The Epidoc Aphrodisias Project was launched in 2002 to develop and apply tools for presenting ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions on the Internet. With support from the Leverhulme Trust, as part of their Research Interchange Scheme, researchers from Europe, the U.S. and the U.K. pooled their experience and launched a pilot project.

The longer term aim is the publication of some 1,000 inscribed texts from the ancient city of Aphrodisias in Caria, where inscriptions have been recorded since the eighteenth century, and where excavations have been conducted by New York University since the early 1960s. Charlotte Roueché, of King’s College London, and Joyce Reynolds, of Newnham College Cambridge, are preparing the inscriptions for publication in collaboration with other colleagues. An international group, co-ordinated by Tom Elliott of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is working to establish uniform standards for marking up inscriptions for publication in this way (using XML). The Leverhulme grant allowed a group of the Aphrodisias inscriptions to be used as a pilot project, to test out the new guidelines.

The initial outcome was the publication of about 250 late antique inscriptions from the site, which had been published in book form by Charlotte Roueché in 1989 as Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, which is now out of print; this has the added advantage of allowing direct comparison between web and book publication.