Dear colleagues and friends,

We are excited to release a new version of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE, hosted at Ghent University), freely accessible at https://www.dbbe.ugent.be.

Thanks to the generous support of the Special Research Fund of Ghent University, DBBE has been completely redesigned over the past two years, in close collaboration with the Database, Document and Content Managementhttps://ddcm.ugent.be/ research group of the Faculty of Engineering of Ghent University and with the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanitieshttps://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/.

The corpus of Byzantine metrical paratexts collected in our Database has been consistently enlarged, through the systematic consultation of manuscripts and relevant secondary literature, and it now counts some 10700 single epigrams, over 7000 of which are the result of first-hand inspection of (reproductions of) manuscripts. In comparison with the previous version of DBBE, our users are offered the possibility to navigate more easily through the different records, which are much better linked to each other. The search function of Greek text has been refined and provides users with more accurate results.

While the distinction between Occurrenceshttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/occurrences/search (unique epigrams as to be found in manuscripts) and Typeshttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/types/search (normalised texts of similar occurrences) has been retained, a new way to group epigrams has been introduced: the Verse Variants records. These pages display a clear overview of the parallels and deviations of single verse lines. The Verse Variants are accessible by clicking on single epigram verse lines.

The main scope of DBBE is collecting Byzantine book epigrams and offering their texts to the scholarly community. However, we are aiming to make available contextual data as well, and have paid major attention to the improvement of information on Manuscripthttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/manuscripts/search and Personshttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/persons/search. The Bibliography section has been adjusted and it now includes a search path.

We gladly refer to our Help pagehttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/pages/help and Search Tricks and Tipshttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/pages/search-tips-tricks page for more information.

We encourage users to explore the new features of DBBE and are eager to welcome their comments and feedback at dbbe@ugent.bemailto:dbbe@ugent.be.

For the whole DBBE teamhttps://www.dbbe.ugent.be/pages/team,

Floris Bernard Julián Bértola Julie Boeten Cristina Cocola Sien De Groot Kristoffel Demoen Pieterjan De Potter Ilse De Vos Rachele Ricceri Anne-Sophie Rouckhout