Welcome to the eSAD website!

Update, and annoucing:"Digital Transformations: New developments in cultural heritage imaging"

2011-02-07T17:13:48Z

Although the eSAD project has now formally ended, Henriette's doctoral work will carry on until Sept. 2011, and I will also carry on posting news as to what becomes of the research that was conducted in this project, and how I intend to continue working on some of the research questions that arose during the project.

In the mean time, I'm copying below the workshop announcement for the RTISAD project, a sister project that was started last year as a collaboration between Southampton (G. Earl, K. Martinez) and Oxford (A. Bowman, C. Crowther, J. Dahl):

You are warmly invited to attend
“Digital Transformations: New developments in cultural heritage imaging”
a workshop on digital imaging to be held at the University of Oxford on Friday, 25 February 2011.

The workshop will focus on documentary evidence, from 3D capture techniques to reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). This workshop is part of the collaborative University of Oxford and University of Southampton pilot project “Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts”, supported by the AHRC DEDFI scheme.

Friday, 25 February 2011

Lecture Theatre, The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LU

Time: 10:30 - 17:30

For free registration, further details and any queries, please go to: http://rtisad-oxford.eventbrite.com/

Best wishes,
The RTISAD Team:
Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther
Jacob Dahl, Graeme Earl
Leif Isaksen, Kirk Martinez
Hembo Pagi, Kathryn E. Piquette.

Workshop annoucement: 16th Dec 2010 OeRC

2010-12-06T18:26:03Z

e-Science and Ancient Documents Project Wrap-up: Outcomes and Outlook

Investigators: Prof. Alan Bowman, Prof. Sir Michael Brady, Dr Melissa Terras

Research Assistant: Dr Ségolène Tarte

Doctoral Student: Henriette Roued-Cunliffe

The e-Science and Ancient Documents project aimed to use computing technologies to aid experts in the complex tasks of reading ancient and damaged documents.

A three-year interdisciplinary project, funded under the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative until December 2010 (and until September 2011 for the doctoral work), the project is based at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford e-Research Centre, with the collaboration of University College London. This third and final workshop will present the outcomes and outlooks of the project.

During this workshop we will present and discuss how we have explored and applied advanced ICT techniques to facilitate the reading of ancient and damaged documents, and how these techniques and tools relate to ongoing research.

· The morning sessions will present the techniques and tools we have developed to support the act of interpretation, ranging from image capture and processing to tools to support reasoning under uncertainty.

· The afternoon sessions will introduce connected projects that can benefit from the integration of the outcomes of the eSAD project and that can thus offer a possibility to sustain the eSAD research results beyond its funding period.

Schedule for the final eSAD workshop

Thursday 16th December 2010, OeRC conference room, Oxford

Morning (10:15 – 12:45)

eSAD session

*10:15 – 10:30*	Welcome coffee
10:30 – 10:45	Introduction (Alan, Mike)
10:45 – 11:30	Henriette’s talk/demo (35 min + 10 min Q&A)
*11:30 – 11:45*	Tea, coffee break
11:45 – 12:30	Ségolène’s talk/demo (35 min + 10 min Q&A)
12:30 – 12:45	Summary (Alan, Mike) 15 min

12:45 – 13:30

Lunch

Afternoon (13:30 – 15:00)

Connected projects session

13:30 – 14:00	RTISAD project (20 min talk + 10 min Q&A)
14:00 – 15:30	Bamboo/VRE project (20 min talk + 10 min Q&A)
14:30 – 15:00	Outlook: what’s next? (Alan, Mike, all)

Eἰκονοποιία... or the emergence of a community of (digital) shape-makers

2010-11-16T15:18:07Z

The Centre of Excellence “Ancient Greek Written Sources” of the Academy of Finland, on the instigation of the advisory board, of which Prof. Bowman is a member, organized a symposium entitled “Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual Heritage: Technological Challenges and Solutions”. It took place in Helsinki on the 28th and 29th October 2010. As the chosen brand name for the symposium, εἰκονοποιία, also indicates, the themes of the meeting revolved around “image-making”. “Image-making” of textual heritage encompassed both image capture and image processing for the use of documentary scholars and historians.

Attending the conference and presenting their work, were a group of experts all working closely with papyrologists, palaeographers, and epigraphers, and all specialized in the digitization of and image processing for textual heritage. The intent of digitization is usually to reveal hidden text, like in the case of the Archimedes palimpsest, but also for non-palimpsest texts that are difficult to read, such as the Vindolanda tablets, to enhance the legibility of these texts, and to create digital avatars of the documents that can be further digitally manipulated, processed, and eventually interpreted by documentary scholars and historians.

This very enjoyable symposium achieved the remarkable thing of assembling technology experts who are usually dispersed and rather isolated from one another. It thereby created a community of “image-making” experts (εἰδωλοποιοί? image-makers, literally shape-makers), where design strategies, technological challenges and solutions to the questions of how to usefully image ancient textual heritage could be shared.

Each speaker presented: the technologies they used, ranging from X-ray systems and multi-spectral imaging to 3D imaging and Reflectance Transformation Imaging; why they used them, e.g. the choice of an imaging modality based on the composition of inks; and how end-users take an active part in the design and implementation of these imaging projects (Proceedings available here: http://www.eikonopoiia.org/programme.html).

The scale of the event and the fact that it stretched over two days made it possible to interact with each and every participant. It also permitted rich discussions and exchanges during the break-out sessions, where, amongst others, the following subjects were broached: funding (inevitably!); where to publish and how to disseminate our research; how to visualize meaningfully the results of our research; how to make our results reproducible; what kind of imaging workflows we have adopted…

Besides a Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum volume, which the organisers are currently editing, and which will regroup the papers presented at the symposium, we all thought that one or even two books could constitute a further output of this event. There was a consensus on the fact that imaging technologies have reached a certain maturity and that the imaging techniques that have been tried and tested should be gathered, documented and detailed along with the type of textual artefacts they are most suited to.

All participants were also eager to keep this community alive, and it was agreed that a second instalment of εἰκονοποιία would take place some time in 2011, probably in Washington. Looking forward to it!

[This entry is also posted on the blog of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents]

Off to Helsinki for the Eikonopoiia symposium

2010-10-08T10:42:12Z

Two of the eSAD team members will be going to Helsinki at the end of October (28-29) for the Eikonopoiia symposium.

The symposium is subtitled: "Digital imaging of ancient textual heritage: technological challenges and solutions". More details about the event can be found here.

Prof. Alan Bowman will be chairing a plenary session, and Dr Ségolène Tarte will be presenting a paper entitled: "Image capture and processing for enhancing the legibility of incised texts" (to be published in the Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum series of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, and currently retrievable from our reports and publications section).

Looking forward to this event!

Back from an amazing DH2010 conference!

2010-07-12T14:11:19Z

Just a quick entry to give an update on the presence of the eSAD project at DH2010, and on DH2010 itself.

If you were lucky to be there, you'll know all this already, but if not, here are some useful links to figure out more on what happened!

Melissa Terras (reader at UCL's Department for Information studies, who is also co-investigator on the eSAD project) gave the closing plenary lecture (which can now be viewed here). It was an (even more than usual) amazing talk! The text of it can be found on her blog, and is well worth a read! I can't cover it all here, and she did such a great job that anything I'd say would be pale paraphrase. But one thing that definitely came through is that we, in the Digital Humanities, have to stand up for ourselves, be better at communicating what we do and why it matters!
Ségolène Tarte's paper (presentation available here) received an Honourable Mention for the Fortier Young Scholars Award, along with two other papers (by Edward Finn and Toma Tasovac), the winner of the prize is Maceij Eder, for his paper entitled "Does size matter? Authorship attribution, small samples, big problem". Congratulations to him! There were 70 young scholars present; and 4 papers were short-listed for the award.
For an overview of how the conference was received and the reactions it provoked, have a peak at the twitter archive for #dh2010.
Also, keep an eye on arts-humanities.net, where the videos of the talks will progressively be uploaded, and where soundbite interviews can also be streamed! (It is a little difficult to get on the site these days without an "unable to connect to database server" error, but once the traffic settles, all the material will be available there!)

eSAD research featured in THE!

2010-07-02T11:22:18Z

Times Higher Education just ran an article on some of the work we've conducted, along with VREs! It also reports on the story of the Frisian tablet... (see our Gallery section, and the paper "Papyrological Investigations: Transferring Perception and Interpretation into the Digital World" in the reports and publications section for more about the story of the Frisian tablet.)

Heading for DH'10 at KCL

2010-07-02T11:15:34Z

The eSAD project will be represented at DH'10 in London 7-11th July. I will be giving a talk on my latest work on the 8th. The corresponding extended abstract is available for download in our Conference papers section.

Looking forward to a very stimulating conference!

Talks of the colloquium available for download

2010-05-24T08:20:48Z

The talks of the "e-Research on Texts and Images" colloquium are being added as they are received in our documents section, where they can be downloaded from.

Briefs about the colloquium

2010-05-17T12:42:50Z

Sponsored jointly by the British Academy and JISC, the "e-Research on Texts and Images" colloquium positioned itself at the crossroads of Classics, Engineering, and Social Sciences. The study of how ancient and damaged documents are deciphered and the investigation of how to digitally support reading and interpreting them were at the centre of the first day of the colloquium. Covered themes included: approaches to image capture and processing; ethnographic study of documentary scholars and the cognitive processes they mobilize; web-based tools for manipulating, annotating, editing images of ancient texts and their transcription; constitution and access to digital knowledge bases. A panel wrapped up the day by summarizing and discussing the themes broached and the emergent trends in Digital Humanities research, such as, amongst others, the understanding of processes and the affordances between data and content. The second day, lead by Prof. David Robey, dealt with the broader applications of ICT in the Humanities, such as: data mining into large corpora of texts; semantically linking texts; digitization of Humanities material and data, and digital communities of experts.

What people are saying about the event:

Reports by attendees: here, here, and here
Tweets archive

Many thanks to the authors for putting these online.

And many thanks also to all who attended, speakers, panelists and delegates for making this event a success!

Slides of the presentations will soon be available online, and a more official form of outcome for the event is currently under discussion.

"e-Research on texts and images" colloquium 11-12 May (on invitation)

2010-05-07T11:12:35Z

During this 1.5-day colloquium at the British Academy, we will present and discuss how advanced ICT techniques and approaches have been adopted either by the eSAD team, or by researchers working with ancient textual material.
The overall aim is to encourage discussion and exchanges on how to take these technologies forward into a broader range of areas of the humanities.

In particular, on the first day, we will focus on the three following themes:
▪    Image capture and analysis, where the speakers will present their strategies for both capturing the texts digitally and processing the resulting images to help reveal the text.
▪    Virtual Research Environments for the Humanities, where the speakers will show how they have approached the questions of interactions with digitized textual material, and how they can be facilitated.
▪    Specific support tools for e-research in the Humanities, where the speakers will introduce the tools developed to assist researchers in the humanities and to enable them to create, access, use and integrate digitized knowledge.
Taking the discussion forward, the morning of the second day will be more concerned with the broader implications of digital technologies for research in the humanities.
Each of these workshops will leave a generous time slot for discussion and interactions between the speakers and the delegates.

This one and a half day-colloquium is sponsored by the British Academy and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)