Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
The Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies
66 St Giles
Oxford OX1 3LU
Tel. 01865 288255

Director: Alan K.Bowman FBA FSA, Camden Professor of Ancient History
Assistant Director: C.V.Crowther MA PhD

The Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, established in 1995, has undertaken a number of projects involving applications of Image Processing and Information Technology to damaged and degraded documents (principally Greek and Latin writing-tablets, papyri and inscriptions on stone).

With the support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, in 2001-4 the CSAD completed a research program entitled ‘Script, Image and the Culture of Writing in the Ancient World’. This program comprised six self-standing elements:

• Epigraphic Sources for Early Greek Writing (http://poinikastas.csad.ox.ac.uk)

• The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets On-line (http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk)

• Curse Tablets from Roman Britain (http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk)

• Gazetteer of Papyri in British Collections (http://gpbc.csad.ox.ac.uk)

• Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Ashmolean Museum (http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/Ashmolean)

• Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum (http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk)

All these projects resulted in the on-line availability of significant bodies of ancient documentary evidence in text-and-image form.

In parallel, the team at the CSAD, in collaboration with imaging experts at the Department of Engineering Science in Oxford, undertook extensive research into methods of deciphering incised and inscribed texts. This research was pursued on two fronts – first, image capture and enhancement, which resulted in the development of an effective new technique called ‘shadow stereo’. At the same time, a knowledge-elicitation analysis of the process of decipherment was used to create a cognitive visual system that could read in image data and generate possible interpretations. As a result, we have begun to understand how machines might be ‘taught’ to recognise putative letter-strokes. This research has provided the platform for developing our present research activities in three connected ways:

• Investigation of new technologies for imaging damaged stone inscriptions (including a collaboration with the Thorne group in the Physics Department at Cornell University to explore the possibilities offered by x-ray fluorescence imaging at the newly-opened Diamond synchrotron)

• Construction of a Virtual Workspace for the Study of Ancient Documents. This project explores the advantages of assembling existing ITC resources for research into ancient documents within a virtual workspace, which will allow researchers to share images and annotations with colleagues and work in real time with remote collaborators. In collaboration with the Silchester Roman Town Project (VERA), based at Reading University, it will also provide a prototype for integrating archaeological and textual tools and databases, to allow direct access from both directions (http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM)

• Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents. This research seeks to develop a system which will aid the scholarly humanities community in reading manuscripts and documents from a wide range of literatures and cultures, emphatically not ‘automating’ reading, but providing a tool for the expert reader or scholar to harness and document the reasoning process; share, distribute, and manipulate data; and utilise advanced computational techniques and processing power.

Future research will concentrate on methods of improving the integration of textual and archaeological data and resources, taking improved techniques back into the field and enabling archaeologists and documentary scholars to utilize tools and resources of information relevant to a wide range of artefacts and assemblages. These will be developed in the context of Oxford’s programme ‘Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities’ (http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk).