The Centre for the scholarly study of Ancient Documents

A short walk from the Ashmolean, the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) is making waves through the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies on St Giles’. The interview has been set up to find out more about new imaging technology that is being used to reveal previously illegible ancient inscriptions.

I’m here to fulfill Dr Jane Massйglia, an Oxford alumna, former secondary teacher and now research fellow for AshLI (the Ashmolean Latin Inscription Project). Jane works to encourage general public engagement with translating these ancient documents. There are lots of nice types of this: calling out on Twitter for the interested public to have a stab at translating these ancient inscriptions.

The person that is second meeting today is Ben Altshuler, ‘our amazing RTI whizzkid.’ RTI, or Reflectance Transformation Imaging, could be the software used to decipher previously impenetrable inscriptions. Ben Altshuler, 20, happens to be dealing with CSAD on his gap year before starting a Classics degree at Harvard later this year.

What’s the remit of CSAD and how achieved it come to be?

‘The centre started about two decades ago,’ Jane tells me. ‘It was created away from several big projects involving original texts like the Vindolanda tablets (a Roman site in northern England which has yielded the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain). There is suddenly a necessity to accommodate various different projects in Classics taking a look at primary source material, and a sense it was better joined up together. It’s wise: epigraphers, the folks who study these ancient inscriptions – do things in a similar way with similar resources and technology.

‘In terms of what we do now, the centre currently holds a number of projects like AshLI, the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions (CPI) while the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN).

‘This is how it began,’ she says and shows me a «squeeze».

The ‘squeezes’ are stored in large boxes that are stacked floor to ceiling in the middle.

‘a number of the work that is ongoing the centre is in sifting and analysing what exactly is in these archives. The new system is much more accessible – when you look at the immediate future we are going to have the ability to view the squeezes on a computer and, into the long term, there is talk of searchable indexes of RTI images and integration with open source and widely used commercial platforms, like Photoshop.’

Ben, how did you turned out to be so a part of CSAD at 20?

‘In the previous couple of many years of High School I took part in an history that is oral organised because of the Classics Conclave and American Philological Association,’ Ben tells me. ‘Although we were interviewing classicists at Oxford, Roger Michel, the top regarding the Conclave, saw a number of places in the University and surrounding museums where technology that is new thrive buy essays. I became offered a two-year sponsorship at the CSAD as an imaging expert within the fall following my graduation, and I spent the final year building up technical expertise to give you the necessary support inside my work with Oxford.

‘from the classical language side so I came into it. I quickly saw that to be very successful in epigraphy takes many years of experience. However with RTI one can master the technology in a relatively short length of time. I really could make a much bigger impact providing the skills that are technical processed images for established classicists to get results on employing their language expertise.’

Ben shows me a video clip he’s made from the different effects RTI can create in illuminating previously indecipherable texts (or, in this case, a coin).

Here prominent classist Mary Beard interviews Ben yet others at CSAD to learn more exactly how RTI has been used in order to make new discoveries possible within Humanities.