The TALOS AI4SSH Lab is pleased to welcome Stavroula Konstantopoulou as a Visiting Scholar! Stavroula Konstantopoulou is a PhD candidate in Classical Philology at the University of Valladolid (Spain) and a research assistant in the project Dodona Travels to Ithaca: Artificial Intelligence Applied to the Edition of Greek Inscriptions (NextGenerationEU), under the supervision of Dr Elena Martín González. She holds an MA in History from The Ohio State University (USA) and a BA in Archaeology from the University of Crete, and has recently completed a postgraduate degree in Greek Alphabetic Scripts, Writing Materials and their Contents (Democritus University of Thrace & National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).

With nearly two decades of experience at the Center of Epigraphical and Paleographical Studies at the Ohio State University, she has worked extensively as an external collaborator on the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) Greek Inscriptions database. Her scholarly profile combines deep philological expertise with long-standing engagement in digital epigraphy and large-scale research infrastructures.

Her doctoral research focuses on the oracular tablets from the sanctuary of Dodona and the early 20th-century excavation journals documenting their discovery, with particular emphasis on the handwritten notebooks of Dimitrios Evangelidis. Her work brings together philological, archaeological, and archival perspectives with digital methodologies, including detailed transcription, the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies, and the development of interoperable metadata and TEI/EpiDoc-based annotation workflows. This approach enables the systematic linking of textual, visual, and contextual data and supports both analogue and digital access to these important archival sources.

During her research stay at TALOS, Stavroula Konstantopoulou will focus on the methodological integration of AI technologies into the study of Greek epigraphic and archival material, in close alignment with both her doctoral research and the Dodona Travels to Ithaca project. A key component of her visit is a research presentation on AI-assisted approaches to the study and re-examination of the Dodona oracular tablets, with particular attention to textual restoration models such as Ithaca. The presentation will address not only the practical integration of such models into editorial workflows but also their methodological potential and limitations.

Building on this framework, her work at TALOS will explore the combined analysis of the epigraphic corpus and the excavation archives compiled by Evangelidis, using Dodona as a case study for bringing archival documentation into dialogue with AI-assisted tools and traditional philological analysis. By foregrounding excavation diaries as essential contextual sources, her research contributes to the reconstruction of the archaeological and documentary context of the tablets and enhances the accessibility and scholarly reuse of archival material, in comparison with the published corpus edition (2013).

In parallel, she will collaborate with TALOS researchers on methodological questions concerning HTR for handwritten archival documents, the alignment of transcriptions with structured and interoperable metadata, and advanced TEI/EpiDoc annotation practices linking textual, material, and contextual dimensions. Her visit exemplifies TALOS’s commitment to fostering interdisciplinary research at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Classical Studies, and Artificial Intelligence, and to supporting early-career researchers working with innovative and critically grounded methodologies.