Documents under diagnosis

Some are wooden tablets, about the size of a postcard, covered in apparently indecipherable scratches. Others are fragments of papyrus, retrieved from old bonfires and bearing tantalisingly incomplete texts. Yet others are ‘squeezes’, paper impressions of inscriptions on stone that may have been weathered into invisibility.

These are the written traces of the societies and economies of Ancient Greece and Rome that come under the scrutiny of Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD). Now housed in the new Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies, the Centre is spearheading an approach to such tantalising documents that exploits the extraordinary potential of advanced computing.

Oxford has a vigorous culture of computing in the humanities, using scanning, hypertext and web links both to extend access and provide new tools for analysis. For example, the 120,000 photographs and tracings of Greek vases that represent the bulk of the Beazley Archive, also now part of the Ioannou School, have been available on the web for a decade. Today the site receives 200,000 hits per day from students, researchers and schoolchildren who use it for their projects.

A decade ago Professor Alan Bowman, the CSAD’s director, began a collaboration with Professor Sir Mike Brady in the Department of Engineering Science to develop methods of image enhancement – combining images photographed from different angles – that could help scholars to read degraded texts. With funding from the AHRC, they are now extending this process further.

‘We’re trying to model the cognitive processes involved in reading damaged texts’, says Professor Bowman. ‘We want to understand how we make decisions about seeing and interpreting sets of signals, and to be able to look back and see where we went wrong.’ In developing computer systems that can support the process whereby experts flexibly deploy their existing knowledge in assessing physical evidence, the team is drawing on Professor Brady’s work in medical diagnostics, where doctors face very similar problems in interpreting ambiguous images. It is an approach that could have wide applications in studies of documents from all historical periods.

At the same time, as part of a national initiative funded through the Joint Information Services Committee, Professor Bowman and his colleagues are building a ‘virtual research environment’, which will provide images, tools for enhancing them, dictionaries and other research resources in a single web-based space that can be shared by scholars working collaboratively from different locations. ‘If you look at the corpus of written texts, it’s not unusual to find half a document in Los Angeles and half in Moscow’, says Professor Bowman. ‘Now we can put them back together.’

Documents such as the wooden writing tablets recovered from the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall have given an unprecedented insight into daily life in Roman times. But many such postcards from the past are still unread, and some early discoverers were wildly adrift in their interpretations. Professor Bowman and Dr Roger Tomlin have recently collaborated with colleagues in the Netherlands to produce a new and completely different decipherment of a wooden tablet from Leeuwarden, interpreted by its original editor in 1917 as a contract for the sale of an ox. In fact, it concerns the repayment of a loan and is the earliest such document from the northwest of the Roman empire.