Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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prototype 512 <strong>in</strong>cludes a word search that “takes the partially <strong>in</strong>terpreted characters of a word and
attaches them to the web service URL as a pattern, thus receiv<strong>in</strong>g suggestions for the word us<strong>in</strong>g the
V<strong>in</strong>dolanda tablets as a knowledge base” (Roued 2009).
The research work by eSAD with the V<strong>in</strong>dolanda tablets demonstrates how the use of standard
encod<strong>in</strong>g such as EpiDoc can support new research such as the development of knowledge bases from
encoded texts. It also illustrates the potential of provid<strong>in</strong>g access to such knowledge resources for other
digital humanities projects through web services.
Collaborative Workspaces, Image Analysis, and Read<strong>in</strong>g Support Systems
The unique nature of work<strong>in</strong>g with papyri has made papyrology a fairly collaborative discipl<strong>in</strong>e, <strong>in</strong>
contrast to some of the other subdiscipl<strong>in</strong>es of classics. As noted earlier, Hanson described the amicitia
papyrologorum of the n<strong>in</strong>eteenth and twentieth centuries, and this trend it appears cont<strong>in</strong>ues today.
“Individual specialists, particularly <strong>in</strong> the study of cultural artifacts or documentary rema<strong>in</strong>s, work with
collections of artifacts, texts, artworks, and architecture that may span several excavation sites,” Harley
et al. (2010) expla<strong>in</strong>ed, add<strong>in</strong>g that “as a result, scholars can be highly collaborative” … “<strong>in</strong> how they
locate and work with these materials <strong>in</strong> order to extract as much <strong>in</strong>formation and detail as possible.”
In their review of archaeology, Harley et al. also observed that some scholars desired web-based
workspaces that could be shared when work<strong>in</strong>g on documentary rema<strong>in</strong>s. The authors quoted one
scholar at length:
It would be nice to be able to have a more convenient way of look<strong>in</strong>g at images all at the same
time and manipulat<strong>in</strong>g them. We can now do that with text pretty easily, but let’s say a few of
us are work<strong>in</strong>g on an edition of a papyrus and we want to discuss some particular feature <strong>in</strong> a
high-resolution image of it. The only th<strong>in</strong>g we can really do very easily at that po<strong>in</strong>t is to all
look at the same webpage or to pass the image around by email and give verbal cues to
navigate to a particular po<strong>in</strong>t (Harley et al. 2010, 111).
Some <strong>in</strong>itial work toward provid<strong>in</strong>g such an environment has been conducted by the VRE-SDM
project 513 and this work largely cont<strong>in</strong>ues under the eSAD project. Tarte et al. (2009) have observed
that greater accessibility to legible images and a collaborative work<strong>in</strong>g environment are both important
components of any potential VRE:
For Classical historians, add<strong>in</strong>g to the legibility challenge, access to the document is often
limited. Collaborative work on the documents is one factor that facilitates their decipher<strong>in</strong>g,
transcription and <strong>in</strong>terpretation. The Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents
and Manuscripts pilot software (VRE-SDM) … was developed to promote non-colocated work
between documentary scholars, by provid<strong>in</strong>g them with a web-based <strong>in</strong>terface allow<strong>in</strong>g them to
visualize and annotate documents <strong>in</strong> a digitized form, share annotations, exchange op<strong>in</strong>ions and
access external knowledge bases (Tarte et al. 2009).
The development of this prototype and the <strong>in</strong>-depth exam<strong>in</strong>ation of the work<strong>in</strong>g methodologies of
scholars that work with such damaged texts through a video-based ethnographic study have been
described <strong>in</strong> Bowman et al. (2010) and de la Flor et al. (2010a). 514 De la Flor et al. reported that the
512 This prototype is discussed <strong>in</strong> the next section of this paper.
513 http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM.html
514 One publication regard<strong>in</strong>g this work (de la Flor et al. 2010b) only recently came to the attention of the author and could not be more fully <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>
this report.