Digitization and Materiality (original) (raw)
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On Cognition and the Digital in the Study of Ancient Textual Artefacts
""This talk will present some cognitive aspects of the study of Ancient textual Artefacts and how understanding these cognitive processes has the potential to influence, complement, and ultimately enhance the use of digital tools. As such, it will situate itself at the confluence of the Digital Humanities and of the Cognitive Humanities. Scholars studying Ancient Textual Artefacts endeavour to create knowledge through the decipherment, transcription, transliteration, edition, commentary, and contextualization of textual artefacts, thereby transforming data and information into knowledge and meaning. Their task is hence intrinsically interpretative, and relies heavily on the mobilization of both perceptual and conceptual cognitive processes. To illustrate the claim that the act of knowledge creation is interpretative, I will briefly present the example of a Roman tablet that was interpreted once in 1917 and a second time in 2009. I will then argue that the act of digitization of Ancient Textual Artefacts already participates in the act of interpretation of textual artefacts, thereby conferring to the digitized versions of the textual artefacts three ontological characteristics making them into avatars of textual artefacts. I will then describe how, in an effort to integrate these observations into the design and development of digital tools, I have focused on analysing the expert practices of scholars working with ancient textual artefacts. Applying ethnographic methodologies and cross-referencing my findings with results from the cognitive sciences literature, I was able to identify a set a perceptual processes that intervene in the act of interpretation of ancient textual artefacts, as well as a set of conceptual processes. I will highlight three types of perceptual, embodied processes: (1) visual processes, which, as I will illustrate through the example of digital modelling work conducted on the Artemidorus papyrus, can also involve physical interactions; (2) kinaesthetic processes, where the act of tracing the texts participates in decipherment – a claim that also holds true for undeciphered texts such as Proto-Elamite, as the cognitive sciences literature on pseudo-letters would seem to suggest; and (3) aural processes, where sounding out the texts can trigger breakthroughs – a claim supported by the literature on word recognition. I will then present three types of conceptual processes involving: (1) semantic memory, also involved in word recognition; (2) acquisition and mobilization of unconscious structural knowledge, for which the cognitive sciences literature on artificial grammar learning seems to suggest that exposure to structured scripts generates unconscious knowledge; and (3) insights (aka “aha!” moments), for which the literature on creativity proposes a wide variety of possible triggers. I will conclude by claiming that by bringing the cognitive into the digital humanities, both the Cognitive Humanities and the Digital Humanities have the exciting potential to enrich each other and empower the humans doing Humanities research.""
Interpreting Ancient Documents: Of Avatars, Uncertainty and Knowldege Creation
This talk presents shortly the cognitive processes papyrologists tap into when deciphering, transcribing and interpreting ancient documentary artefacts. Based on those observations, I further show how the ontology of the digitized versions of a text-bearing artefact deviates from the traditional mimetic model. Digitized artefacts share three ontological characteristics with Mesopotamian salmus (images, representations): they are encoded, embedded into the real and they influence the real; they are avatars of the artefact, expressing a specific form of presence of the artefact conditioned by the act of digitization. I then move on to explore how this new ontology influences scholarly practice: the impact it has on the solving and introduction of uncertainties, and on the act of knowledge creation itself. I conclude by stating that not only the provenance of the data should be documented but also the process of interpretation itself, at all its stages.
In scholarly use, the term ‘inscription’ is not always unambiguous. The same concept can designate either the signifiers on a support, regardless of their meaning and textual function, or can be used to distinguish different texts. In a digital representation, a distinct markup is utilised to encode the material and textual dimensions. In order to combine them in an adequate representation, we submit a definition of some epigraphic notions which supports the theoretical model of an encoding schema compliant with the EpiDoc guidelines, designed as a part of the IGLouvre project.
Artefacts and Errors: Acknowledging Issues of Representation in the Digital Imaging of Ancient Texts
In: Fischer, F and Fritze, C and Vogeler, G, (eds.) Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 2 / Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2. (43 - 61). Books on Demand: Norderstedt, Germany. , 2011
It is assumed, in palaeography, papyrology and epigraphy, that a certain amount of uncertainty is inherent in the reading of damaged and abraded texts. Yet we have not really grappled with the fact that, nowadays, as many scholars tend to deal with digital images of texts, rather than handling the texts themselves, the procedures for creating digital images of texts can insert further uncertainty into the representation of the text created. Technical distortions can lead to the unintentional introduction of "artefacts" into images, which can have an effect on the resulting representation. If we cannot trust our digital surrogates of texts, can we trust the readings from them? How do scholars acknowledge the quality of digitised images of texts? Furthermore, this leads us to the type of discussions of representation that have been present in Classical texts since Plato: digitisation can be considered as an alternative form of representation, bringing to the modern debate of the use of digital technology in Classics the familiar theories of mimesis (imitation) and ekphrasis: the conversion of visual evidence into explicit descriptions of that information, stored in computer files in distinct linguistic terms, with all the difficulties of conversion understood in the ekphratic process. The community has not yet considered what becoming dependent on digital texts means for the field, both in practical and theoretical terms. Issues of quality, copying, representation, and substance should be part of our dialogue when we consult digital surrogates of documentary material, yet we are just constructing understandings of what it means to rely on virtual representations of artefacts. It is necessary to relate to our understandings of uncertainty in palaeography and epigraphy to our understanding of the mechanics of visualization employed by digital imaging techniques, if we are to fully understand the impact that these will have.
The digital duplication proposed by computer-mediated technologies (CMT) cultivates a new aesthetics of reproduction as it serves the need for persistence of the object, thus, ensuring its ephemeral presence. The digital object, in turn, appears not to be present to us immediately, but through its digital model. Nevertheless, the question to pose is whether the reality of the object, not in its immediacy, but in the perspective of its perpetuation in time ultimately leads to its replacement by an artificial integrity that challenges the risks of actual existence. A possible answer could be that the denaturalization of the object present to our consciousness denies its right to exist in the corruptible historical time in order to conquer digital oblivion.
Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology: Implications on the Nature of Digital Artefacts
Papyrology is an interpretative practice that aims to decipher, transcribe and interpret ancient texts. This paper presents an enquiry into papyrological digitization and visualization in the age of computerization. It first establishes that, in the particular case of text-bearing artefacts, visual perception and cognition are so tightly intertwined that the acts of computational digitization and visualization are intrinsically interpretative. For experts, seeing and knowing are so closely related that they intuitively adopt methodologies of seeing, which, if incorporated into the act of digitization, can empower the cognitive processes that enable them to identify letters and words on the digitized version of the artefact. It further explores what these interpretative digitization and visualization processes entail in terms of the ontology of the resulting digitized version(s) of a text-bearing artefact. The digitized versions of a text-bearing artefact seem to not only depart from mimetic representations, but also to re-materialize the artefact by expressing some form of its presence. Indeed, they have three ontological characteristics that establish a bidirectional relationship between the (digital) representation and the real: they are encoded, both numerically and culturally; they are embedded into the real, through the handling and interactions they prompt; and they influence the real, by participating in the interpretation of the artefact in a performative way. Digitization and visualization are thus an integral part of the papyrological workflow, and as all of the other choices of interpretation in papyrology, they are entitled to be reported upon, justified and debated.