Ancient Egyptian philology: The digital turn. Current projects and future perspectives for the study of Ancient Egyptian texts

Use of Information Technologies in Egyptology can be traced back to the early 1960s, when first efforts were made in documenting Meroitic scripts or emblematic corpora such as the Pyramid Texts. With the rise of the Digital Humanities in the mid-2000s, many new academic projects that implement IT solutions not only as a way to manage and present data, but also to produce, process and analyse the material, have come to light in the field. The aim of this paper is to give a survey of current digital projects related to the study of ancient Egyptian and Coptic texts. Our goal is not to be exhaustive, but to discuss the methods and tools that are being used and to describe the variety of scholarly practices. The first set of projects to be examined are those related to digital text editions and annotated corpora (including the types of representation format). Second, the question of how to handle the complex writing systems of Ancient Egypt will be addressed by looking at projects that focus on encoding (Manuel de Codage vs Unicode), on establishing hieroglyphic sign-lists (the Thot-Sign-List), on palaeographical databases and on ways to OCRize original texts efficiently. The issue of interoperability and data sharing will then be investigated through a presentation of several related projects working on a XML/TEI interchange format as well as on digital resources for enabling a Linked Open Data approach to the ancient Egyptian written material (http://thot.philo.ulg.ac.be/). Finally, we will argue in favour of a coherent data model so that encoding of data and metadata is done in the most effective way.