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

Inheriting library cards to Babel and Alexandria: Contemporary metaphors for the digital library

Librarians have been consciously adopting metaphors to describe library concepts since the nineteenth century, helping us to structure our understanding of new technologies. We have drawn extensively on these figurative frameworks to explore issues surrounding the digital library, yet very little has been written to date which interrogates how these metaphors have developed over the years. Previous studies have explored library metaphors, using either textual analysis or ethnographic methods to investigate their usage. However, this is to our knowledge the first study to use bibliographic data, corpus analysis, qualitative sentiment weighting and close reading to study particular metaphors in detail. It draws on a corpus of over 450 articles to study the use of the metaphors of the Library of Alexandria and Babel, concluding that both have been extremely useful as framing metaphors for the digital library. However, their longstanding use has seen them become stretched as metaphors, meaning that the field’s figurative framework now fails to represent the changing technologies which underpin contemporary digital libraries

Exploring Data Provenance in Handwritten Text Recognition Infrastructure: Sharing and Reusing Ground Truth Data, Referencing Models, and Acknowledging Contributions. Starting the Conversation on How We Could Get It Done

This paper discusses best practices for sharing and reusing Ground Truth in Handwritten Text Recognition infrastructures, as well as ways to reference and acknowledge contributions to the creation and enrichment of data within these systems. We discuss how one can place Ground Truth data in a repository and, subsequently, inform others through HTR-United. Furthermore, we want to suggest appropriate citation methods for ATR data, models, and contributions made by volunteers. Moreover, when using digitised sources (digital facsimiles), it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between the physical object and the digital collection. These topics all relate to the proper acknowledgement of labour put into digitising, transcribing, and sharing Ground Truth HTR data. This also points to broader issues surrounding the use of machine learning in archival and library contexts, and how the community should begin to acknowledge and record both contributions and data provenance

Exploring data provenance in handwritten text recognition infrastructure:Sharing and reusing ground truth data, referencing models, and acknowledging contributions. Starting the conversation on how we could get it done

This paper discusses best practices for sharing and reusing Ground Truth in Handwritten Text Recognition infrastructures, and ways to reference and acknowledge contributions to the creation and enrichment of data within these Machine Learning systems. We discuss how one can publish Ground Truth data in a repository and, subsequently, inform others. Furthermore, we suggest appropriate citation methods for HTR data, models, and contributions made by volunteers. Moreover, when using digitised sources (digital facsimiles), it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between the physical object and the digital collection. These topics all relate to the proper acknowledgement of labour put into digitising, transcribing, and sharing Ground Truth HTR data. This also points to broader issues surrounding the use of Machine Learning in archival and library contexts, and how the community should begin toacknowledge and record both contributions and data provenance

Image to interpretation

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda have provided a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets in particular have proved extremely difficult to read. The aim of this thesis is to explore the extent to which techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be used to develop a system that could aid historians in reading the stylus texts. This system would utilise image processing techniques that have been developed in Engineering Science to analyse the stylus tablets, whilst incorporating knowledge elicited from experts working on the texts, to propagate possible suggestions of the text contained within the tablets. This thesis reports on what appears to be the first system developed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document. There has been little previous research carried out to see how papyrologists actually carry out their task. This thesis studies closely how experts working with primary sources, such as the Vindolanda Texts, operate. Using Knowledge Elicitation Techniques, a model is proposed for how they read a text. Information regarding the letter forms and language used at Vindolanda is collated, A corpus of annotated images is built up, to provide a data set regarding the letter forms used in the ink and stylus texts. In order to relate this information to the work done on image processing, a stochastic Minimum Description Length (MDL) architecture is adopted, and adapted, to form the basis of a system that can propagate interpretations of the Vindolanda texts. In doing so a system is constructed that can read in image data and output textual interpretations of the writing that appears on the documents. It is demonstrated that knowledge elicitation techniques can be used to capture and mobilise expert information. The process of reading ancient, and ambiguous texts, is made explicit. It is also shown that MDL can be used as a basis to build large systems that reason about complex information effectively. This research presents the first stages towards developing a cognitive visual system that can propagate realistic interpretations from image data, and so aid the papyrologists in their task.</p

A Virtual Tomb for Kelvingrove: Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Education

The use of computers as an educational resource in museums is becoming increasingly popular as more and more institutions realise that multimedia displays are very successful in imparting a broad variety of information. Although three-dimensional reconstructions of sites and structures have been used in archaeology for many years, the majority of museum computer installations have dealt with two-dimensional media because of the costs, equipment and labour involved in producing interactive 3D scenes. The birth of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) has changed the way virtual reality is implemented and viewed. As an internet protocol, VRML can be used on most major platforms and implemented by anyone with a word-processing package, an internet browser, and the relevant plug-in. There is no reason why this new technology cannot be adopted by archaeologists and museums to produce virtual reality models of structures, sites and objects to aid the research of specialists and the education of the public. This project (undertaken at the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow, Scotland, between May and October 1998) investigated the practicalities involved in using VRML to create a virtual reality model for use in a public space. A model of the Egyptian tomb of Sen-nedjem was developed for installation in the Egyptian Gallery of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, in the hope that the introduction of this computer display would encourage the museum visitor's interest in the gallery's existing artefacts. Creation of the model would also investigate the possibility of using VRML to build accurate archaeological reconstructions cheaply and efficiently using publicly available software and existing archaeological resources. A fully functioning virtual reality model of the tomb of Sen-nedjem has been created, incorporating interactive elements, photorealistic representation, and animation, and this model can be seen here. However, because of technical problems as well as the educational issues raised, it was felt that the model was not suitable in this format for inclusion in the Kelvingrove Museum. The project has illustrated that although it is technically possible to create an archaeologically based virtual model using VRML, technical issues prevent this format from being a feasible way of displaying 3D worlds in a museum environment at present. Also, the project has shown that the creation of the virtual reality world is only the beginning of developing a virtual reality display for use in education. Both the user interface and the informative aspects of a model have to be carefully designed to ensure the resulting computer display has proven educational worth, and broad issues surrounding the nature of representation and reconstruction have to be addressed before such models will become commonplace in museums

Image to interpretation

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda have provided a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets in particular have proved extremely difficult to read. The aim of this thesis is to explore the extent to which techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be used to develop a system that could aid historians in reading the stylus texts. This system would utilise image processing techniques that have been developed in Engineering Science to analyse the stylus tablets, whilst incorporating knowledge elicited from experts working on the texts, to propagate possible suggestions of the text contained within the tablets. This thesis reports on what appears to be the first system developed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document. There has been little previous research carried out to see how papyrologists actually carry out their task. This thesis studies closely how experts working with primary sources, such as the Vindolanda Texts, operate. Using Knowledge Elicitation Techniques, a model is proposed for how they read a text. Information regarding the letter forms and language used at Vindolanda is collated, A corpus of annotated images is built up, to provide a data set regarding the letter forms used in the ink and stylus texts. In order to relate this information to the work done on image processing, a stochastic Minimum Description Length (MDL) architecture is adopted, and adapted, to form the basis of a system that can propagate interpretations of the Vindolanda texts. In doing so a system is constructed that can read in image data and output textual interpretations of the writing that appears on the documents. It is demonstrated that knowledge elicitation techniques can be used to capture and mobilise expert information. The process of reading ancient, and ambiguous texts, is made explicit. It is also shown that MDL can be used as a basis to build large systems that reason about complex information effectively. This research presents the first stages towards developing a cognitive visual system that can propagate realistic interpretations from image data, and so aid the papyrologists in their task.</p

Oceanic Exchanges

Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical New spaper Repositories, 1840 -1914 (OcEx) brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals res earch from the nine academic partners in US, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland an d the UK to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth century newspapers by linking digitized newspaper corpora currently siloed in natio nal collections. OcEx seeks to break through the conceptual, institutional, and political barriers which have limited working with big humanities data by bringing together historical newspaper experts from different countries and disciplines around common questions; by actively cro ssing the national boundaries that have previously separated digitized newspaper corpora through computat ional analysis; and by illustrating the global connectedness of nineteenth-century newspapers in way s hidden by typical national organizations of digital cultural heritage