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

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use of image process<strong>in</strong>g techniques is not particularly new <strong>in</strong> either epigraphy 515 or papyrology, but
few technologies have been based on detailed studies of the actual work<strong>in</strong>g practices of classicists with
digital images. While the project was developed with papyrologists and epigraphers <strong>in</strong> m<strong>in</strong>d, Bowman
et al. (2010) hoped that the VRE-SDM might prove useful to any scholars who worked with
manuscripts and thus they attempted to develop a tool that could be generalized for various discipl<strong>in</strong>es.
In this particular case, however, de la Flor et al. (2010a) had videotaped the collaborative work
sessions of expert classicists who were work<strong>in</strong>g with the Tolsum Tablet, a wooden tablet dat<strong>in</strong>g from
the first century AD. “The aim of the film<strong>in</strong>g,” Bowman et al. (2010) expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “was to discover and
document the <strong>in</strong>herent practices, tools and processes used to decipher ancient texts and to establish
ways <strong>in</strong> which a VRE might emulate, support and advance these practices” (Bowman et al. 2010, 95).
The VRE-SDM project wanted both to construct and test their <strong>in</strong>terface, so they filmed four meet<strong>in</strong>gs
between three specialists. The scholars worked with the VRE-SDM prototype and were able to display
images of the tablet on a large screen.
By watch<strong>in</strong>g how the scholars exam<strong>in</strong>ed the tablet and progressed <strong>in</strong> their <strong>in</strong>terpretation of the text, de
la Flor et al. observed a number of significant processes at work, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g (1) how the scholars
identified shapes and letters <strong>in</strong> order to figure out words and phrases, (2) how the determ<strong>in</strong>ation of
shapes and letters was an iterative process that could <strong>in</strong>volve major re<strong>in</strong>terpretation of earlier scholarly
hypotheses regard<strong>in</strong>g words; and (3) how scholars drew off their background knowledge <strong>in</strong> various
languages, ancient history, and palaeographic expertise to analyze not just <strong>in</strong>dividual letters or words
but the text as a whole. In this experiment, the ability to enhance multiple digital images of the text and
to work collaboratively led the scholars to re<strong>in</strong>terpret several letters, and this consequently led them to
re<strong>in</strong>terpret the word bovem as dquem. They thus concluded that the Tolsum Tablet was not about the
sale of an ox but may have <strong>in</strong>stead been an example of an early loan note. 516
The VRE-SDM prototype as it currently exists is controlled by either mouse or keyboard and
accord<strong>in</strong>g to de la Flor et al. (2010a) provides a collaborative workspace where classicists can select
high-resolution digital images, manipulate them <strong>in</strong> different ways, use different algorithms to analyze
them, and then view them along with images, texts, and annotations. An annotation feature allows
classicists to comment on letters, words, and phrases and to enter translations of them. In addition, to
enable users to select and annotate image regions, the VRE-SDM extended the Annotea vocabulary. 517
Us<strong>in</strong>g a portlet, users can create, save, and share annotations, and Bowman et al (2010), reported that
they were hop<strong>in</strong>g to build a system toward shared read<strong>in</strong>g that, along with the use of a standard format
such as EpiDoc XML, would allow users to create digital editions that could be “supported by an audit
trail of read<strong>in</strong>gs.” To support <strong>in</strong>tegration with other projects, all annotations and metadata are
represented as RDF and stored <strong>in</strong> a Jena 518 triplestore.
While their current fund<strong>in</strong>g has allowed for only a pilot implementation, the VRE-SDM project is
consider<strong>in</strong>g develop<strong>in</strong>g some new functionalities, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the creation of “hypothesis folders” where
researchers could track translations proposed by colleagues for different texts (de la Flor et al. 2010a).
Such a feature would allow scholars to associate specific images of a manuscript with translations or
515 The use of advanced image-process<strong>in</strong>g technologies used <strong>in</strong> epigraphy has been discussed earlier <strong>in</strong> this paper.
516 For more on the re<strong>in</strong>terpretation of the text, see Bowman et al. (2009) and (Tarte 2011).
517 http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/. As seen throughout this paper, many types of annotations (editorial commentary, image annotations, l<strong>in</strong>guistic
annotations) are used by digital classics projects. The importance of be<strong>in</strong>g able to share different types of annotations both with<strong>in</strong> and across discipl<strong>in</strong>es
has led to the creation of the Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org/), which has released an “alpha” data model
(http://www.openannotation.org/spec/alpha3/) and developed use cases for shar<strong>in</strong>g annotations.
518 Jena is a “Java framework for build<strong>in</strong>g Semantic Web applications” (http://jena.sourceforge.net/) and provides a “programmatic environment” for
work<strong>in</strong>g with RDF, RDFS, OWL and SPARQL.