Artefacts and Errors: Acknowledging Issues of Representation in the Digital: Imaging of Ancient Texts

It is assumed, in palaeography, papyrology and epigraphy, that a certain amount of uncertainty is inherent in the reading of damaged and abraded texts. Yet we have not really grappled with the fact that, nowadays, as many scholars tend to deal with digital images of texts, rather than handling the texts themselves, the procedures for creating digital images of texts can insert further uncertainty into the representation of the text created. Technical distortions can lead to the unintentional introduction of ‘artefacts’ into images, which can have an effect on the resulting representation. If we cannot trust our digital surrogates of texts, can we trust the readings from them? How do scholars acknowledge the quality of digitised images of texts? Furthermore, this leads us to the type of discussions of representation that have been present in Classical texts since Plato: digitisation can be considered as an alternative form of representation, bringing to the modern debate of the use of digital technology in Classics the familiar theories of mimesis (imitation) and ekphrasis (description): the conversion of visual evidence into explicit descriptions of that information, stored in computer files in distinct linguistic terms, with all the difficulties of conversion understood in the ekphratic process. The community has not yet considered what becoming dependent on digital texts means for the field, both in practical and theoretical terms. Issues of quality, copying, representation, and substance should be part of our dialogue when we consult digital surrogates of documentary material, yet we are just constructing understandings of what it means to rely on virtual representations of artefacts. It is necessary to relate our understandings of uncertainty in palaeography and epigraphy to our understanding of the mechanics of visualization employed by digital imaging techniques, if we are to fully understand the impact that these will have

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

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

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

Egyptin siirtovaikutuspiirteitä Narmuthiksen ostrakonien kreikassa

Volume: Supplement XXVIII Host publication title: The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, Supplement 28: Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology, Warsaw 29.07.-3.08.2013 Isbn(print): 978-83-938425-8-2Peer reviewe

Review of I. Andorlini, G. Bastianini, M. Manfredi, and G. Menci Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia, Firenze, 23–29 Agosto 1998

Review of I. Andorlini, G. Bastianini, M. Manfredi, G. Menci (edd.): Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia, Firenze, 23–29 Agosto 1998. Vols I, II and III. Pp. xxiii + 1362, pls. Florence: Istituto Papirologico ‘G. Vitelli’, 2001. Cased, €154.94. ISBN: 88-87829-21-7

Image and interpretation using artificial intelligence to read ancient Roman texts

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 a system that assists expert papyrologists in the interpretation of the Vindolanda writing tablets. A model-based approach is taken that relies on models of the written form of characters, and statistical modelling of language, to produce plausible interpretations of the documents. Fusion of the contributions from the language, character, and image feature models is achieved by utilizing the GRAVA agent architecture that uses Minimum Description Length as the basis for information fusion across semantic levels. A system is developed that reads in image data and outputs plausible interpretations of the Vindolanda tablets