Roberta Zeni is studying for a Masters in Digital Humanites at Kings College, London. She is spending a week at PIN in Prato on the Trans-national access programme, looking at mapping EpiDoc to CIDOC CRM. Roberta took a 10 minute break to talk to Sheena Bassett about her work and experience of the ARIADNE TNA.
Roberta, tell me about what you are working on and why
I’m interested in cataloguing, sharing information and using standards to do this. My first degree was in Art History where a lot of different information is used to identify and date paintings. For example, Renaissance paintings often feature coins and these can be used to provide a date range. My experience from this led to my interest in open linked data.
My supervisor is Gabriele Badard who is involved in the Byzantine epigraphs from the Black Sea (http://iospe.kcl.ac.uk/project/index.html) which are encoded with EpiDoc. We have studied CIDOC CRM with him and the idea of mapping EpiDoc to CIDOC CRM has been discussed within the Department. I tried to get on an ARIADNE summer school last year but I was too late so I was pleased that I could come to PIN this year to get help with the mapping.
So, what are you doing on the TNA here at PIN?
I am learning to use the 3M tool with support from Achille Felicetti to make the mappings. With 3M there is a lot more information to record, it’s more complex than the EpiDoc tool. It’s taking me a while to learn it as I have to think about why I am making a particular mapping but I can see that this will also be a lot more useful in the long term.
And what will you be doing when you go back to the UK?
I will continue to use 3M in the UK and mapping of EpiDoc to CIDOC CRM will be the subject of my Masters’ dissertation. The IOSPE project is very interested in what I am doing and we will be discussing whether this is the way forward for the future of the Epigraph database and making the data more openly available.