Workshop announcement: 13.05.2009 (on invitation) PDF Print E-mail
Written by Segolene Tarte   
Thursday, 02 April 2009 16:58

Investigators: Professor Alan Bowman, Professor Sir Michael Brady, Dr. Melissa Terras
Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Dr. Ségolène Tarte
Doctoral Student: Henriette Roued Olsen

 
This four-year interdisciplinary project, funded under the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative until September 2011, is based at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford e-Research Centre, with the collaboration of University College London. It aims to use computing technologies to aid experts in the complex tasks of reading damaged documents. A central part of the work involves creating tools to aid the reading of damaged texts such as the inscribed stilus tablets from the Roman fort of Vindolanda and elsewhere. We will also develop an Interpretation Support System (ISS), which will be used in the routine tasks of decipherment and will track the stages and the processes of decipherment and interpretation. A combination of image-processing tools and an ontology-based support system will be developed to facilitate ‘expert reading’ and track the development of hypotheses

The project has now been running for a year. So far it has explored image processing techniques; mark-up and web-service technology for building and accessing knowledge bases; use of e-infrastructure; and methodologies to identify mechanisms in deploying implicit knowledge and build an ontology; all of these converging towards our final aim, the construction of a web-based interpretation support system for papyrologists and epigraphers. [...]

 

We are organising a workshop at which we will present the results of the first year’s work, and encourage open discussion on the techniques and methodologies, as well as the needs that such tools and systems can meet and their potential impact on the community of researchers on documents from the classical world and other periods and cultures.
 
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Presentations will include:
Morning sessions:
Professor Alan Bowman: Reading and Understanding Damaged Documents – Context and Challenges
Professor Sir Michael Brady and Dr. Ségolène Tarte: Developing Imaging Technologies
Afternoon sessions:
Dr. Melissa Terras and Henriette Roued: Developing an Interpretation Support System
Ruth Kirkham and John Pybus: A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts (demonstration)
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Date: 13th May 2009,
Time: 10:00-17:00
Venue:  Conference room of the Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3QG.
Coffee and sandwich lunch will be provided. Further details of the programme to follow.
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Last Updated on Friday, 25 September 2009 16:41