“Border Crossing: Engineers, Papyrologists, and the
Graphical Use Interface”
Melissa
Terras
Oxford University, UK
The discovery of the writing and stylus tablets from Vindolanda, a Roman Fort
built in the late 80s AD near Hadrian's Wall at modern day Chesterholm, has
provided a unique resource regarding the Roman occupation of northern Britain
and the use and development of Latin around the turn of the first century AD.
However, although papyrologists have been able to transcribe and translate most
of the writing tablets, the meaning of the majority of the stylus tablets
remains obscure. These small wooden plaques with a hollow recess which was once
filled with wax and written on by means of a metal stylus are well preserved;
however, the wax has deteriorated leaving a wooden surface with small strokes
where the stylus pen has occasionally breached the wax covering. Making sense of
such minute indentations by eye alone has proved impossible for papyrologists,
and the problem is compounded by the fact that many tablets were reused again
and again leaving the remains of many texts on the damaged surfaces.
An EPSRC funded project at the Department of Engineering Science, University of
Oxford, was initiated two years ago to analyse these tablets and develop new
image processing techniques to retrieve information from small incisions in
damaged surfaces (the techniques developed being applicable to a wide variety of
engineering problems). Some headway has been made using wavelet filtering to
remove woodgrain in images of the stylus tablets, and developing and
appropriating Phase Congruency and Shadow Stereo techniques to identify
candidate writing strokes. However, until some interface is put into place
between these engineering techniques and the papyrologist, the stylus tablets'
texts will not become decipherable because of the complex nature of the
papyrology process and the difficulties encountered in expecting a
non-mathematical user to utilise such algorithms.
This paper gives a brief background to the project, before discussing the steps
taken and problems encountered whilst developing the computer application and
user interface for this system. Focussing on the interaction between historians,
papyrologists and the application developer, and the design of the graphical
user interface, the paper discusses the benefits and problems surrounding such a
multi-disciplinary project.