Dr Simona Stoyanova
Qualifications: BA (Sofia University), MA (King’s College London), PhD (King’s College London, in progress)
I have worked in Digital Classics since graduation (BA Sofia, MA KCL), first on two major digital epigraphy projects at KCL – Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica and IOSPE: Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea. Between 2013-2015 I worked at the University of Leipzig as a research associate on the Open Greek and Latin (OGL) project for digitisation of ancient sources in the public domain as part of the Perseus Digital Library, and on two research projects from the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Text Series (LOFTS): the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) and the Digital Marmor Parium. In 2016 I returned to London to work on IOSPE again, and later joined the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, as a research fellow in library and information science on the Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials (COACS) project. Last year I joined the ERC project LatinNow, based at the University of Nottingham, working on the epigraphic database and managing collaborations with Digital Humanities partners. Earlier this year I was involved in the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions (CPI) project at CSAD.
I am currently pursuing a post-experience part-time PhD in Classics and Digital Humanities at King's College London on the palaeography of Greek and Latin inscriptions in the province of Thrace, and its exploration and presentation through a customised Archetype framework for epigraphers.
My main research interests lie in the study of primary sources. Right after my MA I started working on the epigraphy of North Africa and later the Crimea, both projects hosted at KCL. At Nottingham I gained more experience working on the Western provinces of the Roman empire, which included working with inscribed instrumenta, as well as lapidary material. Within the study of Greek and Latin epigraphy I focus on multilingualism and language contact research, as well as epigraphic palaeography. My doctoral research is on the relationship between the Greek and Roman epigraphic practices in Thrace, primarily looking at the mutual influences in the epigraphic palaeography of the region.
During my MA I was also trained in text encoding and data modelling, and my work has involved an element of Digital Humanities ever since. I am a co-author of the EpiDoc Guidelines (http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/) and stylesheets for XML encoding and publication of ancient documents. In the last few years I have been providing TEI XML expertise and consultation for the encoding of ancient and medieval documents, including Billion Words project; Pelagios 3; Westminster Leningrad Codex; Visible Words: Digital Contextual Epigraphy; ERC Dharma. I am involved in the project for encoding a corpus of ancient inscriptions from Georgia in a training and advisory capacity; similarly in the Telamon project for the Greek inscriptions found in Bulgaria. In the last two years I have also been advising on the application of EpiDoc and adapting the EFES publishing platform (https://github.com/EpiDoc/EFES) for the encoding of Byzantine Seals.
Within Digital Humanities my main interests lie in data modelling, data transformation, sustainability, open data, development and application of standards, cultural heritage preservation. Last year I briefly joined the DARIAH-DESIR project at King’s Digital Lab, writing documentation on software development lifecycle specifically for research software (https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/blog/sdlc-for-rse/).
I was recently appointed Deputy Treasurer of the European Association for Digital Humanities (https://eadh.org/).
ancient history, epigraphy, palaeography, textual criticism, bi- and multi-lingualism, digital humanities, text encoding, digital publishing, open access
I teach classes and workshops on digital scholarly editing and textual criticism, and digital encoding for epigraphy and papyrology, and provide TEI XML and EpiDoc consultancy for digitisation and electronic publishing of Ancient and Mediaeval primary sources.
During my time at the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, I taught in the Master’s module Digital Scholarly Editing and Textual Criticism. Since 2016 I have been involved in the Sunoikisis Digital Classics (https://github.com/SunoikisisDC) online modules, teaching a number of topics from text encoding and data transformation to cultural heritage preservation.
In addition, I have supervised a number of student assistants (BA and MA) both in Leipzig and in London.
Full Publications: Dr Simona Stoyanova Publications Oct 2020
Selected Publications:
“The Digital Enhancement of a Discipline: Byzantine Sigillography and Digital Humanities”. In Magazén International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities 1, (2020) (with A. Sopracasa and M. Filosa), forthcoming
“Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy”. In Bodard G. & Romanello M. 2016. Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press. (with G. Bodard) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bat
“The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors”. In Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 8 (2014-2015) (selected papers from the 2013 TEI Conference) (with B. Almas, D. Dubin, G. Franzini, M. Berti, and G. R. Crane). DOI: 10.4000/jtei.1218.
“Digital Marmor Parium. For a digital edition of a Greek chronicle”. In Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage. Proceedings of the First EAGLE International Conference. Ed. by S. Orlandi, R. Santucci, V. Casarosa, P.M. Liuzzo. Roma: Sapienza Università Editrice 2014, 319-324 (with M. Berti).
EpiDoc Guidelines: Ancient documents in TEI XML (Version 8). Available: http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/. (T. Elliott, G. Bodard, E. Mylonas, S. Stoyanova, C. Tupman, S. Vanderbilt, et al.), 2007-2015.
