Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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The conclusion drawn from this experience was ma<strong>in</strong>ly that read<strong>in</strong>g ancient documents is not a
process of transcrib<strong>in</strong>g the document letter-by-letter and l<strong>in</strong>e-by-l<strong>in</strong>e. Instead it is a cyclic
process of identify<strong>in</strong>g visual features and build<strong>in</strong>g up evidence for and aga<strong>in</strong>st cont<strong>in</strong>ually
develop<strong>in</strong>g hypotheses about characters, words and phrases. This is then checked aga<strong>in</strong>st other
<strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> an ongo<strong>in</strong>g process until the editors are happy with the f<strong>in</strong>al <strong>in</strong>terpretation
(Roued-Cunliffe 2010).
Of particular <strong>in</strong>terest for the development of their ISS, then, was to determ<strong>in</strong>e “how and why the jumps
between read<strong>in</strong>g levels occur, and to what extent vision, expertise and <strong>in</strong>terpretation are <strong>in</strong>tertw<strong>in</strong>ed”
(Tarte 2011).
Further <strong>in</strong>sight <strong>in</strong>to this process came from an exam<strong>in</strong>ation of the transcript of three papyrologists
attempt<strong>in</strong>g to figure out a complicated letter form. Two major approaches were identified: a
“k<strong>in</strong>aesthetic/paleographical approach,” where the scholar would draw characters or trace over them
with a f<strong>in</strong>ger to try and reconstruct the movements of a scribe; and a “philological/cruciverbalistic”
approach, where the scholar looks at the question as a puzzle-solv<strong>in</strong>g task and often relies upon
characters he or she is certa<strong>in</strong> of to make decisions and test various hypotheses (Tarte 2011). Although
Tarte recognized that the two approaches were not mutually exclusive, she concluded that the ISS
would need to be able to support both. Through analyz<strong>in</strong>g this transcript she identified several forms of
scholarly expertise and how they triggered jumps between read<strong>in</strong>g levels, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g visual skill (from
experience), “scholarly content expectations” (based on prior knowledge), aspect-shift<strong>in</strong>g (“ways of
look<strong>in</strong>g” vs. “ways of see<strong>in</strong>g,”), and global-local oscillations. Translat<strong>in</strong>g the work processes that lead
to scholarly <strong>in</strong>terpretations <strong>in</strong>to digital methods, however, Tarte stated has not been a simple task.
“One difficulty <strong>in</strong> build<strong>in</strong>g a case for an <strong>in</strong>terpretation is that it is all about reconstruct<strong>in</strong>g a mean<strong>in</strong>g
for which there is no accessible ground truth,” Tarte reported; “the objective towards which we are
tend<strong>in</strong>g is to facilitate the digital record<strong>in</strong>g of how such a case is made” (Tarte 2011). The project has
thus sought to unravel the process of mak<strong>in</strong>g decisions and to “m<strong>in</strong>d map” various percepts (through
the creation of a schematic of percepts) that lead to the creation of <strong>in</strong>terpretations.
Additional technical details on design choices for the ISS that would support the
cruciverbalistic/philological approach have been given by Roued-Cunliffe (2010). She expla<strong>in</strong>ed that
s<strong>in</strong>ce DUGA needs to record not just f<strong>in</strong>al scholarly decisions but the evidence used to create them, she
has explored the idea of “us<strong>in</strong>g a set of knowledge bases, such as word lists and frequencies from
relevant corpora” to suggest <strong>in</strong>terpretations of words and letters as a scholar reads a document or as
evidence to support a particular <strong>in</strong>terpretation. Consequently, DUGA <strong>in</strong>cludes a “word-search facility”
that is connected to a “knowledge base Web Service” called APPELLO that has been created from the
EpiDoc XML files of the V<strong>in</strong>dolanda tablets. The project hopes to further develop the knowledge base
function of this web service to support any textual corpus that uses EpiDoc. Rather than creat<strong>in</strong>g a
large rule base for classicists such as the rules created <strong>in</strong> a DSS system for doctors, Roued-Cunliffe
noted that classicists often use similar documents to make choices about the document they are
currently analyz<strong>in</strong>g, so the use of a knowledge base from related documents seemed a far better choice.
The work of Roued-Cunliffe differed slightly from the earlier work of Melissa Terras <strong>in</strong> that the former
identified “stages,” rather than levels, of read<strong>in</strong>g, and placed certa<strong>in</strong> identification tasks (such as the
identification of letters) on a different level. Her work still relied on the basic idea that <strong>in</strong>terpretations
consist of “networks of percepts” from low to high level, and that these percepts are used to make
scholarly decisions <strong>in</strong> an iterative fashion. Roued-Cunliffe also wanted to make sure the model used