Digital Autoptic Process
We followed already existing Digital Scholarly Edition standards regarding the written text on cultural artefacts. We also attempt to overcome some of their limits by taking in consideration more thoroughly the entangled relationships between text, object and archaeological context in order to elaborate some historical information.
The primary source of information (i.e. the written archaeological object) was described following the dispositive analysis. It consists in describing the three systems present in anything written and their relationships: the writing system (e.g.: conservation status and shape of the symbols), the textual system (e.g.: abstract linguistic content, meaning of the text) and the contextual system, that deals with the intended use of the text-bearing object, the place, time and society that produced this object etc. Only some part of these systems could be taken into account in a Digital Scholarly Edition.
This approach, applied to the TSS, led to the design of a set of tools allowing a comprehensive Digital Autoptic Process (DAP). These tools cover the observation, the analysis and the process of the data extracted from the lead tag for each of the three systems, and their relationships. We focused on the tools that allow to creating the connection between these systems.
RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) is a photographic method tha enables the interactive re-lighting of the object.
The following 39 labels have been digitized and are available for viewing on the browser.
Open Access Dataset and Machine Learning
The archeological drawings and the letters extracted from the drawings are available for download in the TSS dataset.tgz file, see the enclosed README for details.
The RTI files and the original images are available for download upon request (due to the large size of the files)