A Medieval Epigraphic Corpus and its Retro-Developments (CIFM-CBMA): The Exploratory Research of the Cosme2 Consortium

The digital ‘Burgundian Epigraphic Corpus’ is the result of a collaboration between two teams, the Corpus of Inscriptions of Medieval France (CIFM) and the Corpus of Medieval Burgundian Texts (CBMA), as part of the Cosme2 (Consortium Sources Médiévales—linked to TGIR Huma-Num from CNRS—France), dedicated to digital approaches to historical corpora. This article explains how a complex set of documents mixing Latin, Greek, and Old French texts, accompanied by rich metadata, has been processed in order to allow new surveys by humanists. It shows how the corpus is constantly reinvested and how its exploitation, thanks to digital methods, generates new data and metadata that can be reinjected into the corpus and in turn operated, creating a kind of virtuous circle. Three retro-developments are briefly discussed here: (1) semantic web, connectivity, and named entities; (2) geographic information system (GIS) and automated extraction of new metadata; (3) lemmatization and automatic language detection.