Doorstone funerary monument for Tateis erected by her children [At]talion, Attalios and Apphia
CSAD News and Activities |
Imaging Incised Texts
Digitising MAMA IX and X
RIB Research Assistant
Oxyrhynchus Papyri Digitisation Project
Centre for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies
Ancient History Documentary Research Centre
The Centre, in conjunction with Professor Mike Brady of the Department of Engineering Science, has been awarded a grant of £160,000 by the EPSRC for the continuation of the research programme on the image-enhancement of incised writing-tablets described in our last issue (Newsletter No.6).
Veit Schenk, who held the post funded by the Leverhulme Trust for 1997 continues to work on the project, but the EPSRC grant has made it possible to appoint an additional postdoctoral Research Assistant and a doctoral student for three years. Melissa Terras, who has recently completed an MSc in Information Technology (Humanities) at the University of Glasgow, for which she undertook a project involving the creation of a virtual reality model of an Egyptian tomb for the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, has been appointed to the doctoral studentship. Stephen Se has taken on the role of interim Research Assistant. Among his first contributions to the project has been the programming of two java applets implementing the image processing algorithm already developed by Veit Schenk for removing the background woodgrain from images of stilus tablets and for viewing looped sequences of images photographed under different angles of lighting.
The archive of notebooks, photographs and squeezes from Sir Christopher Cox's two Anatolian expeditions in 1925 and 1926 which formed the basis for Barbara Levick's and Stephen Mitchell's publication of volumes IX and X of Monumenta Asia Minoris Antiqua in 1988 and 1993 has been deposited in the Centre by Dr. Levick.
Doorstone funerary monument for Tateis erected by her children [At]talion, Attalios and Apphia
Both MAMA IX and X were published with extensive photographic documentation, but the constraints of publication costs prevented the excellent negatives from Cox's expeditions from being printed at larger than contact print size. As a complement to the full editions of the texts of the inscriptions in MAMA IX and X, the Centre is planning to make high resolution digitised images of the photographs in the Cox archive available from its WWW server. An initial phase of digitisation, covering the photographs for MAMA X, was undertaken by Dr. Ralph Häussler before he began work as RIB Research Assistant in January 1999, under the supervision of Dr. Crowther.
A preliminary group of images and supporting material from MAMA vol. X has now been posted on the CSAD WWW server at http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/MAMA. Images are offered at both snapshot size (maximum dimension 400 pixels) and a resolution of 300 dpi. Higher resolution, 600 dpi, images can be provided on request for research purposes.
The Centre hopes to make the complete archive of images for MAMA IX and X available over the course of the spring and summer of 1999.
The Administrators of the Haverfield Bequest have been awarded a grant by the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy (now the Arts and Humanities Research Board) to support the appointment of a Research Assistant, to assist the editors, Dr. Roger Tomlin (Wolfson College) and Mr. Mark Hassall (UCL), in the preparation of Roman Inscriptions of Britain Volume III, which will effectively complete (up to the discoveries of 1996) the corpus initiated by R.G. Collingwood and continued by R.P. Wright and S.S. Frere.
The Haverfield Archive of material for the study of the epigraphy of Roman Britain, which includes an irreplaceable collection of original ink drawings and contact tracings of the inscriptions in Volume I of RIB, has been deposited in the Centre since 1996.
Dr. Ralph Häussler has been appointed to the Research Assistantship, with effect from 1 January, 1999. Dr. Häussler was educated at the Universities of Kaiserslautern and Frankfurt/Main in Germany and at the Institute of Archaeology and University College, University of London. In London he completed his MA thesis (1992) on the Romanisation of the civitas Vangionum and his doctoral thesis (1997) on the Romanisation of Piedmont and Liguria.
Gideon Nisbet completed his one year stint as researcher for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Digitisation Project at the end of September 1998. The result of his work has been the creation of an Oxyrhynchus Papyri WWW site on the Centres server offering not only an introduction and guide to the Oxyrhynchus papyri but also digitised images of the papyri from four recent volumes of P.Oxy (59-62) and an online version of the exhibition held in July 1998 in the Ashmolean Museum to mark the centenary of work on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
The Centre for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at Ohio State University began to digitise its squeeze collection in coordination with CSAD's own similar project during the autumn of 1998. The initial phase of digitisation, which is being carried out by Paul Brown, has concentrated on squeezes of dated Attic inscriptions, above all from the American School Agora excavations.
A first series of images, in resolutions of 72 or 150 dpi, has now been posted on the CEPS WWW pages at URL: http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/~pbrown/.
The Centre's reciprocal relationship with the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre at Macquarie University continues to flourish. The Centre's Administrator Dr. Charles Crowther visited Macquarie in August and September 1998 for two weeks at the invitation of Professor Sam Lieu to take part in AHRDC's continuing research programme on Asia Minor under the direction of Dr. Rosalinde Kearsley. He presented a paper at a staff seminar, and gave a public lecture to the Macquarie Ancient History Society on his continuing epigraphical and historical research.
The Ancient History Department at Macquarie possesses its own collection of antiquities, including a significant collection of papyri housed in exemplary conditions, in its Museum of Ancient Cultures. A catalogue of the papyrus collection is in preparation under the direction of Dr. Stuart Pickering. Karl van Dyke, the Museum's curator, has taken an active role in making much of its collection more widely available through its participation in the Australian University Museums Online network.
Participants in the AHRDC staff seminar
| Created on |