eSAD Workshops

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.

Programme

2010-05-17T12:27:12Z

Programme:

Tuesday 11th May

10.00- 10.30 Introduction to the colloquium Mike Brady/Alan Bowman

10.30- 12.30

Workshop 1: New image capture techniques for analysing text
[2x30 min presentations followed by 30 min discussion]

Chair: Charles Crowther
Speaker 1: Ségolène Tarte, Mike Brady
Speaker 2: Simon Tanner

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.00

Workshop 2: A Virtual Research Environment for the humanities
[2x30 min presentations followed by 30 min discussion]

Chair: Alan Bowman
Speaker 1: John Pybus, Charles Crowther
Speaker 2: Dot Porter

3.00-3.30 Tea

3.30-5.00

Workshop 3: Specific support tools for e-research in the humanities
[2x30 min presentations followed by 30 min discussion]

Chair: Mike Brady
Speaker 1: Melissa Terras, Henriette Roued-Cunliffe
Speaker 2: Tom Elliott

5.00-6.15

Summary and Panel Discussion

Chair: David Robey
Panel: John Fox, David de Roure, Annamaria Carusi

6.15-7.30

Exhibition plus drinks reception for all

Introduction: David Baker

Wednesday 12th May

Workshop 4: Broader implications of digital technologies for research in the humanities
Chair: David Robey

10.00-10:40"Data Mining for Historians", Robert Shoemaker
10:40-11:30 "New Directions in e-Science for the Arts and Humanities", Stuart Dunn, Tobias Blanke

11:30-11:45 Coffee

11:45-13:00 "Data resources, sustainability and infrastructure", Alastair Dunning, David Robey, Lorna Hughes

"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)

"Understanding image-based evidence". Detailed workshop programme (on invitation)

2009-10-16T14:50:08Z

Note: If you feel you should have received an invitation and haven't, please get in touch with segolene.tarte(at)oerc.ox.ac.uk

Thank you.

10:00 - 10:15 Welcome Coffee

10:15 - 10:30 Introduction: Prof. Sir Michael Brady

10:30 - 12:00 "Quality of digitization and capture of evidence" session

Or how to digitize text-bearing artifacts so that the pieces of evidence relevant to further interpretation are optimally captured and processed?

10:30 - 10:45 eSAD research question: Dr Melissa Terras
10:45 - 11:20 Invited speaker: Prof. Lindsay MacDonald (LCC, UCL)
11:20 - 11:30 Respondent: Dr Julia Craig-McFeely (Oxford, Royal Holloway)
11:30 - 12:00 Open discussion

12:00 - 13:15 Sandwich lunch

13:15 -14:45 "Evaluating evidence" session

Or what are the tools and strategies that can help to evaluate the goodness of a given piece of evidence in a chain of reasoning?

13:15 - 13:30 eSAD research question: Dr Ségolène Tarte
13:30 - 14:05 Invited speaker: Dr Floris Bex (Dundee)
14:05 - 14:15 Respondent: Dr Sanjay Modgil (KCL)
14:15 - 14:45 Open discussion

14:45 - 15:00 Coffee break

15:00 -16:30 "Restoration, palaeographical knowledge bases and classification of letter-forms" session

Or how to organize and access palaeographical knowledge in order to use it as evidence in an emerging interpretation?

15:00 - 15:15 eSAD research question: Henriette Roued-Cunliffe

15:15 - 15:50 Invited speaker: Dr Peter Stokes (Cambridge)

15:50 - 16:00 Respondent: Dr Gabriel Bodard (KCL)

16:00 - 16:30 Open discussion

16:30 -16:45 Wrap-up: Prof. Alan Bowman

---------------------------------------------

Date: Tues. 17th November 2009

Time: 10:00-16:45

Venue: Conference room of the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), 7 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3QG.

---------------------------------------------

Workshop announcement: 17.11.2009 (on invitation)

2009-09-28T14:49:24Z

Understanding Image-based Evidence

2nd e-Science and Ancient Documents workshop

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

Following our first workshop, which presented how we are aiding the process of reading ancient and damaged texts through: exploring 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, we would like to invite you to our 2nd workshop on 17th November 2009, in Oxford.

We will concentrate on how image-based evidence is understood in the context of the building of an Interpretation Support System (ISS) for ancient or damaged documents. To that end, we will focus on three of our current themes of research:
Evaluating evidence, or what are the tools and strategies that can help to evaluate the goodness of a given piece of evidence in a chain of reasoning ?
Quality of digitization and capture of evidence, or how to digitize text-bearing artifacts so that the pieces of evidence relevant to further interpretation are optimally captured and processed?
Restoration, palaeographical knowledge bases and classification of palaeographical data such as letter-forms, or how to organize and access palaeographical knowledge in order to use it as evidence in an emerging interpretation? [...]

Subjects discussed in the "Quo vadis" sessions at the workshop

2009-05-21T16:31:25Z

Please note that the workshop talks are available for download here.

1- Morning session

About letter shapes - Is there any way to deal with statistical letter shapes? Melissa’s work did build statistical models of letter shapes for the Vindolanda ink tablets, based on positional probabilities within a character box. Another statistical modeling method would be by Principal Component Analysis, provided that enough samples are available. One question is then: “How much do letter shapes differ between ink tablets and incised tablets?”, and also “How could one ’compensate’ for the shapes not represented in the statistical model?” ’Compensating’ isn't quite the right term; what we want is in fact to inform and feed the database (and the model) with the newly found instances of letter shapes as well as consult it. For example in the case of the Frisian tablet (shown during the presentations), dated as a 1st Century AD tablet, a quite unique palaeography was found; ‘A’ as shaped in the document, would not have been identiﬁed as ‘A’s according to our current knowledge of shapes of ‘A’s in 1st Century AD Old Roman Cursive.

Workshop programme (13.05.2009; on invitation)

2009-05-06T22:01:00Z

Detailed workshop programme:

10:00 - 10:30 Welcome Coffee

10:30 - 11:15 "Image, Text, Interpretation: problems and solutions" by Prof. Alan Bowman

11:15 - 11:45 "Image Capture and Analysis for Inscribed Documents" by Dr. Ségolène Tarte

11:45 - 12:15 "Letter Shapes and Ambiguity" by Prof. Sir Michael Brady

12:15 - 12:45 Quo vadis discussion, chaired by Prof. Alan Bowman

12:45 - 14:00 Sandwich lunch

14:00 - 14:30 "Aiding the Expert: Computers, Reading, and Ancient Texts" by Dr. Melissa Terras

14:30 - 15:00 "Building an Interpretation Support System" by Henriette Roued Olsen

15:00 - 15:30 Quo vadis discussion, chaired by Prof. Alan Bowman

15:30 - 16:00 Tea break

16:00 - 16:30 "Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities" demo;

followed by a sneak-peak demo of the integration of eSAD into BVREH (part of the ENGAGE initiative)

---------------------------------------------

Date: Wed. 13th May 2009,

Time: 10:00-16:30

Venue: Conference room of the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), 7 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3QG.

---------------------------------------------

Workshop announcement: 13.05.2009 (on invitation)

2009-04-02T16:58:20Z

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