Altinum: a Wikidata Project for Digital Epigraphy and Prosopography

Abstract

Altinum is the first Latin epigraphy project to be hosted on Wikidata, the collaborative database maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. Launched in 2024, the project involves importing information about epigraphic artefacts from the Roman period originating in Altinum, a municipality in eastern Veneto, being also the first attempt of a digital prosopographic corpus of the municipality. The data have been sourced from EDR, EDCS, analogue catalogues, and unpublished theses. Once the data are integrated into Wikidata, users can formulate queries to generate graphs and tables, obtain statistics, and reconstruct family trees. As Altinum demonstrates, this approach not only expands the epigraphic corpus and prosopographical data but also makes it increasingly accessible in a collaboratively editable, multilingual and interdisciplinary database with the possibility of highly customisable queries.