Charles CROWTHER Beyond the Museum: Documents and Technology

New technologies have revolutionized the ways in which documentary records on papyrus, stone, and other materials, have been and are being studied by researchers. Moreover, this technological revolution can also be carried into the seminars and classrooms, where texts once stored in far-flung museums now increasingly are becoming available for study worldwide through the medium of the Internet. This presentation examines two projects that aim to make available documentary resources in a digital environment. Both projects aim to locate ancient documentary source material closely within an archaeological context. With these, caution has been exercised to ensure that the documents will present themselves within a sufficiently structured context to allow students at a range of levels to engage directly with bodies of documentary material. Such an increased accessibility and exposure to source evidence cannot help but to reshape significantly the way in which the ancient world is studied The first project aims to make available an online version of the ink writing tablets from the Romano-British fort at Vindolanda. This is to be accomplished with appropriate materials so as to support the largest possible constituency of users, beyond those with access to the publications of the tablets held primarily in institutional libraries. This project is being developed at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in collaboration with Oxford University's Academic Computing Development team and draws extensively from the construction of the Sphakia Survey website. The project is intended to be completed in autumn 2002.

The second project is an online companion to L. H. Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1961] 1990), based on the rich materials in Jeffery's papers, which include a comprehensive dossier of line drawings and hundreds of original medium-format negatives. All of this illustrative material is to be digitised and accompanied by an Epidoc-based .XML text database with translations. The entirety then will be tied into a catalogue format, enabling the user to follow and plot chronologically and geographically the evolution and diffusion of the Greek alphabet. Jeffery's own periodization and stylistic judgments will be fully represented in the database catalogue, but also, wherever possible, alternative dating criteria will be included, so that the enterprising user will be able to assess and verify Jeffery's conclusions.