A Digital Corpus of Byzantine Seals: the DigiByzSeal Project

This paper aims to present the results of the DigiByzSeal project (ANR-DFG 2022–2025 – UMR 8167 ‘Monde byzantin’, Paris, and the University of Cologne) and its subsequent developments. The objective of the project is to create and maintain a digital, accessible, and sustainable environment for Byzantine sigillography. To this end, the project has developed SigiDoc (currently version 2.0), an XML-TEI encoding standard long-awaited by the scholarly community of sigillographers, which is fully compatible with EpiDoc and inspired by it. Thanks to SigiDoc and the recommendations gathered in its accompanying Guidelines, it is now possible to produce digital scholarly editions of Byzantine seals that fully harness the potential of both the seals themselves and digital technologies, thereby making the sigillographic material interoperable. To fully realise this potential, DigiByzSeal has also created a unified search portal that allows for simultaneous research across all seal editions that employ, or will employ, SigiDoc. In this way, a reference corpus far more extensive than anything previously available is currently being developed and made searchable, as it is – and will continue to be – based on contributions from the entire scholarly community, with each contributor retaining scientific responsibility for their own work. The paper seeks to demonstrate the functioning and potential of this portal, which is not addressed solely to sigillographers, but more broadly aims to make a type of material often overlooked more accessible to scholars in Byzantine studies. It also intends to explain how individuals may contribute to the initiative: SigiDoc and the portal are designed to be used independently by interested parties. However, recognising that the desired level of involvement and available time may vary, the project has developed a range of solutions to accommodate different needs.