Epigraphic heritage and digital practices: the case of pre-Islamic Arabia

Digital Epigraphy stands out in the domain of the Information Technologies applied to the Humanities because the complex nature of the epigraphic document requires the interaction of the different computational solutions which have been elaborated both for textual studies and material culture studies. While shared strategies have been defined by a growing community of "digital epigraphers" in the Classics, the situation is more fragmented in the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies, due to the variety of chronological, geographic, and cultural contexts of its epigraphic corpora, and the often fragmentary knowledge of their linguistic and writing systems. The epigraphy of Ancient Arabia is an exemplary case-study of the challenges of the digital approach to the Near Eastern inscriptional sources: the study of its textual corpus, which is itself huge and diversified, suffers from the limitations which are typical of under-resourced disciplines. The paper outlines the state of the art of Digital Epigraphy in pre-Islamic Arabia studies, describing the existing initiatives which provide online access to curated editions of epigraphic corpora and to linguistic reference tools. The major methodological challenges that these projects have faced in terms of digital approaches to a "niche" and in fieri discipline will be discussed, focusing especially on issues such as the choice of the data model for the recording and mining of epigraphic information, the constraints of under-resourced corpora in terms of linguistic annotation, and the efforts of sharing resources to enhance the knowledge of a less-known part of our Cultural Heritage, in order to support its conservation and promote its valorisation.