Following the very successful seminar on scribes and writing surfaces, 'Inside the Mind of the Scribe' at Doughty Mews on 14 April 2012, we are delighted to be able to provide links to a number of online resources to support research into the topics discussed in the seminar.
Prof. Tait referred to an article of Jac. J. Janssen's, 'On Style in Egyptian Handwriting', which was published in the JEA (vol 73, 1987). The article is available via JSTOR to those members who subscribe: http://goo.gl/z9bVP. Long considered a primary research source for palaeographic studies, this article outlines how a single, common word (the late Egyptian pA, 'the') can be used to distinguish between scribal hands.
Dr Obbink introduced the Ancient Lives project, http://ancientlives.org/, which is a crowd-sourcing enterprise, allowing members of the public to transcribe Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments, and submit them to the professional translators for batch processing and translation. This innovative idea allows the papyri to be transcribed and translated much more quickly, whilst allowing members of the public the chance to get involved and provide valuable input from anywhere in the world. If you would like to try transcribing an Oxyrhynchus papyri, there is a useful tutorial here: http://ancientlives.org/tutorial/transcribe - why not have a go?
Dr Obbink also mentioned the website established to host information about the study and publication of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri - http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/. The website includes the online database of the papyri, accessible images of the published papyri, as well as a host of other interesting articles and links.
Dr Piquette discussed the technique of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and demonstrated the use of an RTI viewer to explore an object that had been recorded using this technique. The viewer is available as an open-source download, and can be found here: http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtiviewer/index.html
Since the seminar was broadcast on Ustream, we can offer members who weren't there in person the opportunity to watch the seminar again, since it was (mostly) recorded. The video below shows the recording.
Unfortunately due to a technical hitch, Dr Piquette's talk was not fully recorded; however, Dr Piquette has kindly agreed to allow us to upload her Powerpoint presentation, which can be found here.