Creating a Sigillographic Search Engine for Byzantium: Preliminary Results

Many of the documents that were created in the Byzantine Empire (the former Eastern Roman Empire, 4th–15th centuries) are no longer extant, but the seals that accompanied the documents have survived in large numbers, providing information for various research fields within Byzantine studies. The ANR/DFG project DigiByzSeal aims to use digital presentation to enable new understandings of Byzantium and its written culture by transforming Byzantine sigillography. The project focuses on SigiDoc, which provides an XML-based and EpiDoc-compliant data model for the digital scholarly edition of Byzantine seals. The DigiByzSeal team is working on the first scholarly digital edition of approximately 4,000 seals, which will be freely accessible and based on open-source software. The goal is to create a centralized hub for Byzantine sigillography, with a unified federated search interface for all seals encoded with SigiDoc, based on a highly customized and enhanced instance of EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Services). This paper presents the preliminary results of the development of SigiDoc, and of the unified search interface based on it, and discusses the methodology and the challenges faced thus far, while showing how the project promotes open, shared, and accessible information and overcomes the issue of accessibility and lack of interoperability in Byzantine sigillography.