Cognition and the Digital: Embodied Digital Interactions in the Study of Ancient Textual Artefacts (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.
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.
Involving the collaboration of researchers from Classics, Geography and Archaeological Computing, and supported by funding from the AHRC, HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) aims to enrich contemporary discussions of space by developing an innovative methodology for the study of an ancient narrative, Herodotus’s Histories. Using the latest digital technology in combination with close textual study, we investigate the geographical concepts through which Herodotus describes the conflict between Greeks and Persians. Our findings nuance the customary topographical vision of an east versus west polarity by drawing attention to the topological network culture that criss-crosses the two, and develop the means of bringing that world to a mass audience via the internet. In this paper we discuss three main aspects to the project: the data capture of place-names in Herodotus; their visualization and dissemination using the web-mapping technologies of GIS, Google Earth and Timemap; and the interrogation of the relationships that Herodotus draws between different geographical concepts using the digital resources at our disposal. Our concern will be to set out in some detail the digital basis to our methodology and the technologies that we have been exploiting, as well as the problems that we have encountered, in the hope of contributing not only to a more complex picture of space in Herodotus but also to a basis for future digital projects across the Humanities that spatially visualize large text-based corpora. With this in mind we end with a brief discussion of some of the ways in which this study is being developed, with assistance from research grants from the Google Digital Humanities Awards Program and JISC.
The Digital Existence of Words and Pictures: the Case of the Artemidorus Papyrus
This paper describes a case-study conducted to model digitally the Artemidorus papyrus as a roll. It presents how the correspondence between digital images of recto and verso was established and the adoption of a spiral model to reconstitute the papyrus as a rolled virtual 3D object. We suggest that the thickness of the papyrus (undocumented, to the author's knowledge) is roughly 0.45 mm. It is further shown that D'Alessio's (2009) re-ordering of sections (a) and (b+c) of the papyrus is justified. Against expectations, the digital world shifts focus on the papyrus from a pure-content perspective to a content-within-a-material-context perspective. This material context, revealed by the use of digital technologies, gives invaluable clues in the trail of evidence gathered to build an understanding of P. Artemid.