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

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for DUGA reflected the actual work<strong>in</strong>g practices of classicists, and did not simply rely on quantitative
measures:
Classical scholars do not traditionally justify their <strong>in</strong>terpretations for example by claim<strong>in</strong>g to be
85% sure of a character or word. Therefore, there would be no po<strong>in</strong>t <strong>in</strong> try<strong>in</strong>g to quantify their
perceptions by express<strong>in</strong>g a percentage of certa<strong>in</strong>ty for a given percept. Instead this research is
work<strong>in</strong>g on a model of evidence for (+) and aga<strong>in</strong>st (-) each percept. The network of percepts
would furthermore enable each percept to act as evidence for or aga<strong>in</strong>st other percepts (Roued-
Cunliffe 2010).
Thus, Roued-Cunliffe wanted to make sure that DUGA could capture scholarly expertise and add
reasons used by scholars to make decisions as “pieces of evidence” under the head<strong>in</strong>g “Scholarly
Judgments.” The current DUGA prototype stores ongo<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>terpretations as XML documents but does
not yet store all the pieces of evidence for and aga<strong>in</strong>st each percept.
The DUGA prototype is divided <strong>in</strong>to a set of views, a “transcript view” and a “box view” that
visualizes each character and word with boxes, both of which are populated by two different XSLT
translations of an XML document. S<strong>in</strong>ce users will view images of documents and need to make
annotations on words or characters, Roued-Cunliffe is explor<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g the image-annotation tool
AXE, which is currently be<strong>in</strong>g enhanced by the TILE project (Porter et al. 2009) or an annotation
viewer created by the BVREH project (Bowman et al. 2010). The use of one of these annotation tools
would allow users to draw “character-, word- or l<strong>in</strong>e-boxes anywhere on the image at any time,” and
these annotations would then be turned <strong>in</strong>to XML and could have scholarly arguments attached to
them. Scholars could also move back and forth between the box view and the annotation view, as they
needed to add or review characters or words. The ability to “support a circular <strong>in</strong>terpretation process,”
Roued-Cunliffe argued, was an essential design feature for DUGA. As more scholars use such a
system to annotate texts, the evidence used for and aga<strong>in</strong>st different percepts such as problematic
character identifications could be stored and then presented to new scholars as they were annotat<strong>in</strong>g
the same text. In addition, the eSAD project is also work<strong>in</strong>g on character-recognition software that will
also make recommendations. “The word search and character recognition results should not be seen as
conclusive evidence,” Roued-Cunliffe concluded, “but as suggestions that may either confirm the
scholars’ current percept or <strong>in</strong>spire a new one. It is entirely up to the scholars to decide how they value
each piece of evidence” (Roued-Cunliffe 2010).
Roued-Cunliffe commented that, to extend their model, more knowledge bases would need to become
available, such as a knowledge base of Greek words for a scholar work<strong>in</strong>g on <strong>in</strong>scriptions. The general
idea would be to allow scholars to choose from a number of knowledge bases, depend<strong>in</strong>g on the text
with which they were work<strong>in</strong>g. Their current web service, APPELLO, makes use of the highly
granular encod<strong>in</strong>g of the EpiDoc XML files of the V<strong>in</strong>dolanda project, particularly the lemmas that
were encoded. In the future, they hope to adapt APPELLO so that it can <strong>in</strong>teract with other classical
language data sets available onl<strong>in</strong>e, and Roued-Cunliffe hopes that more projects would make their
data sets available <strong>in</strong> a format such as XML. Other planned work is to turn the prototype <strong>in</strong>to a
work<strong>in</strong>g application, where the biggest issues will be design<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>terface, determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g how to store
the networks of percepts and the evidence for and aga<strong>in</strong>st them, and add<strong>in</strong>g annotation software.
Philology
Moalla et al. (2006) have def<strong>in</strong>ed philology as a research field that studies “ancient languages, their
grammars, the history and the phonetics of the words <strong>in</strong> order to educate and understand ancient texts”