Just announced: Oxford and UCL have won an award to apply e-Science technologies to the reading of the Vindolanda Tablets and other other epigraphic materials.
“Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents”
Original documents are primary, often unique, resources for scholars working in literature, history, archaeology, language and palaeography of all periods and cultures. The complete understanding and interpretation of textual documents is frequently elusive because of damage or degradation, which is generally more severe the older the document. Building on successful earlier research at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/ (Professor Alan Bowman) and Engineering Science (Professor Sir Mike Brady) at Oxford University http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mvl/, in collaboration with UCL SLAIS www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/ (Dr Melissa Terras), this project aims to construct a signal to symbol system, which will aid scholars in propagating interpretations of texts through a combination of image processing, computational interactive reasoning under uncertainty, the provision of tools to construct datasets of palaeographical information, to disseminate it in the research community, and to provide training methods and resources in the application of e-science technology to texts and documents.
The project will begin in October 2007, with studentship and postdoc details to be posted shortly.
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