Integrating Digital Papyrology

Paper presented at "Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come" a three-day, Mellon Foundation Conference at the University of Virginia to explore how to develop and sustain online humanities research and publication, March 26-28, 2010: http://shapeofthings.org/index.htm

Proposal for three Greek papyrological characters

This is a proposal to add three Greek characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode, needed to represent text on papyri. The characters were published in Unicode Standard version 7.0 in June 2014

The Son of Suda On-Line

The Son of Suda On-Line (SoSOL) represents the first steps towards a collaborative, editorially-controlled, online editor for the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP). Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Integrating Digital Papyrology Phase 2 (IDP2), SoSOL provides a strongly version-controlled front-end for editing and reviewing papyrological texts marked up in EpiDoc XML

Towards a reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets: Engineers and the Papyrologist

We introduce a collaborative project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford regarding the analysis and reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets. We sketch the imaging and image processing techniques used to digitally capture and analyse the tablets, the development of the image analysis tools to aid papyrologists in the transcription of the texts, and lessons that can be learned so far from such an inter-disciplinary project

Hands on Workshops. ENCODE report on digital competences, learning outcomes and best practices in teaching and learning

The report presents the results of the feedback and competence questionnaires distributed during workshops/training activities organized by ENCODE or associated partners. These results are useful to identify eventual learning needs, measure the improvement in digital competences and design teaching materials and programmes of next training events. The present analysis is based on data collected by the following events (in chronological order): - the “Epigrafia digitale e EpiDoc Epigrafia greca” Workshop, held by A. Bencivenni and I. Vagionakis within the Greek Epigraphy Class of the MA in Classics/Ancient History/Archaeology of the University of Bologna (October, 12th-14th, 2020) - the “ENCODE Greek and Latin Epigraphy Workshop”, organized by the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, part of the first Multiplier Event of the ENCODE Project (January, 26th-29th, 2021) - the “EpiDoc Workshop London/Bologna”, organized by G. Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London) and I. Vagionakis (Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna), held on April, 12th- 16th, 2021 - the “Edizioni digitali di testi sanscriti: introduzione a xml e tei” Workshop, organized by G. Buriola, M. Franceschini, I. Vagionakis (Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna), held on April, 26th- 29th, 2021 - the “Linked Open Data for Written Artefacts Intensive Training”, organized by the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies of the University of Hamburg, part of the second Multiplier Event of the ENCODE project (May, 26th-28th, 2021) - the “Training Workshop Multilingual and Multicultural Digital Infrastructures for Ancient Written Artefacts”, organized by the Department of Ancient History of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, part of the third Multiplier Event (November, 3rd-5th, 2021) - the “ENCODE Winter School Papyrology for non-specialists” organized by the Institut für klassische Philologie of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg, part of the fourth Multiplier Event (February, 14th- 17th, 2022).The ENCODE Project (KA2-2020-1-IT02-KA203-079585) was financed by the European Commission in the framework of the Erasmus+ Strategic partnership for higher education

Digital Corpus of Greek and Latin Literary Papyri

Since the end of the 19th century, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, other places in the Mediterranean have yielded thousands of papyri, many written in Greek and Latin. The majority of them contain documentary texts concerned with public and private affairs, but an estimated 15% are ancient books of varied content, such as epic, ancient drama, lyric poetry, historical and oratorical works, medical treatises, lexicographical texts, etc. To determine the appropriate scope of a digital corpus of these texts, we propose to invite those whose scholarship and teaching depend on literary papyri to two workshops, to be attended also by the technical specialists behind the new DDbDP. The engagement of all these individuals will be critical to the long-term sustainability of the project, and by the end of the second workshop we intend to have a clearly defined set of goals and a realistic workplan that will serve as a basis for a project aimed at realizing a digital corpus of literary papyri

Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets have proved particularly difficult to read. This paper describes the initial stages in the development of a computer system designed to aid historians in the reading of the stylus tablets. A detailed investigation was undertaken, using Knowledge Elicitation techniques borrowed from Artificial IntelliJOURce, Cognitive Psychology, and Computational Linguistics, to elicit the processes experts use whilst reading an ancient text. The resulting model was used as the basis of a computer architecture to construct a system which takes in images of the tablets and outputs plausible interpretations of the documents. It is demonstrated that using Knowledge Elicitation techniques can further the understanding of complex processes in the humanities, and that these techniques can provide an underlying structure for the basis of a computer system that replicates that process. As such it provides significant insight into how experts work in the humanities, whilst providing the means to develop tools to assist them in their complex task

Report on digital competences, learning outcomes and best practices in teaching and learning

The report is based on an international online survey on Digital competences, learning outcomes and best practices in teaching and learning conducted as part of the ENCODE project in July 2021 (Intellectual Output 1). With the aim of bridging the in Ancient Writing Cultures, the ENCODE project intends to promote digital competences among students and academic staff by developing innovative teaching modules with modern digital approaches and implementing them in the existing academic curricula.1 The pilot experiences of previous workshops and intensive programmes are of great importance for the design of new training modules. Therefore, a survey was conducted among teachers and participants of these digital workshops, the results of which are analysed in this report. The purpose of the report is to discuss examples of good Learning and Training practices in the field of Ancient Writing Cultures. It also aims to identify improvement possibilities, as well as areas where digital methods should be expanded or newly established.The ENCODE Project (KA2-2020-1-IT02-KA203-079585) was financed by the European Commission in the framework of the Erasmus+ Strategic partnership for higher education