The following titles from the Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars are of potential interest to epigraphers:
6 June (NG16): Elaine Matthews and Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford), The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and classical web services
13 June (NG16) Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), EDUCE: Non-invasive scanning for classical materials
20 June (STB3) Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing tool
18 July (STB3) Ryan Bauman (University of Kentucky), Towards the Digital Squeeze: 3-D imaging of inscriptions and curse tablets
25 July (NG16) Charlotte Tupman (KCL), Markup of the epigraphy and archaeology of Roman Libya
8 Aug (NG16) Charlotte Roueché (KCL), From Stone to Byte
The Centre for Computing in the Humanties, Kings College London, is again offering an EpiDoc Summer School, on July 14th-18th, 2008. The training is designed for epigraphers or papyrologists (or related text editors such as numismatists, sigillographers, etc.) who would like to learn the skills and tools required to mark up ancient documents for publication (online or on paper), and interchange with international academic standards.
You can learn more about EpiDoc from the EpiDoc home page and the Introduction for Epigraphers; you wil find a recent and user-friendly article on the subject in the Digital Medievalist. (If you want to go further, you can learn about XML and about the principles of the TEI: Text Encoding Initiative.) The Summer School will not expect any technical expertise, and training in basic XML will be provided.
Attendees (who should be familiar with Greek/Latin and the Leiden Conventions) will need to bring a laptop on which has been installed the Oxygen XML editor (available at a reduced academic price, or for a free 30-day demo).
The EpiDoc Summer School is free to participants; we can try to help you find cheap (student) accommodation in London. If any students participating would like to stay on afterwards and acquire some hands-on experience marking up some texts for the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project, they would be most welcome!
All interested please contact both charlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk and gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible. Please pass on this message to anyone who you think might benefit.
Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (http://ircyr.kcl.ac.uk). First International Workshop. British School at Rome, 28-29 February 2008.
Charlotte Tupman and Gabriel Bodard: Epigraphic Interoperability
On the occasion of the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica Workshop on geospacial data and interoperability, held in Rome on February 28-29, scholars, mainly archaeologists, involved in digs and studies in Libya presented their work with a particular focus on digital data capture and publication.
At 14:00 on Friday 29th, Charlotte Tupman and Gabriel Bodard gave an interesting joint paper on Epigraphic Interoperability. (Slideshow available to view.)
As an introduction, EpiDoc and its principles were briefly explained. The EpiDoc schema and guidelines offer guidance for the encoding of epigraphic texts and metadata in an XML system that abstracts structure and semantics on the one hand from the specifics of display on the other, so that the same underlying data can be used to generate various presentations (from traditional Leiden edition, diplomatic text, web page, printed page, dynamic indexes, or database-like tables).
However, the main focus of the paper was to demonstrate the possibility of collaboration between EpiDoc and the EAGLE databases through a sort of “crosswalk” of data from one schema to another. The EpiDoc guidance defines a level of compliance with the EAGLE database which means that all metadata required by the relevant databases is included and explicitly tagged in a compliant EpiDoc XML edition. Finally a simple tool was demonstrated that created tabular output compatible with the Epigraphic Database Roma from the IRCyr XML files).
At the end of the presentation Professor Silvio Panciera, chair of the AIEGL committee on IT and Epigraphy and director of the EAGLE federation of databases, expressed his support to the project and stressed the importance of digital applications to the study of epigraphy and the Classical world in general. He also expressed his gratitude for any sort of collaboration with the EAGLE endeavour and encouraged the audience to embrace the new opportunities offered by digitalization.
Yesterday afternoon’s (Friday 17th August) seminar in the Digital Classicist series was presented by Charles Crowther of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in Oxford, on the subject of ‘A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts’. The project on which Dr. Crowther was reporting (mentioned here back in May) is the successor to the BVREH (Building a VRE for the Humanities) and VWSAD (Virtual Workspace for the Study of Ancient Documents) projects, which ran during the last couple of years.
The new VRE, which recently won two years’ funding and is at an early stage of development, will be targeted explicitly at epigraphic and papyrological texts (although it could easily be repurposed for medieval or other manuscripts). The aim is to create a working environment to replicate for scholars at a distance the opportunities for collaborative research offered by bringing several experts into a room at the same time to look at high-quality images of a papyrus or inscription. In addition they intend to take advantage of the many online research tools that are available (e.g. PHI Greek Inscriptions, especially the new concordance tool; the Epigraphik Datenbank Clauss/Slaby; the more sophisticated Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg; the Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum; the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, etc.), as well as more “deep” resources–scholarly publications such as Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity or Vindolanda Tablets Online.
It would also be valuable to integrate this system with the excavators who might be digging up new inscriptions and need an expert to look at them. The Silchester excavations, who use the VERA (VRE for Archaeology) environment and keep detailed electronic notes, would be an ideal candidate for such collaboration, except that they very rarely unearth inscribed objects. Vindolanda do not have such sophisticated electronic recording methods, or else their many and difficult texts would be ideal. A first pilot collaboration might be with the excavations at Zeugma, where the excavators are aware of the importance of calling upon specialists in particular fields (such as epigraphy) to work with the excavators on their finds.
This is a project that is worth watching. The VRE will be run on the Oxford servers in the first instance, and other collaborators will be very welcome to help test the environment as soon as there is something running. Ultimately the tools created by this project will be Open Source, and so can be used by anyone with an interest in working collaboratively on documents, inscriptions, papyri, or manuscripts in an environment that integrates multiple freely available resources to enrich the editor’s research experience.
Yesterday (Friday 3rd Aug) Melissa Terras, lecturer in Electronic Communication in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (UCL) gave a seminar in the Digital Classicist series at the Institute of Classical Studies entitled ‘Can Computers Ever Read Ancient Texts?’ In this excellent presentation, Dr. Terras’ answer to the question posed in the title was (pace a response on the Humanist list last week) basically ‘no’, or at least not yet and not in any significant sense as we understand “read”. A better question, she asserted, would be “Can computers assist in reading ancient texts?”, and to that question she gave (and demonstrated) a much more positive response.
In the course of this paper, which was in part a demonstration of past and ongoing work on the semi-papyrological/semi-epigraphical Vindolanda writing tablets, she made several important points that are worth repeating to an audience of epigraphists.
- The expert who teaches the computer to read texts is not principally the programmer, analyst, or engineer, but principally and essentially the papyrologist (or epigrapher) who knows the art and works in a discipline that has decades (centuries) of methodologies and expertise behind it.
- Based on Herbert Youtie’s now famous distinction between “public” (published, polished, perfect) and “private” (in progress, iterative, much-laboured) text scholarship, she points out the ability of computer-assisted readings to reveal and preserve the private processes of text editing and track methodologies and mistakes, a process known by engineers as “truth maintenance”. For example, it would be incredibly valuable to be able to document the process of making decisions as to dating and/or scribe based on letter-forms (see point 4 below), a process that seasoned papyrologists and epigraphers currently often perform based on instinct and therefore find very difficult to describe and teach.
- The computer does not, in the prefered model, make firm decisions and statements of “fact” based on engineering principles and programmed algorithms; rather it offers a range of probabilistic results (number-crunching is what machines are good at), offering likely character-groups or words, for the text editor or historian to choose between based on her expertise (interpretation is what humans are good at).
- One of the most impressive by-products of the Vindolanda text-analysis project has been the development of palaeographic markup, a system designed to record and predict average letter-forms as well as variants.
- Perhaps the most striking point was that this project, although firmly in the humanities and concerned with Ancient History, provides a rare “real-world” application of theories and techniques in Artificial Intelligence. New use-cases lead to new solutions, and a project like this benefits the discipline of Engineering Science as a whole. We Classicists should not underestimate what we have to offer to the high-powered world of medical imaging, defense technologies, and forensic science, for example.
Joyce Reynolds and colleagues at King’s College London are beginning a three-year project to publish the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica, along with supporting materials, images, and a detailed geographical gazeteer.
From the IRCyr project website (http://ircyr.kcl.ac.uk/):
In 1948 Joyce Reynolds, of Newnham College Cambridge, then based at the British School at Rome, started a series of regular visits to Libya, to study the inscriptions of the Roman period. She worked initially in Tripolitania: her epigraphic corpus, the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, written with John Ward-Perkins, was published in 1952, and remains the authoritative work. In 1951 she first visited Cyrenaica, and has worked since then on the inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica, working with local archaeologists and others from Italy, France, the U.K. and the U.S.A.. She has continued to visit Libya almost every year since then, and has assembled materials for a corpus of some 2500 inscriptions from Roman Cyrenaica. Nearly a third of these have never previously been published, while others have only appeared in versions which can be very much improved, and better understood, as a result of re-reading. The collection is made up of transcriptions, and illustrations for about half the texts; the bulk of the remainder are illustrated in photographs held only in the archives of the Libyan Department of Antiquities at Cyrene. The Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to publish this material as an online corpus; the team will be drawing on experience gained in publishing the online corpus of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias. Images held in Cambridge, Rome and Cyrene will be scanned to illustrate the collection. The new corpus will be presented as a series of documents; but it will also link to an online map of Roman Cyrenaica, being prepared as part of the Pleiades project, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Material collected by Reynolds and her colleagues will be used to map ancient sites on that map, with a fullness which was not possible within the necessary limitations of its predecessor, the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.
Over the last few years an international group of scholars has been developing a set of conventions for marking up ancient documents in XML for publication and interchange. The EpiDoc Guidelines started from the case of inscriptions, but the principles are also being applied to papyri and coins, and the aim has always been to produce standards consistent with those of the Text Encoding Initiative, used for all literary and linguistic texts.
Following on from the interest we have seen in EpiDoc training events (including recent sessions in Rome and San Diego) and the success of the London EpiDoc summer school over several years now, we shall be holding another week-long workshop here at King’s College London, from the 11th-15th June this year.
- The EpiDoc Guidelines provide a schema and associated tools and recommendations for the use of XML to publish epigraphic and papyrological texts in interchangeable format. For a fuller description of the project and links to tools and guidelines see http://epidoc.sf.net.
- The Summer School will offer an in-depth introduction to the use of XML and related technologies for publication and interchange of epigraphic and papyrological editions.
- The event will be hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, which will provide the venue and tuition. The school is free of charge, but attendees will need to fund their own travel, accommodation, and subsistence. (There may be cheap accommodation available through KCL; please inquire.)
- The summer school is targeted at epigraphic and papyrological scholars (including professors, post-docs, and advanced graduate students) with an interest and willingness to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects necessary to run a digital project (even if they would not be marking-up texts by hand very much themselves). Knowledge of Greek/Latin, the Leiden Conventions and the distinctions expressed by them, and the kinds of data and metadata that need to be recorded by philologists and ancient historians, will be an advantage. Please enquire if you’re unsure. No particular technical expertise is required.
- Attendees will require the use of a relatively recent laptop computer (Win XP+ or Mac OSX 10.3+), with up-to-date Java installation, and should acquire a copy of the oXygen XML editor (educational discount and one-month free trial available); they should also have the means to enter Unicode Greek from the keyboard. Full technical specifications and advice are available on request. (CCH may be able to arrange the loan of a prepared laptop for the week; please inquire asap.)
Places on the workshop will be limited so if you are interested in attending the summer school, or have a colleague or student who might be interested, please contact gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible with a brief statement of qualifications and interest.
Gregg Schwender posts in the What’s New in Papyrology blog the following summary of a new publication. I re-post this here not only because the Vindolanda website is one of the first pilots of the EpiDoc schema, but because this is a methodological and technological issue that is of just as vital importance to epigraphers as it is to papyrologists. (Not to mention a great book.)
Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts
Melissa Terras
ISBN13: 9780199204557ISBN10: 0199204551 hardback, 264 pages, Dec 2006
Price: $95.00 (06)
Description
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 in particular are extremely difficult to read. This book details the development of what appears to be the first system constructed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document, exploring the extent to which techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be used to develop a system that could aid historians in reading the stylus texts. Image to Interpretation includes a model of how experts read ancient texts, a corpora of letter forms from the Vindolanda text corpus, and a detailed description of the architecture of the system. It will be of interest to papyrologists, researchers in Roman history and palaeography, computer and engineering scientists working in the field of Artificial Intelligence and image processing, and those interested in the use of computing in the humanities.
Product Details
264 pages; 86 illus.; ISBN13: 978-0-19-920455-7; ISBN10: 0-19-920455-1
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. How Do Papyrologists Read Ancient Texts? Knowledge Elicitation and the Papyrologist (1)
3. The Palaeography of Vindolanda. Knowledge Elicitation and the Papyrologist (2)
4. Image to Interpretation (1). Using Artificial Intelligence to Read the Vindolanda Texts , Paul Robertson (co-author)
5. Image to Interpretation (2). Results , Paul Robertson (co-author)
6. Conclusion
Melissa Terras is Lecturer in Electronic Communication, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London