0304.29: 0304.29

Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 00:00:35 +0200
From: Edward Vanhoutte <evanhoutte@kantl.be>
Subject: 0304.29: Lezingen in de reeks 'Seminar in Electronic Editing' van het CTB te Gent: vr 2 mei 2003 prof. dr. Martha Nell-Smith over Dickinson; vr 16 mei 2003 dr. Melissa Terras over het gebruik van de computer bij het lezen van de 'Vindolanda tablets'

Seminar in Electronic Editing

Op 2 mei houdt prof. dr. Martha Nell-Smith (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, USA) een lezing getiteld "Dickinson, a User's Guide".
Op 16 mei verwelkomen we dr. Melissa Terras (Royal Academy of Engineering & Oxford University, UK) die een lezing houdt getiteld: "They wrote it, but how do we read it? The Vindolanda tablets and advanced computing techniques." (Abstracts verder in deze mail).

De voertaal van beide Seminars is Engels. De toegang is vrij. Aanmelden hoeft niet, maar wordt gewaardeerd (evanhoutte@kantl.be). Achteraf is er een bescheiden wijnreceptie.

Het CTB organiseert het Seminar in Electronic Editing waarop (inter)nationale sprekers lezingen en demonstraties geven. De seminars zijn vrij toegankelijk en vinden plaats in het gebouw van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde in de Koningstraat 18 te Gent.

2 MEI 2003 (vrijdag, 10.30 uur)
Prof. dr. Martha Nell-Smith (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, USA): "Dickinson, a User's Guide".

Abstract: In any period, some poetry will discover that which can only be done in and as writing by using new technical means available, while other poetry will bring into the present of writing the forms and motifs of previous technological and historical moments. Neither approach is invalid just as neither is surefire, but evaluating one approach by the criteria derived from the other is misguided (Bernstein "The Art of Immemorability"). The subject of this talk is to muse on that critical observation by Charles Bernstein and upon a task I have undertaken (to write a a short introduction to Emily Dickinson for Blackwell's Introductions to Literature in order to offer some reflections on the status and reach of the author Emily Dickinson, the state of Dickinson studies, the state of digital humanities, and some of the broader implications of each for twenty-first century literature, culture, and education, for the importance and meaning of poetry.

Martha Nell-Smith (mnsmith@umd.edu) is professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She is the general editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives and has written and edited many books and articles on Emily Dickinson.

16 MEI 2003 (vrijdag, 14.30 uur)
Dr. Melissa Terras (Royal Academy of Engineering, UK): "They wrote it, but how do we read it? The Vindolanda tablets and advanced computing techniques".

Abstract: The ink and stylus texts discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of the Roman occupation of Britain. This lecture will present the development of an appropriate knowledge based system, developed at the University of Oxford, to aid papyrologists in the reading of the stylus texts. The system uses input from image processing techniques, statistical representations of language, and additional procedural information elicited from the experts themselves, to output possible and probable interpretations of the stylus texts. As such, it is the first system that has been developed to aid historians in reading ancient texts.

The ink and stylus texts from Vindolanda, a Roman fort on the Stanegate near Hadrian's Wall and modern day Chesterholm, are an unparalleled source of information regarding the Roman Army for historians, linguists, palaeographers, and archaeologists. Textual sources regarding the Roman army from this period - around 100 AD - are rare, and the ink and stylus tablets provide a personal, immediate, detailed record of the Roman fort at Vindolanda. The hand-writing on the ink texts can be made visible through the use of infrared photography. However, due to their physical state, the stylus tablets (one of the forms of official documentation of the Roman Army) have proved almost impossible to read. (Further information regarding Vindolanda can be found at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/).

A program of research was set up in the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, University of Oxford, UK, to explore the extent to which techniques from Artificial Intelligence could be used to develop a system that would aid historians in reading the stylus texts. This system would utilise image processing techniques that have been developed in the Department of Engineering Science to analyse the stylus tablets (Bowman, Brady et al 1997, Brady et al 2003), whilst incorporating knowledge elicited from experts working on the texts, to propagate possible suggestions of the text contained within the tablets (Terras 2002).

This lecture will report on what appears to be the first system developed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document. There has been little previous research carried out to see how papyrologists actually carry out their task, and this project studied closely how experts working with primary sources, such as the Vindolanda Texts, operate. Using Knowledge Elicitation Techniques, a model is proposed for how they read a text. Information regarding the letter forms and language used at Vindolanda was collated. A corpus of XML annotated images was built up, to provide a data set regarding the letter forms used in the ink and stylus texts. In order to relate this information to the work done on image processing, a stochastic Minimum Description Length (MDL) architecture was adopted, and adapted, to form the basis of a system that can propagate interpretations of the Vindolanda texts (Robertson 2001). In doing so a system was constructed that can read in image data and output textual interpretations of the writing that appears on the documents. This research presents the first stages towards developing a cognitive visual system that can propagate realistic interpretations from image data, and so aid the papyrologists in their task.

Melissa Terras (TerrasM@raeng.co.uk) graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA in English Literature and the History of Art. She then went on to gain a Masters in IT and the Humanities, before recently completing her doctorate at The University of Oxford. This was a joint project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, which looked at how to build cognitive systems to aid historians read damaged and deteriorated texts. She is currently the Assistant Manager of the Engineering Policy department at the Royal Academy of Engineering, Westminser, advising the UK Government on science and technology. Her research interests include image processing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, knowledge elicitation, and textual encoding, in order to build computational tools to aid humanities scholars in their tasks. She has published various articles on virtual reality and archaeology, and the use of computers for the study of ancient documents. This seminar will elaborate on her recently completed doctoral thesis.

Edward Vanhoutte, Co-ordinator Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie - CTB (KANTL), Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde Koningstraat 18, B-9000 Gent, +32 (0)9-265.93.51, +32 (0)9 265.93.49, evanhoutte@kantl.be, http://www.kantl.be/ctb/, http://www.kantl.be/ctb/vanhoutte/.