Agendas for Digital Palaeography in an Archaeological Context: Egypt 1800 BC

Handwriting raises issues alive in archaeological debates, philosophical and historical. In turn, by their extreme fragmentariness, the earliest archaeological manuscripts could generate usefully different questions for the field of palaeography. Here, digitisation offers new common ground for the separate disciplines in the study of the past. For current archaeological discussions of structure and agency, manuscripts pose the act of writing, between social and individual. For debates over literacy and power in part- literate societies, an archaeological hoard of manuscript fragments offers opportunities to assess our chances of knowing, for one time and place, how many writings and writers. The largest earliest group of writing on papyrus-paper comprises several thousand small fragments from Lahun in Egypt (about 1850–1750 BC). Traditional methods of recording similarity and difference across the collection can now be accelerated to a point of qualitative change, by applying image-matching software. This paper considers the potential of computer-aided palaeography for generating new research agendas

Show or tell? Opportunities, problems and methods of the exhibition as a form of research dissemination

There has a been a good deal of debate about the possible use of exhibitions in disseminating research, as an alternative to conventional text papers where artefacts have a significant role in the research The European Academy of Design has been a pioneer in this area but, so far, there has been little documentation of this practice or constructive reflection to support future development. The authors were responsible for the organisation of an exhibition of research work at the 2002 "Common Ground" Conference of the Design Research Society. Their role included mentoring the exhibitors, making the practical arrangements for the exhibition and organising refereeing of exhibits by an international panel of referees. The exhibition demonstrated the potential for new forms of research dissemination but also highlighted a number of problems and issues which must be dealt with if future exhibitions are to provide a robust and appropriate way to present and record research outcomes. The reflections of the organisers, and comments of referees and exhibitors are employed in this paper to develop guidelines for future practice in research exhibitions, paying particular attention to the importance of providing a full narrative within the exhibit and a permanent record, and ways that exhibitions might change the format of conferences to allow more constructive engagement between participants. </p

Open Access to Papyrus Collections and the Future of Editing Papyri

This contribution aims to answer the question «what measures can we take to secure the future of editing papyri?». The main suggestion is to find ways to secure in the long term the survival, updating, and function of already existing and extremely useful traditional research aids, either printed or online

THE PHYSICAL BEING Al\1]) CIRCULATION OF ANCIENT LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION

Among 20th-century classicists reacting against an overriding concern with Realien, so important to the scholarship of earlier generations, one topic which has suffered relative neglect is that of the physical being of ancient literature.! Yet it need hardly be stressed how important this topic is as background information to the study of classical literature. How did the Greeks and Romans record their literary works, and how did they "publish" them? What was the ancient notion of a collection of poetry? And was there an equivalent for our notion of a "second edition"? These are but some of the questions which may pertinently be asked. So with a view more to utility than originality I offer a survey of the more important recent critical writing on the subject, which I hope will serve also as a vade mecum outlining the basic details of the ancient book, as well as the processes by which it was circulated. The first part (sections I to III) surveys the physical being of Greek and Latin literature, concentrating on its materials and then format, and the second half is concerned with its dissemination

With Flaccus: A Conversation with Erich Gruen’s Alexandria

This research critically examines In Flaccus, a text from the ancient author Philo. The research takes into account the perspectives of several scholars, especially Erich S. Gruen, an American classicist and authority on the subject. The purpose of the research is to reexamine the causes of and motives for the outbreak of the Alexandrian riots in 38CE that left a significant portion of the city\u27s Jewish population dead or confined to a ghetto