Friday, February 23, 2024

Bibliography of Egyptological databases and datasets

Description

The Bibliography of Egyptological databases and datasets aims to provide an annotated list of digital publications, both online and offline, of the types that are not covered by conventional Egyptological bibliographies, namely databases, text, image and 3D datasets, and other digital assets. It aims to cover resources that are or were publicly available (even if on a paid basis) rather than private and project internal databases. 
Until ten years ago, there existed an annotated online database of Egyptological resources then available on the internet, including databases and datasets, called SISYPHOS – Internetquellen zur Ägyptologie, Altorientalistik und zur Klassischen Archäologie. In June 2014 it was taken offline without (to our knowledge) archiving its data in any publicly accessible repository. An incomplete copy, preserved in the Internet Archive, gives some idea of what the database looked like. Our aim is to provide a similar service reflecting the proliferation of online datasets in Egyptology in recent years. Obviously, the idea of cataloguing all Egyptological resources on the internet is no longer viable, at least not as a leisure-time project such as our bibliography. Hence, we had to set clear limits on what is included in the bibliography. 

Scope 

Only digital publications are included.
Not included are digitized versions of printed Egyptological publications and digital publications in conventional formats (books, journals, papers, encyclopaedias, and theses). Also excluded are blogs, social media accounts, excavation, exhibition, and project websites without formally structured datasets, general public websites and media, and collections of Egyptological weblinks. Databases and datasets that are supplements to conventional books and papers are also not included.
Online databases of museum collections are not included; one can refer to existing overviews of these resources provided by CIPEG, AKU project, and Alexander Ilin-Tomich. 
The Bibliography of Egyptological databases and datasets excludes resources devoted to Greek, Latin, and Arabis texts from Egypt.The current version of the Bibliography of Egyptological Databases and Datasets does not aim to cover Coptological datasets, although we would welcome efforts to fill this gap.
The current version also does not include Egyptological applications, fonts, and online tools.

Other lists of digital Egyptological resources

In compiling this database, we have benefited from a number of other efforts to catalogue digital Egyptological resources. As a token of appreciation, we enumerate here the lists that we have used (all links accessed on 20 February 2024):

Usage

The bibliography is currently offered as a Zotero library (https://www.zotero.org/groups/4851156/). You have to open the Group library on Zotero to access the bibliography itself. Entries are assigned to different types: database, spreadsheet, text dataset, image dataset, 3D dataset, digitized archival materials, digitized print materials, controlled vocabulary, and GIS dataset. Users can browse records of specific types by using collections defined within the library. Entries are tagged to characterize their subject matter. Zotero allows users to filter records by one or more tags. The Abstract field is used to briefly describe each entry, and the Extra field is used to describe access modalities and provide additional links, including links to pages with full credits and citation rules. The Date field is used for the date of the last modification, if found on the website, or the publication date for offline media. Authorship of datasets is not always easy to establish, and the rigid structure of the bibliographic software we use (Zotero allows only authors and contributors to be entered) does not make it easier to reflect the different roles sometimes indicated on project websites.
The dataset is also available for download in the Zotero RDF, CSL JSON, and CSV formats in this repository. Using these exports, you can import the complete library into your local instance of Zotero or use the data in other reference management software. If you plan to import data into Zotero, it is best to use the Zotero RDF file. 
The data from the Bibliography of Egyptological databases and datasets can be freely reused under the CC0 1.0 Universal license.
The database is a work in progress, and we would appreciate any corrections or additions. Please do not hesitate to contact us under the email addresses given below. We plan to constantly update the bibliography. 

Alexander Ilin-Tomich, ailintom@uni-mainz.de
Tobias Konrad, tokonrad@uni-mainz.de 
February 2024

 

 

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