ABSTRACT
One of the challenges in introducing computing to practitioners in the humanities is to explain how digital scholarship relates to the traditions of scholarly work to which they are accustomed. The very terminology is problematical. Humanities scholars do not very often compute; but many of them do categorise and analyse, and those are aspects that they can appreciate. Such markup is not essential, as is clear from some of the oldest documents. Greek inscriptions were commonly presented all in capitals, with no breaks between words. Fixed numbers make possible systems of analysis, lexica or concordances. The Hebrew Bible, had for centuries been presented in verses, which were demarcated by the system of accentuation. The digital publication of inscriptions and papyri is now gathering pace, using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-compliant XML to represent the many nuances that papyrologists and epigraphers wish to express.
