ABSTRACT
WP10 ReTINA (Religious Texts in the Nile Valley and Beyond) aimed at creating a dedicated component of RESILIENCE focused on the enhancement of its research infrastructure through the construction of religious content datasets from ancient world sites along and around the Nile Valley. ReTINA addressed a significant gap in the digital description and fruition of ancient religious texts from archaeological contexts by suggesting the most used data-model and developing a prototype for the semantic annotation and scientific visualisation of objects and texts related to ancient religious contexts. The project tackled the digital transformation of complex and fragile materials — including papyri, inscriptions, amulets, and ritual objects — through the integration of collaborative annotation tools, semantic models, and interoperable standards.
RESULTS AND TOOLS
ReTINA produced a comprehensive analysis of the critical issues connected to the acquisition and processing of religious information from the Nile Valley and beyond, with particular attention to the heterogeneity of the sources, the diversity of scholarly traditions and their related classification and taxonomy systems, and the ambiguous nature of archaeological and epigraphic information pertaining to the world of religion. The project defined guidelines for the digitisation and archiving of a heterogeneous set of sources encompassing both material culture and textual evidence in different languages and writing supports. A key objective was to provide researchers with a system for publishing new archives and structuring annotations — that is, the scholarly process through which a researcher examining a source adds further significant information and makes it available to the wider community. A set of datasets developed by UNIOR research groups — covering archaeological research carried out across different geographical areas and cultures — was digitised and made available on the ITSERR MarketPlace.
Building on these foundations, ReTINA developed a web-based prototype for the interactive annotation and visualisation of digital resources, allowing users to select parts of texts, images, or 3D models and add comments and interpretative hypotheses directly on the resource via an IIIF/OpenSeadragon viewer. Each annotation is stored as a distinct digital object, automatically structured according to international standards such as Dublin Core and W3C Web Annotation, and exported in interoperable formats. The system enables linking objects, texts, and contexts, highlighting relationships and derivations across collections. The project also tested the use of ontologies and multilingual thesauri addressing the complexity of categories such as “religious”, “magical”, and “sacred”. The platform integrates standards including IIIF, TEI/EpiDoc XML, and CIDOC CRM, and explores AI techniques such as Named Entity Recognition for knowledge extraction, making free-text scholarly comments both human-readable and machine-processable.
CASE STUDIES
ReTINA was tested on manuscripts, inscriptions, and ritual objects from the Nile Valley and related areas, using images and 3D models as annotation surfaces. In these case studies, researchers were able to propose alternative readings, distinguish overlapping religious and magical categories, and connect artefacts across different collections through shared concepts and controlled vocabularies.
TEAM
WP10 was coordinated by Andrea D’Andrea (University of Naples L’Orientale), with Gilda Ferrandino as technologist at University of Naples L’Orientale, Alexia Pavan as RTD A at the University of Naples L’Orientale and Tarik Ranieri enrolled in DREST PHD.
The team brought together expertise in archaeology, epigraphy, digital humanities, and computer science.
BEYOND ITSERR
The results are transferable to various cultural heritage contexts, particularly for collaborative annotation of complex digital collections. The platform supports integration with existing repositories and can be extended to other geographical areas and religious traditions, contributing to global semantic infrastructures. Its standards-based design and lightweight web architecture make it suitable for institutions with limited technical resources that nonetheless wish to enrich and interconnect their digital holdings.