As short texts written on a durable medium, inscriptions offer a window into past societies, their organization, cultural norms, and practices. Several hundred thousand inscriptions in Greek and Latin language survive until today, providing us with a line of evidence concerning populations of large cities and rural communities of the entire Mediterranean Basin in the period between the eighth century BC and eighth century AD. Most published inscriptions have been digitized in online databases. Although open computational tools exist to handle large digital datasets, large-scale and comparative studies of inscriptions are still rare. Numerous technical and conceptual issues, such as the inconsistent resolution of spatial and temporal attributes or the incompatibility of data structures between datasets, hinder the aggregation and analysis of thousands of inscriptions. The incomplete, uncertain, and complex nature of inscriptions as a historical source has compelled us to develop a series of custom open-source tools and reproducible pipelines, enabling a macro-scale overview of epigraphic remains in time and space. Despite the limitations concerning the representativeness of the extant evidence, we still believe that the spatio-temporal patterns we identify in the datasets offer important insights concerning the dynamics of the societies that produced them. To illustrate the potential of quantitative studies in epigraphy, we harvest and render comparable two well-established, yet very distinct, digital collections for Latin epigraphy: Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), containing over 81,000 records and Epigraphische Datenbank Clauss-Slaby (EDCS) with over 500,000 records. Placing the datasets side-by-side in a machine readable and comparable format, we contrast past interpretations of epigraphic habit based on limited samples with trends identified in substantially more extensive datasets. We assert that research communities stand to gain from extending digital infrastructures to reduce barriers to access with packages of open and reusable research tools. The main contribution of the article lies in the transparent and accessible application of digital methods that for the first time in the history of the discipline enabled side-by-side explorative analysis of the two largest yet very heterogeneous datasets and provide a starting point for collaborative large-scale research of inscriptions as proxies for past human activity.
digital epigraphy; quantitative research; FAIR science; reproducibility; digital history; Latin inscriptions; epigraphic habit