Publications Officer
Persepolis Fortification tablets
Digitising the Oxyrhynchus Papyri
WWW Server
Imaging Ancient Documents: A Symposium
Dr. Alison Cooley (Corpus Christi College) has been appointed Publications Officer by the Centre's Management Committee. Among Dr. Cooley's first responsibilities will be the task of finding publishers for two research conferences which she herself is organising at the Centre in 1998.
The first conference, to be held on 9 May, will be a workshop at which new research on the epigraphy of Roman Italy will be presented. The second conference, to be held on 3-4 July, will examine the reuse, rediscovery and reinvention of inscriptions in and after Antiquity. A provisional programme for the May Workshop and further information about the July Conference are now available on the Centre's WWW site.
The Faculty of Literae Humaniores has made a substantial grant available for the current academic year to support Dr. Maria Brosius' continuing work on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets on the basis of the transcriptions deposited in the Centre's research archive. Dr. Brosius will establish a computer database of the texts, which are currently only in manuscript form, incorporating the late Professor D.M. Lewis's translations of the first 500 texts.
Dr. Brosius is also organising an international research symposium on Ancient Archives to be held, under the auspices of the Centre, in September, 1998. Further details of this will be announced in Newsletter 6 in the spring.
With the appointment of Mr. Gideon Nisbet as Research Assistment, work began on 1 October, 1997 on a one-year pilot project funded by the University's Research and Equipment Committee to investigate the feasibility of digitising the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
The first stage of the project will be the systematic cataloguing and digitisation of a single volume from the published series of Oxyrhynchus Papyri volumes, following the principles established by the APIS project. The results of this preliminary study will be made available from a new Oxyrhynchus Home Page on the Centre's WWW server and the feedback from users will then be used to guide further work on the project. Over the course of the year of Mr. Nisbet's appointment, it is hoped that up to a quarter of the published Oxyrhynchus papyri can be digitised.
Mr. Nisbet is also assisting Dr. Obbink in his continuing work on the
carbonised Philodemus papyri from Herculaneum.
The Centre's dedicated WWW server has been running uninterrupted since November 1997. Forthcoming additions to the site will be a searchable catalogue of the Centre's squeeze collection and a new Oxyrhynchus home page.
The papers presented to the symposium on Imaging Documents at the Centre on 1 June last year (reported in Newsletter no. 3) have now appeared as a "Special Issue on the Use of Computers in the Study of Ancient Documents" in volume 12.3 (1997) of Literary and Linguistic Computing, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Alan Bowman and published by Oxford University Press.
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