Authors: Lorenzo Calvelli ¹; Federico Boschetti ^2,1; Tatiana Tommasi ¹

• 1 Ca' Foscari University of Venice
• 2 Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli”

AbstractEpigraphic documents are an essential source of evidence for our knowledge of the ancient world. Nonetheless, a significant number of inscriptions have not been preserved in their material form. In fact, their texts can only be recovered thanks to handwritten materials and, in particular, the so-called epigraphic manuscripts. EpiSearch is a pilot project that explores the application of digital technologies deployed to retrieve the epigraphic evidence found in these sources. The application of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to epigraphic manuscripts is a challenging task, given the nature and graphic layout of these documents. Yet, our research shows that, even with some limits, HTR technologies can be used successfully.