Interpreting the image: using advanced computational techniques to read the Vindolanda texts

Purpose: This paper provides an overview of the development of a computer system designed to aid historians in the reading of the stylus tablets from the Roman fort of Vindolanda. The different stages in developing the system are outlined, and preliminary results given. Methodology/Approach: Literature review regarding Vindolanda, stylus tablets, and the process of reading an ancient document. Knowledge Elicitation techniques used to explicitly model expert processes used to read an ancient document. Corpus construction: gathering a corpus of character forms, and lexicostatistics. Implementing an advanced cognitive imaging system utilising Artificial Intelligence techniques which uses the explicit model of how experts read ancient text, and the corpora collated, to produce plausible interpretations of the document. Findings: This paper describes the developmental stages undertaken to construct a system which can read in images of an ancient document and produce plausible interpretations of the document, to aid the historians in the lengthy process of reading an ancient text. In carrying out the development, an explicit representation of how experts approach and reason about damaged and deteriorated texts was formulated, and a large corpus of letter forms and linguistic data was captured, providing experts with a valuable dataset and understanding of their own tools and processes. Preliminary results from the resulting computer system are presented which demonstrate the usefulness of the technique, although more work is needed to develop this into a stand alone computer system. Research limitations: Focused on the Roman stylus tablets from Vindolanda, near Hadrian‟s Wall, although the technique could be extrapolated to cover other types of ancient documents from any period should corpora regarding letter forms and linguistic data be available. Practical implications: It is demonstrated that using techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology can result in further explicit understanding of humanities expert processes, which allow computational systems to be constructed. The resulting computational system is a tool for the humanities expert, which carries out a task in a similar manner, allowing for faster reasoning time and quicker hypotheses development. Originality/value: Presents the first known system to intakes an image of an ancient text and output a plausible interpretation of the text in a reasonable time frame, assisting the papyrologist in resolving ambiguities in the damaged and abraded text.