Billy
15th October 2011, 11:14
You can all take part
http://ancientlives.org/about
Ancient Lives is a collaboration between a diverse collection of Oxford Papyrologists and Researchers, The Imaging Papyri Project, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, the Egypt Exploration Society and the following institutions.
The papyri belong to the Egypt Exploration Society and their texts will eventually be published and numbered in Society's Greco-Roman Memoirs series in the volumes entitled The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
The Citizen Science Alliance is a transatlantic collaboration of universities and museums who are dedicated to involving everyone in the process of science. Growing out of the wildly successful Galaxy Zoo project, it builds and maintains the Zooniverse network of projects, of which Ancient Lives is part.
The University of Oxford is the oldest in the English-speaking world having been founded in the 11th or 12th centuries. Today, it combines research in the humanities with major effort in the natural sciences and medicine.
Ancient Lives Research
For classics scholars, the vast number of damaged and fragmentary texts from the waste dumps of Greco-Roman Egypt has resulted in a difficult and time-consuming endeavor, with each manuscript requiring a character-by-character transcription. Words are gradually identified based on the transcribed characters and the manuscripts' linguistic characteristics. Both the discovery of new literary texts and the identification of known ones are then based on this analysis in relation to the established canon of extant Greek literature and its lexicons. Documentary texts, letters, receipts, and private accounts, are similarly assessed and identified through key terms and names. Furthermore, an immense number of detached fragments still linger, waiting to be joined with others to form a once intact text of ancient thought, both known and unknown. The data not only continues to reevaluate and assess the literature and knowledge of ancient Greece, but also illuminates the lives and culture of the multi-ethnic society of Greco-Roman Egypt.
The data gathered by Ancient Lives will allow us to increase the momentum by which scholars have traditionally studied the collection. After transcriptions have been collected digitally, we can combine human and computer intelligence to identify known texts and documents faster than ever before. For unknown documents, we can isolate them and begin the long process of identification.
Like any other scientific project, the data will require a lengthy process of vetting and analysis. There are no quick answers or discoveries. We want to make sure our findings are accurate. However, instead of just a few scholars going through the collection one fragment at a time, users of Ancient Lives are allowing professionals to process large batches of data at any given time. These papyri, as owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society, will then be published and numbered in the Society’s Greco-Roman Memoirs series in the volumes entitled THE OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI.
As for the Greek alphabet, numerous questions have been raised concerning lower and upper cases. This distinction is a much later phenomenon. There is only a majuscule (a so-called upper case) writing in the papyri. It’s best not to think in terms of lower and upper case.
read the story here http://ancientlives.org/story have a look around the website
http://ancientlives.org/about
Ancient Lives is a collaboration between a diverse collection of Oxford Papyrologists and Researchers, The Imaging Papyri Project, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, the Egypt Exploration Society and the following institutions.
The papyri belong to the Egypt Exploration Society and their texts will eventually be published and numbered in Society's Greco-Roman Memoirs series in the volumes entitled The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
The Citizen Science Alliance is a transatlantic collaboration of universities and museums who are dedicated to involving everyone in the process of science. Growing out of the wildly successful Galaxy Zoo project, it builds and maintains the Zooniverse network of projects, of which Ancient Lives is part.
The University of Oxford is the oldest in the English-speaking world having been founded in the 11th or 12th centuries. Today, it combines research in the humanities with major effort in the natural sciences and medicine.
Ancient Lives Research
For classics scholars, the vast number of damaged and fragmentary texts from the waste dumps of Greco-Roman Egypt has resulted in a difficult and time-consuming endeavor, with each manuscript requiring a character-by-character transcription. Words are gradually identified based on the transcribed characters and the manuscripts' linguistic characteristics. Both the discovery of new literary texts and the identification of known ones are then based on this analysis in relation to the established canon of extant Greek literature and its lexicons. Documentary texts, letters, receipts, and private accounts, are similarly assessed and identified through key terms and names. Furthermore, an immense number of detached fragments still linger, waiting to be joined with others to form a once intact text of ancient thought, both known and unknown. The data not only continues to reevaluate and assess the literature and knowledge of ancient Greece, but also illuminates the lives and culture of the multi-ethnic society of Greco-Roman Egypt.
The data gathered by Ancient Lives will allow us to increase the momentum by which scholars have traditionally studied the collection. After transcriptions have been collected digitally, we can combine human and computer intelligence to identify known texts and documents faster than ever before. For unknown documents, we can isolate them and begin the long process of identification.
Like any other scientific project, the data will require a lengthy process of vetting and analysis. There are no quick answers or discoveries. We want to make sure our findings are accurate. However, instead of just a few scholars going through the collection one fragment at a time, users of Ancient Lives are allowing professionals to process large batches of data at any given time. These papyri, as owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society, will then be published and numbered in the Society’s Greco-Roman Memoirs series in the volumes entitled THE OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI.
As for the Greek alphabet, numerous questions have been raised concerning lower and upper cases. This distinction is a much later phenomenon. There is only a majuscule (a so-called upper case) writing in the papyri. It’s best not to think in terms of lower and upper case.
read the story here http://ancientlives.org/story have a look around the website