DeepScribe: Localization and Classification of Elamite Cuneiform Signs Via Deep Learning

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the paperwork of the Achaemenid Empire was recorded on clay tablets. In 1933, archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute (OI) found tens of thousands of these tablets and fragments during the excavation of Persepolis. Many of these tablets have been painstakingly photographed and annotated by expert cuneiformists, and now provide a rich dataset consisting of over 5,000 annotated tablet images and 100,000 cuneiform sign bounding boxes. We leverage this dataset to develop DeepScribe, a modular computer vision pipeline capable of localizing cuneiform signs and providing suggestions for the identity of each sign. We investigate the difficulty of learning subtasks relevant to cuneiform tablet transcription on ground-truth data, finding that a RetinaNet object detector can achieve a localization mAP of 0.78 and a ResNet classifier can achieve a top-5 sign classification accuracy of 0.89. The end-to-end pipeline achieves a top-5 classification accuracy of 0.80. As part of the classification module, DeepScribe groups cuneiform signs into morphological clusters. We consider how this automatic clustering approach differs from the organization of standard, printed sign lists and what we may learn from it. These components, trained individually, are sufficient to produce a system that can analyze photos of cuneiform tablets from the Achaemenid period and provide useful transliteration suggestions to researchers. We evaluate the model's end-to-end performance on locating and classifying signs, providing a roadmap to a linguistically-aware transliteration system, then consider the model's potential utility when applied to other periods of cuneiform writing.Comment: Currently under review in the ACM JOCC

As Below So Above: Reconstructing the Neo-Babylonian Worldview

To add to our knowledge about a Near Eastern culture, this project examines through textual evidence how the early first millennium BCE Neo-Babylonians thought, reasoned, and wrote in order to partially reconstruct the shared, generally held worldview of the Neo-Babylonian people using the transdisciplinary approach of worldview analysis. Worldviews are what we use to think with, not what we think about. Underlying surficial cultural behaviors are deeper levels of cognition regarding how to reason, perceive the world, prioritize values, prescribe behavior, and explain all of life. Specifically, this work examines the language and logic reflected in the textual archive, believing that this is the foundational level of any worldview. I argue that one finds two related components: (1) that they were linguistically programmed to be attuned to the full context over particularities, verbal actions over agential subjects, the continuity of substances over discrete objects, the standard use of maleness over femaleness, and the affective power of spoken or written words, and (2) that they were logically programmed to prefer gradations over distinctions, functional properties over inherent attributes, radials and/or rhizomes over linearity, and relationships and/or comparisons over abstractions and algorithms. By addressing this underlying, implicit cognitive software the Neo-Babylonians used, one is better able to understand the society’s more observable and obvious religious, ethical, legal, political, and social features. This has the potential to present a more contextualized view of Neo-Babylonian civilization. Reconstructing the ancient Neo-Babylonian worldview allows scholars to compare and contrast the linguistic and logical features to other ancient nearby cultures in order to understand continuities and differences and what accounts for them. One can open a dialogue between these ancient societies at a deeper level. It demonstrates the uniqueness of Neo-Babylonia. And it provides a basis for understanding how Neo-Babylonians contributed to the roots of Western civilization and thought. Most current worldview analysis examines modern or postmodern worldviews. By examining an ancient worldview, one can begin to more clearly understand any common aspects which exist for all worldviews and any elements that exist in ancient ones which are missing from cataloging more modern worldviews. Thus, the cataloging of an ancient worldview helps to open new vistas within worldview studies. This study invites similar ones within ancient Near Eastern studies and within ancient studies in general

Melammu: The Ancient World in an Age of Globalization

Melammu volumes have broadened the horizons of studies of antiquity by encouraging the crossing of geographical and cultural boundaries between ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. The present Melammu volume extends from Greece to India, with articles on Phrygia and Armenia, also viewing texts from ancient Israel, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The globalization described in this volume extends over language barriers and literatures, showing how texts as well as goods can travel between societies and regions. This collection of papers offer new insights and perspectives into connections between the Mediterranean World, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Persia and India

Collective Intelligence - Consenting to Conscient Consultation

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Disney, Uber, Tinder, etc.: ours is the generation that has got a World Wide Web to their fingertips; in addition, we often feel like the net has analogously become a kind of add-on to our minds, i.e., an extension to our intellectual capacity. Browsing on the internet, emailing, skyping, googling, chatting, posting texts, photos or videos on social media, whilst interacting with contents that can be as informative as the news broadcast and as entertaining as playing videogames or streaming music, films, and series via applications (apps) downloaded on smart devices have thus been gradually becoming some of our generation’s daily activities of choice. Along these lines, whilst meaning to conceptualise a method for studying an alternative to our present-day prescriptive educational practices, I elaborate a constructivist approach towards the transformative paradigm of a transmedia-interactive produsage. That is, in this MA Thesis I propose the produsage of a cyclic program in which educators could cooperatively consent on a conscient consultation of their prodused contents in a knowledge democratisation exercise. These experts could thereby participate on the mediation, moderation, and mediatisation of a (n)ethnographic e-volution on the road to a sociocultural empowerment and a civic emancipation movement, striving for critical reforms that would pursue the autonomous automatisation of self-regulatory socio-cultures. Comparatively, from this study’s standpoint, the arguably participative factor of the existing Participatory Web resembles the speculative political empowerment triggered by the act of voting for a political candidate: because, in both cases, the options presented to the public regularly are pre-established by the few de facto empowered decision-makers, like e.g., the heads of political parties and coalitions on one hand, or content writers and producers on another. Alternatively, in this thesis I will look into concealed alternatives for (or, preferably, against) what has gradually developed into the modus operandi of media and technology businesses: the monetisation of information by the commodification of produsers. More specifically, I hope to analyse if, inasmuch as ICTs have been democratising knowledge, they also have been contributing to the prospective quest for more maximalist, and collective, forms of participation during our (Western societies’) history. Notwithstanding, this thesis is a theoretical study, and therefore, here I will not present an empirical example of such educative interaction: which I deliberately call eduraction. Appropriately, because the academia continuously gains new insights with the intersection and compilation of our human cognition, – viz., with our collective intelligence (CI) – I understand that constructivist edutainment and pedagogical participation practices can be interchangeably employed towards a civic engagement – as presented in this thesis’ results. Accordingly, the discussion that I intend to incite with this research theoretically refers to the possible implementation of artefacts for mediatising our civic participation, towards the radical sense of democracy via a critical constructivist education. In short, here, I aim to explain how interactive media create collective intelligence, by analysing what decentralisation of power is engendered by produsage and why edutaining praxis ought to spur a civic participation. As a result, in this study I will hypothesise the emergence of a 21st century conscientisation praxis. All in all, educators are enthusiasts, connoisseurs, collecting, curating, collaborating, criticising, converging, and creating contents that synthesise and might materialise meaningful methods and manners for systematically reasoning, negotiating, or promoting a collective, constructivist, and perchance transformative and participative (democratic) utopia. Ultimately, instructors are a medium of knowledge; and be that as it may, nobody knows all, but the sum of all known by each of us is all the knowledge of our multi-millenary humanity. Thence, we ought to find ways of collaboratively connecting the dots with our bits and pieces of information. Until very recently, many considered the efforts for conceptualising networks, in which meaningful thematics could be broadly discussed (by people from different ethnicities all over the world), just as naïve as utopic. Indeed, it is still debatable whether interactive media, in the current state of Web 2.0, do provide such effectual possibilities to its users. On the other hand, it is with the purpose of adding to this debate that I endeavour to investigate quiescent means for collaboratively working on a critical upgrade to the denotation of democracy. As a matter of fact, technology, etymologically, is the study of crafts; and this MA Thesis endeavours to deal with the sociocultural factors and artefacts that we create to assist our kind’s evolving signification of civilisation. With this in mind, for concluding this thesis with a theorisation on yet untapped possibilities within produsage, I look into some of the latest media developments which could possibly contribute to meaningful improvements on our practices of participative citizenship. Then, in such hyperlinked hypothesis, educative matters of various thematic universes could be cooperatively taught by doyens, through networked lectures, with new hypertexts being added to the storylines of their lessons inasmuch as they were being produced and curated, as a critique to divergent interpretations on those phenomena previously presented via a unique interactive-video production. In that event, interactive media could create a Collective Intelligence, by means of an edutaining praxis which could spur a civic participation for democratising knowledge via produsage – in turn, (re-)creating and cyclically transforming our collective intelligence. Like this, such media type would theoretically serve as a wikinomical platform

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

CTRL SHIFT

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority

Addressing Information Asymmetry In The Social Contract: An Archival-diplomatic Approach To Open Government Data Curation

This thesis shows that the concepts and practices developed in the field of record-keeping can be applied to the curation of open government data to strengthen the trustworthiness of that data. It begins by situating open government data in the context of the social contract, which operates through the exchange of information. The thesis develops the notions of the ‘record-as-command’ and ‘data-as-command’ to explain the dialogical but asymmetrical information relationship between the individual and the state, which is modelled as a principal-agent problem. Using concepts from information economics, the study argues that open government data is the latest monitoring mechanism in a long history of government secrecy and openness. This establishes the significance of the curation of open government data beyond technical questions. The thesis then considers how trustworthiness has figured in thinking about record-keeping, identifying three core record-keeping controls; 1) metadata used to document 2) custodianship in 3) auditable systems. To show how these three broad controls have been put into practice, the study examines two examples of record-keeping guidance, one for paper records and one for hybrid records, which demonstrates the application of the three core controls across time and media. The study then looks for the presence or absence of these controls in government datasets published in Kenya and Australia. These analyses trace the datasets back to their source(s), at each step looking for evidence of custodial and curatorial interventions documented in metadata managed in auditable systems. The study’s contribution to open government data work is its demonstration of the value of record-keeping controls in the curation of data. Additionally, the study contributes new insights to information in the principal-agent problem of the social contract, contributes to archival theory and finds a need to foster critical data literacy in the body politic if open government data is to be read and used to correct information asymmetry

Enabling cardiovascular multimodal, high dimensional, integrative analytics

While traditionally the understanding of cardiovascular morbidity relied on the acquisition and interpretation of health data, the advances in health technologies has enabled us to collect far larger amount of health data. This thesis explores the application of advanced analytics that utilise powerful mechanisms for integrating health data across different modalities and dimensions into a single and holistic environment to better understand different diseases, with a focus on cardiovascular conditions. Different statistical methodologies are applied across a number of case studies supported by a novel methodology to integrate and simplify data collection. The work culminates in the different dataset modalities explaining different effects on morbidity: blood biomarkers, electrocardiogram recordings, RNA-Seq measurements, and different population effects piece together the understanding of a person morbidity. More specifically, explainable artificial intelligence methods were employed on structured datasets from patients with atrial fibrillation to improve the screening for the disease. Omics datasets, including RNA-sequencing and genotype datasets, were examined and new biomarkers were discovered allowing a better understanding of atrial fibrillation. Electrocardiogram signal data were used to assess the early risk prediction of heart failure, enabling clinicians to use this novel approach to estimate future incidences. Population-level data were applied to the identification of associations and temporal trajectory of diseases to better understand disease dependencies in different clinical cohorts