Object Artefact Script Isaksen
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Object Artefact Script (October 8-9, 2009)
Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton)
Augmenting Epigraphy
Much like the works of Shakespeare, the cultural role of inscriptions has changed dramatically through time as their linguistic norms fell out of common use. Yet in contrast to The Bard, these public statements are now rendered inaccessible to all but highly trained classical scholars. This is an unfortunate state of affairs not only for the academic community which can count on little external input, but also for the general public who are blinded to an important and intrinsic aspect of daily life in the ancient world. This paper argues that an ‘augmented reality’ mobile application could potentially revolutionise the manner in which epigraphy is collected, collated and viewed by academics, curators and tourists alike.
The increasing ubiquity of mobile computing devices – typified by the well-known iPhone – has introduced entirely new possibilities for distributed crowd-sourcing. Usually featuring a high resolution screen, camera, broadband internet access and GPS, these mini terminals are ideal for capturing field-data, sending it to a centralised server for storage and processing, and rapidly returning feedback to a user. Recent work on classical text recognition [1], as well as the availability of online digital corpora such as the Heidelberg Epigraphic Database [2], make an application to return proposed interpretations and translations of texts based on spatially-located photos highly conceivable.
The benefits of such an application would be substantial and could include:
- Instant access to texts and translations for tourists and academics at archaeological sites, thereby providing a constant stream of content
- Cheap and effective documentation possibilities for Museum curators, adding additional, high quality content.
- A spatial database of standard inscriptions such as milestones and votives
- A central website where corrections and translations can be proposed based on the multiple images generated for popular inscriptions [3]
- Large numbers of images would open the door to the new fields of Reflectance Transformation Images [4] and automated 3D modelling [5]
References
- Melissa Terras, Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts (OUP Oxford, 2006).
- http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/adw/edh/
- see, for instance, http://www.worldwidelexicon.org/
- http://c-h-i.org/examples/ptm/ptm.html
- http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/
