CSAD News and Activities |
Michaelmas Term began brightly with a successful (and highly commended) application to the University's Research and Equipment Committee for £33,000 to allow the purchase of three major items of equipment: a state of the art Phase One PowerPhase digital camera, with a resolution of 7,000 x 7,000 pixels, for use in the Stilus Tablet and Oxyrhynchus Papyri digitisation projects, a UMAX Mirage A3 flatbed scanner for scanning squeezes, and an InFocus data projector for presentations - the latter available for teaching, seminars and conferences to members of the Faculty of Literae Humaniores. The PowerPhase camera has been extensively used - a sample of its output, reduced to 72 dpi, accompanies Gideon Nisbet's report on the digitisation project. The Mirage scanner has arrived more recently, but has already proved an important acquisition; its image quality matches that of the PowerLook scanner available to the Centre since 1995, and its larger scanning area should speed up the task of scanning the squeeze collection considerably
The Centre's collaboration with the Department of Engineering Science has attracted an unexpected quantity of attention recently in the popular media. A half-page report by Dalya Alberge ("Science delivers a postscript from the past: medical technology will let scholars read Roman letters") appeared in the Times of 5 January (available online from the Times Internet server), and extended radio interviews have been broadcast on popular science programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. A live television broadcast from the Centre of continuing work on the stilus tablet project is scheduled for Thursday 7 May on Breakfast TV at 8.00 am-a little earlier than the usual start of the epigrapher's working day in Oxford!
CSAD continues to maintain its close links with the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre at Macquarie University. Dr. David Phillips from AHDRC visited Oxford in November, and called in to the Centre to check squeezes of Attic inscriptions in the epigraphical archive. On 20 November, he presented an outline of his current research into the dating of fifth century Athenian proxeny decrees to a seminar in the Centre.
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