Since the very beginnings of the digital humanities Papyrology has been in the vanguard of the
application of information technologies to its own scientific purposes for both theoretical
and practical reasons (the strong awareness towards the problems of human memory and the
material ways of preserving it the need to work with a multifarious and overwhelming amount of
different data). After more than thirty years of development we have now at our disposal the
most advanced tools to make papyrological studies more and more effective and even to create a
new conception of papyrology and a new model of edition of the ancient documents. At this
turining point it is important to build an epistemological framework including all the
different expressions of Digital Papyrology to trace a historical sketch setting the
background of the contemporary tools and to provide a clear overview of the current
theoretical and technological trends so that all the possibilities currently available can be
exploited following uniform pathways. The volume represents an innovative attempt to deal with
such topics usually relegated into very quick and general treatments within journal articles
or papyrological handbooks.
