The digital-edition standards — EpiDoc TEI-XML, IIIF, and the long-term archive plan.
The journal's digital-edition standards document describes the technical infrastructure that supports the published transcriptions in machine-readable form. Bilal Sherif maintains the standards; the document is revised every September and reviewed annually by the editorial board.
The EpiDoc 9.4 TEI-XML schema.
Every published edition is released as a structured TEI-XML file conforming to the EpiDoc 9.4 community schema for ancient inscriptions and papyri. EpiDoc is a community-developed customisation of the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI Guidelines specifically for the requirements of epigraphic and papyrological editions; the standard has been the default for digital-classics edition projects since the early 2010s. Our XML files include the full diplomatic transcription with line breaks and damaged-text markers, the lemmatised normalised reading, the paleographic apparatus as TEI critical-apparatus elements, the institutional inventory and provenance metadata, and links to the IIIF photographic-plate manifests. The schema-validation pass runs in the conversion toolchain before any XML file is released; files that do not validate against the EpiDoc DTD do not enter publication.
The IIIF photographic-plate manifests.
Every published item has an associated IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) manifest describing the photographic plates that document the item. The manifest follows the IIIF Presentation API 3.0 standard and includes the visible-light plate, the raking-light plate (where the item benefits from raking-light photography), and any additional context plates (the excavation-find photograph, the conservation-treatment record). The IIIF manifests are hosted at the journal's open archive and can be consumed by any IIIF-compatible viewer, including the major digital-classics platforms (Mirador, Universal Viewer, the Heidelberg digital library viewer).
Unicode handling across four scripts.
The journal works with four distinct ancient scripts, each requiring specific Unicode handling. Hieratic and demotic are transliterated to the standard Egyptian Latin transliteration (using the ALA-LC convention with the special characters in the Unicode Latin Extended blocks); the original signs are reproduced in the photographic plate only, not in the running XML text. This is a community convention in Egyptology and matches the practice of all major paleographic publications. Coptic uses the full Unicode Coptic block (U+2C80–U+2CFF, encoded since Unicode 4.1) with the dialectal markers we have developed for Sahidic, Bohairic and the minor dialects. Greek uses the standard polytonic Greek (U+0370–U+03FF combined with U+1F00–U+1FFF for the accent diacritics) with the standard papyrological critical-sign mark-up.
The licensing framework.
The TEI-XML files are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, free for academic and educational use with citation, with commercial use requiring a separate licence. The published transcriptions and apparatus inherit the same licence by default. The photographic plates carry a slightly different licence (CC BY-NC-ND) because of the institutional-consent considerations — the photographs include institutional inventory references that the institutional projects' legal frameworks require us to mark non-derivative; the plates can be reproduced for academic use but cannot be modified or used to construct derivative works. Three commercial licences have been granted across the licence framework since 2020.
The long-term archive plan.
The journal's complete digital archive — every TEI-XML file, every IIIF manifest, every published PDF issue — is mirrored at three locations beyond the Aswan office: a copy at the Cooperative's Cairo backup site, a copy at the Heidelberg digital-classics laboratory under a long-term-preservation memorandum signed in 2023, and a copy at the Leiden University digital-classics archive under a similar agreement signed in 2024. The three external mirrors give the journal a structural commitment to long-term preservation of its digital output that does not depend on the cooperative's own continued operation. The mirrors are updated quarterly with the new issue's content; the agreements with Heidelberg and Leiden include the licence terms that allow the receiving institutions to host the content perpetually.
The 2026 platform launch.
The journal's new searchable corpus platform, in development since 2023, is planned for production launch in September 2026. The platform will give subscribers full-text search across the ten-year archive at character, lemmatised and paleographic-feature levels. The platform is built on open-source software (the standard ElasticSearch-based search stack used by several digital-classics platforms) and will be hosted at the Aswan office with the Cairo mirror as the failover. The September 2026 launch is conditional on the editorial board's September meeting and on the platform's beta-testing review with a small group of Researcher-tier subscribers.
For the wider methodology context, see the methodology page. The paleography tools document covers the working reference shelf and photographic workflow. The TEI-XML files for every published edition are downloadable from the journal's open archive section.