Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents

手稿和文件的破译和解释是所有文学和历史时期以及相关专业学科（如语言学，金石学，古文字学和考古学）研究的核心和基本组成部分。然而，这些文本往往很难阅读，尤其是因为文件越旧，物理损坏往往越严重。先进的成像和计算技术可以大大有助于破译、阅读和解释文件的过程。为了在电子科学框架内开发一种有效的基于信息技术的技术，还必须分析和理解破译受损或变质文本所涉及的视觉和认知过程。这一点很少向文本及其学术解释的非专家读者明确表示。目前还没有计算设施，让从事传播文本阅读的学者分享数据，讨论程序，明确他们的推理，并利用技术方法的相关进步。本研究旨在开发一个系统，这将有助于学术人文社会阅读手稿和文件，从广泛的文献和文化/强调不是“自动化”阅读，但提供了一个工具，为专家读者或学者利用和记录的推理过程，共享，分发和操纵数据;并利用先进的计算技术和电子科学技术提供的处理能力。基于早期成功的图像处理和解码研究，在处理Vindolanda独特的罗马墨水和手写板时，这项拟议中的新研究将在一个基于网络的环境中开发培训方法和一套工具，实际上是一个古学者的工作台，以帮助阅读来自广泛时期和主题领域的退化文件。在希腊和罗马的书面和雕刻材料上建立和测试之后，这些技术和方法是众所周知的，研究小组可以随时获得，将对其他语言和时期的其他类型的文件和手稿进行测试和进一步开发，并提供足够的文件，以鼓励更广泛的使用。而且，这种图像处理算法的潜在应用并不局限于阅读手稿和文档。理解图像处理中的局部能量和相位等问题将导致知识转移到医学成像等领域，这些技术的应用是基础性的，系统的发展需要新的计算技术，无论是在图像处理中，还是在计算推理架构中。这里采取的方法关键取决于认识到积累的知识和专家判断的不可或缺性，并旨在帮助他们，使用图像处理和数据挖掘的组合（例如）字母形式、字母频率和单词列表，这些技术在我们早期的研究中已经被证明是一种概念证明。为图像数据的推理和解释，或跨语义层次的知识动员调查的建议很少。然而，有必要调查和开发这样的架构，以帮助在任务中的不确定性和概率需要明确推理时的信息（如在医学成像）。工程科学中的新技术已经开发出来，可以跨不同的语义边界对数据进行比较和对比;这些技术已经被证明是传播文多兰达书写板读数的概念证明。这些技术和技术的进一步发展将完善该方法，提高其有效性，并增加我们对角色不确定性，约束推理和图像数据分析的理解。

Decipherment and interpretation of manuscripts and documents is a central and fundamental component of research in all periods of literature and history and in related specialised disciplines such as linguistics, epigraphy, palaeography and archaeology. Such texts are, however, often very difficult to read, not least because of physical damaged which tends to be more severe the older the document is. Advanced imaging and computational technology can significantly aid the process of deciphering, reading and interpreting documents. In order to develop an effective IT-based technology in an e-science framework, it is also crucially necessary to analyse and understand the visual and cognitive processes which are involved in deciphering damaged or deteriorated texts. This is seldom made explicit to the non-expert reader of the texts and its scholarly interpretation. There are as yet no computational facilities for scholars working on propagating readings of texts to share data, discuss procedures, make explicit their reasoning, and make use of relevant advances in technological methods. This research seeks to develop a system which will aid the scholarly humanities community in reading manuscripts and documents from a wide range of literatures and cultures / emphatically not 'automating' reading, but providing a tool for the expert reader or scholar to harness and document the reasoning process; share, distribute, and manipulate data; and utilise advanced computational techniques and processing power afforded by e-Science technologies.Building on successful earlier research on image-processing and decipherment in dealing with the unique Roman ink and stylus tablets from Vindolanda, the proposed new research will develop, in a web-based environment, training methods and a suite of tools, in effect a palaeographer's workbench, to aid in the reading of degraded documents from a wide range of periods and subject-areas. After being built and tested on Greek and Roman written and incised material, which is well-known and readily available to the research team, the techniques and methods will be tested and further development carried out for other types of documents and manuscripts in other languages and periods, with adequate documentation, to encourage wider use. Moreover, the potential applications of such image processing algorithms are not limited to reading manuscripts and documents. Understanding issues such as local energy and phase in image processing will result in knowledge transfer to domains such as medical imaging, where application of these technologies is fundamental.The development of the system demands novel computational techniques, both in image processing, and in computational reasoning architectures. The approach taken here depends crucially on recognising the indispensability of the accumulated knowledge and judgment of the experts and aims to assist them, using a combination of image processing and data mining of (e.g.) letter forms, letter frequency, and word lists, techniques which have been demonstrated as a proof of concept in our earlier research. Proposals for the investigation into the mobilization of knowledge for the reasoning and interpretation of image data, or across semantic levels, are few. Yet there is a requirement for the investigation and development of such architectures to aid in tasks where uncertainty and probability need to be made explicit when reasoning about information (such as in medical imaging). Novel techniques in engineering science have been developed to allow data to be compared and contrasted across different semantic boundaries; these have been demonstrated as a proof of concept in propagating readings of the Vindolanda writing-tablets. Further development of these techniques and technologies will refine the approach, increase its effectiveness, and add to our understanding of role uncertainty, constraints reasoning, and analysis in image data.