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

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

Disciplined: Using educational studies to analyse 'Humanities Computing'

Humanities Computing is an emergent field. The activities described as 'Humanities Computing' continue to expand in number and sophistication, yet no concrete definition of the field exists, and there are few academic departments that specialize in this area. Most introspection regarding the role, meaning, and focus of "Humanities Computing" has come from a practical and pragmatic perspective from scholars and educators within the field itself. This article provides an alternative, externalized, viewpoint of the focus of Humanities Computing, by analysing the discipline through its community, research, curriculum, teaching programmes, and the message they deliver, either consciously or unconsciously, about the scope of the discipline. It engages with Educational Theory to provide a means to analyse, measure, and define the field, and focuses specifically on the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference to identify and analyse those who are involved with the humanities computing community. © 2006 Oxford University Press

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

Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Based Level

Textual encoding is one of the main focuses of Humanities Computing. However, existing encoding schemes and initiatives focus on 'text' from the character level upwards, and are of little use to scholars, such as papyrologists and palaeographers, who study the constituent strokes of individual characters. This paper discusses the development of a markup system used to annotate a corpus of images of Roman texts, resulting in an XML representation of each character on a stroke by stroke basis. The XML data generated allows further interrogation of the palaeographic data, increasing the knowledge available regarding the palaeography of the documentation produced by the Roman Army. Additionally, the corpus was used to train an Artificial Intelligence system to effectively 'read' in stroke data of unknown text and output possible, reliable, interpretations of that text: the next step in aiding historians in the reading of ancient texts. The development and implementation of the markup scheme is introduced, the results of our initial encoding effort are presented, and it is demonstrated that textual markup on a stroke level can extend the remit of marked-up digital texts in the humanities

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

The Potential and Problems in using High Performance Computing in the Arts and Humanities: the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) Project

e-Science and high performance computing (HPC) have the potential to allow large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available large-scale datasets, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) scoping study, an AHRC-funded e-science workshop series, was established to investigate the potential application of grid computing to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records. Consisting of three one-day workshops held at UCL in Summer 2006, the workshop series brought together expertise across different domains to ascertain how useful, possible, or feasible it would be to analyse datasets from Ancestry and The National Archives using the HPC facilities available at UCL. This article details the academic, technical, managerial, and legal issues highlighted in the project when attempting to apply HPC to historical data sets. Additionally, generic issues facing humanities researchers attempting to utilise HPC technologies in their research are presented