Name	Activity
Societas Magica
Libyan Epigraphy Research Network (co-chair)
British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies
Pelagios Network
Gilbert Murray Trust (trustee)
European Association of Digital Humanities
Text Encoding Initiative Technical Council
British Epigraphy Society (steering committee)

Relevant Events

Related events:

Date	Details
05-Oct-2015	"The EpiDoc Community: training, infrastructure and the future" Given at 'Digital Epigraphy: The Use of TEI XML and Epidoc for Studying Non-Alphabetic Writing Systems', University of Bonn, Germany.
02-Sep-2015	Workshops "Introduction to EpiDoc" and "Linked open data for ancient prosopography and geography (SNAP and Pelagios)" Workshops at 'Humanités numériques et Antiquité', University of Grenoble, France.
24-Jul-2015	Towards a virtual authority for distributed prosopographies Paper at 'Per una Prosopografia dell'Egitto Romano', University of Padova, Italy
	Workshop on digital classics, epigraphy and linked data Workshop on digital classics, epigraphy and linked data, University of Sofia, Bulgaria, September 7–11, 2015

Consultancy & Media

Available for consultancy:

Yes

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