A Collaboration between Classics and Astrophysics: An Advanced Multispectral Imaging Laboratory Optimised through Crowd-Sourced Statistical Analysis

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Transcribing ancient texts written on papyrus and other artefacts has traditionally been slow, painstaking and difficult work undertaken primarily by specialists. Recently, new techniques of digital imaging, including multispectral and 3-D imaging, such as those produced by the Imaging Papyri and Advanced Multispectral Imaging Projects at the University of Oxford (www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/advancedMSI) have enabled new readings of previously indecipherable texts. Public interest in these electronic techniques of enhanced textual visualation has been considerable. New techniques of imaging fragments of ancient Biblical texts, ancient lyric and dramatic poetry, and ancient historical accounts have documented by popular programs on radio and television, including, for example, Discovery Channel and Nova. Paradoxically, our team faced a huge problem, and an equally tantalising opportunity: a huge number of texts await transcription by a small number of specialists while large numbers of the interested public were keen to handle, read, and decipher the texts by themselves. In the propose project we resolve to foster and enable this unprecedented public interest, and to harness its tremendous potential to speed, to utterly transform the way ancient texts are transcribed, deciphered, and understood. Our objective is not merely to broaden access to digital images of ancient texts, or simply to improve the quality of access, but to make use of scientific methods that will endow large populations of interested users (c. 200,000) with means of enhancing and optimising their own access and opportunity to transcribe and to decipher ancient documents that form part of our collective cultural heritage. Thus we propose to establish a collaborative advanced multispectral imaging and multimedia laboratory for papyri and other inscribed ancient artefacts at the University of Oxford. The project will achieve new forms of participation and access for user groups of unprecedented size and diversity to digital images of different kinds of ancient artefacts, including images of published Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum papyri created by the Imaging Papyri at Oxford Project. Interdisciplinary project collaboration of an entirely new kind and order, linking research teams in the fields of Classics (Greek and Latin Papyrology) and Astrophysics, will enable transcription and decipherment of ancient Greek texts captured on diagnostic multispectral images of papyri and other ancient artefacts by the use of methods and techniques of statistical weighting and analysis heretofore confined to the natural and astronomical sciences. Broad public access for the ancient texts will be dramatically increased not only in scale, but also in quality. In this first phase of the project we will focus on delivery, transcription and decipherment of a large number of conventional RGB and black and white images of papyri and related artefacts. Text and images will be published online at http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk. Through close collaboration and large-scale distributed storage, transport, and sharing of bulk multispectral image data with the Galaxy Zoo and Zoo Universe research teams at the University of Oxford ( http://www.galaxyzoo.org ), we will develop online public user interfaces which will enable statistically weighted contributions from users to be used to decipher ancient texts and to optimise diagnostic multispectral imaging workflows and MSI image post-processing algorithms. This work will be done in coordination with a grant pending from the John Fell Fund, Oxford for establishing data-transport between Imaging Papyri and Galaxy Zoo. The result will be an interoperable data resource, insured for sustainable access through distributed storage with (1) Imaging Papyri NAS storage units; (2) storage in data facilities currently being designed by OUCS at Oxford; (3) large-scale bulk storage via Zoo's redundant cloud computing facilities.