"Digitizing the Act of Papyrological Interpretation: Negotiating Spurious Exactitude and Genuine Uncertainty." By S. M. Tarte.  

Accepted as a poster for the 5th IEEE conference on e-Science 2009, University of Oxford. By Henriette Roued-Cunliffe.

Abstract: Linking up two projects that are dedicated to facilitate the work of documentary scholars, this paper presents image processing algorithms tailored to the study of ancient documents and how they have been made available to the users through a portal that calls upon a web-service exploiting grid computational power. To that end, image processing algorithms were wrapped to fit into the National Grid Service (NGS) Uniform Execution Environment; the data model of an existing Virtual Research Environment (VRE-SDM) was extended; JSR-168 compliant portlets were developed to facilitate secure and seamless distributed image analysis; and a GridSAM interface between the portal and the NGS-installed algorithms was developed. The outcomes of the project include:  a web-based application, a proof of concept for the usability of the VRE-SDM platform, an opportunity for wider dissemination for the eSAD algorithms, and a proof of feasibility for the use of the NGS for Humanities applications.[paper accepted for presentation at the 5th IEEE e-Science conference 2009] by Tarte, S. M.; Wallom, D.;  Hu, P.; Tang, K. and Ma, T.

Talk made at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference (Short-listed for the Fortier Young Scholar award; a video of the talk will soon be made available on http://www.arts-humanities.net/). "Digitizing the act of papyrological interpretation: negotiating spurious exactitude and genuine uncertainty", by S.M. Tarte