Funded by: Afeyan Foundation
PI: Narine Sarvazyan
Researchers: Narek Meloyan, Yana Harutyunyan, Zara Grigoryan, Narine Galstyan, Arsen Harutyunyan
The Artsakh Epigraphy Atlas project addresses the urgent need to digitally safeguard Armenian lapidary inscriptions in the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) region, where cultural heritage faces imminent risk from regional conflict and history-altering efforts. Historically, Armenian epigraphy lacked the machine-readable editions and digital infrastructure common in Greco-Roman traditions. Consequently, the team developed an open-access, annotated database of Armenian inscriptions from churches, khachkars (cross-stones), and tapanakars (tombstones) from the Artsakh region to serve as indestructible evidence for scholars and legal decision-makers. The project utilizes a multi-disciplinary technical pipeline structured across several development phases which include: 1) the creation of the Armenian AutoEpiDoc pipeline—a semi-automated Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) workflow that converts validated records into EpiDoc-compliant TEI/XML; 2) a machine-readable SKOS vocabulary specifically for Armenian inscriptional conventions; and 3) geospatial and web visualization: heterogeneous records are standardized using IIIF and CIDOC/FAIR profiles, then geolocated via PostGIS. Key deliverables include an online interactive atlas containing over 200 media records and 50 fully compliant EpiDoc files. The work provides a foundation for future research in Armenian-script optical character recognition (OCR) efforts while serving as indestructible evidence of Armenian cultural heritage for scholars, educators, and legal decision-makers. The Atlas serves both as a preservation tool and as a foundation for future research on Armenian epigraphy, cultural heritage digitization and computational analysis of historical inscriptions.
Results: i) publicly accessible interactive Atlas documenting Armenian inscriptions from Artsakh, ii) a curated dataset of geolocated inscriptions with standardized metadata, iii) an open-source technical pipeline for lapidary heritage digitization and geospatial integration