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

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.

The project will benefit individuals, larger groups, (e.g. Greek nationals), non-profit foundations, charities, and government bodies (e.g. Greek Ministry of Culture) concerned with preservation of Greek and European cultural heritage, museums, schools, local and national councils of primary school and secondary school education. The project is also of considerable potential benefit in the commercial sector, through use of human-assisted OCR technology and its provision of convenient GUs enabling Iuser selection of multispectral imaging (MSI) algorithms. Museums and collections will remain interested in our imaging research and outputs, both as means of deciphering ancient texts and as a supplement to traditional conservation. The memberships of charity organisations such as the Herculaneum Society, have shown continued interest in our digital imaging efforts over the past six years, as have several organisations in the national and international media (Discovery Channel, Der Spiegel, The Times, Telegraph, Nova).

The project will immediately impact upon interested individuals from the point of its inception, in a scope of unprecedented scale and diversity. The collaborating astrophysics research teams have developed projects (www.galaxyzoo.org) that have engaged the input of c. 200,000 users. In our project users will have opportunity to educate themselves through special control training sets consisting of digitised multispectral images of papyri and associated digitised texts. Beginning from elementary sets proceeding to sets representing more advanced levels of expertise, these training sets will enable users to learn to the extent of their ability and desire. The individual user will be able immediately to track the results both of his or her training and of subsequent efforts at transcribing individual letters and words on 'live', untranscribed, papyri. User conjectures will be tracked in relation to final results reached in combination and collaboration with specialists and human-assisted OCR input. Because the training sets are readily adaptable to classroom instruction, and will consist of specimens incrementally graduated in difficulty, they could find broad use in schools at all levels and in university curricula. One interested population would be Greek nationals, who, familiar at the outset with Greek lettering, showed great interest in deciphering the papyri at a conference recently held by Dr Obbink's research teams in the Sackler Library, Oxford in cooperation with the Greek Ministry of Culture (see http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/newsitems/index.html).

To ensure further that these potential benefits are realised, we will publicise through several venues:

--our Advanced Multispectral Imaging exhibit in the new Reading and Writing Room of the Ashmolean Museum.

--our Advanced Multispectral Imaging Page: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/advancedMSI

--radio and television programs that have documented our projects before (Discovery Channel, Der Spiegel, The Times, Telegraph, Nova).

--the semi-annual Newsletters and public engagements of the Herculaneum Society, a registered UK charity.

--through school outreach operations conducted by the Society

--through publication of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series.

We will also work with and through the agency of the U. of Oxford's Vice-Chancellor's forum on Impact, for which Dr Obbink sat on a panel in the summer of 2009.

The results and techniques of human-assisted OCR performed in cooperation with the astrophysics research teams will be published on our website, as will our GUIs and MSI post-processing algorithms.