simpleEDEP
Language

About

simple-edep is a simple rewrite of the EDEP edition tool for serverless deployment. It reproduces the working model of the EDEP — Editionstools für eine digitale Epigraphik project at Heidelberg (open source: eeditiones/edep), but strips out the server: instead of a TEI Publisher / eXist-db backend it runs entirely in the browser as static files, and records are stored directly in a GitHub repository. There is nothing to host and nothing to maintain beyond the repository itself.

Aim

The tool lets epigraphers create and edit editions of Roman/Latin inscriptions and publish them as standards-conformant EpiDoc/TEI XML. It keeps the parts of EDEP that matter for day-to-day encoding — a structured metadata form and a live Leiden editor — while removing the operational overhead of running a database and application server.

What the tool does

Encoding model

Records follow the EpiDoc Guidelines and are emitted with the standard EpiDoc RNG/Schematron processing instructions. They cross-reference the major databases (EDH, EDCS, EDR, Trismegistos, PHI, CIL) and draw authority vocabularies from EAGLE, the Getty AAT and Pleiades.

Technical basis

Plain HTML and JavaScript, no build step and no backend. The transcription editor is the jinn-codemirror Leiden component — the same Leiden engine EDEP uses — embedded standalone. Persistence is the GitHub Contents API: a personal access token, stored only in your browser, commits each record to records/*.xml. The site is served from GitHub Pages. The application skeleton follows the epiwen token-based editing framework.

Data — collections

The app reads several open epigraphic collections, which can be turned on and off independently in the Inscriptions sidebar. A reconciled option deduplicates inscriptions that appear in more than one collection, matching them through their shared authority identifiers (Trismegistos / TM, EDH/HD number, EDCS) and keeping the preferred edition while marking it “also in” the others.

The app represents the full open-data export of the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), published by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities under CC BY-SA 4.0: ~81,900 EpiDoc inscriptions (HD000001–HD082828), a register of ~93,600 persons, ~41,500 photographs, the find-spot gazetteer, and the bibliography. On Geodata, coordinates are joined to each record through its Pleiades URI and the 61 Roman province boundaries can be overlaid.

To keep this editor repository lean, the collection lives in a separate public repository, pleuston/simple-edep-edh, and is served via the jsDelivr CDN. Photographs are from the Epigraphische Fotothek Heidelberg / heidICON (Rights Reserved — Free Access); they are shown live through the heidICON IIIF server with an OpenSeadragon deep-zoom viewer, never copied or re-hosted here.

The second collection is I.Sicily — an open corpus of ~5,100 inscriptions of ancient Sicily, published under CC BY 4.0. Its EpiDoc records are read directly from ISicily/ISicily via jsDelivr (never re-hosted); only a small derived index lives in this repository.

Credits & licence

This is an independent, unaffiliated rewrite that adapts the open-source EDEP / eeditiones model; it is not endorsed by or connected to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Application code: MIT (MIT License — a permissive open-source licence that allows anyone to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the software freely, provided the licence notice is kept). Inscription records: CC BY 4.0 unless stated otherwise. jinn-codemirror is © JinnTec GmbH (MIT); EpiDoc is maintained by the EpiDoc Collaborative.

Source code: github.com/pleuston/simple-edep.