Supporting online research and education of Abnormal Hieratic
Peter Verhaar
Centre for Digital Scholarship Leiden University Libraries
Leiden University The Netherlands
Ben Companjen
Centre for Digital Scholarship Leiden University Libraries
Leiden University The Netherlands
Koenraad Donker van Heel
Papyrological Institute Leiden University The Netherlands
Ferdinand Harmsen
Faculty of Humanities Leiden University The NetherlandsJuan José Archidona Ramírez
Papyrological Institute Leiden University
The Netherlands
1
INTRODUCTION
This poster presents the preliminary results of a project which aims to build an online environment to support research and ed-ucation on manuscript texts written in Abnormal Hieratic. Such manuscripts are managed by a number of institutions, including Leiden University Libraries and the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Leiden University has a long tradition of supporting research and education on the languages and the cultures of Asia and the Middle East. Its university library also manages internationally renowned heritage collections, including collections from non-Western re-gions, such as the Caribbean, Indonesia and Korea. Leiden Univer-sity has also invested considerably in enhancing the digital access to these collections. The Leiden Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS), which is located physically and organisationally within Lei-den University Libraries, encourages researchers to make use of the library’s digital resources, and offers practical support during analyses based on digital data.
Hieratic is a cursive writing system which was developed for Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The abnormal variety is a shorthand version of the older script, which originated in the seventh century BC.
There are only a few experts in the world who can ‘decipher’ texts written in Abnormal Hieratic, but more and more people would like to get access to the contents of (mostly) papyri from ancient Egypt.
In courses on Abnormal Hieratic, students get limited time to learn the alphabet of symbols denoting hieroglyphs. Text books and readers are available to study the texts. Access to original manuscripts is limited. Students need to see the details in the manuscripts to learn the small differences between various symbols. The Centre for Digital Scholarship was asked by researchers of the Faculty of Humanities to cooperate in building an online educational resource on which their knowledge about the writing system can be disseminated through audiovisual and textual tutori-als. The platform should also allow students to study the texts in detail, to learn the script interactively and to discuss transcriptions, transliterations and translations online.
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DATeCH 2019, May 08–10, 2019, Brussels, Belgium © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
2
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE PROJECT AND
SYSTEM
Leiden University Libraries wish to make their collections more accessible for research and education, especially for researchers and students who use digital humanities techniques. By using open standards in the portal, anyone will be able to access its contents. The Faculty of Humanities, whose researchers study many differ-ent languages and cultures, would like online tools to allow the formation of international communities of researchers studying certain source materials, such as Abnormal Hieratic manuscripts.
More specific system requirements included: • viewing high-resolution images of manuscripts
• enriching images with transcriptions, with links to a dictio-nary and name book
• embedding audiovisual instructions and lectures • allow discussion about interpretation of manuscripts • adding self-study materials: questions and answers • allow linking content to contextual information elsewhere
on the web
• allow inclusion of digital manuscripts hosted by other parties
3
MODELLING PAPYRI AND TEXT
In the pilot phase we included three papyri from the Département des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Louvrein the portal: P. Louvre E 7851, 7852 and 7856. Two papyri have text on both sides, unrelated to one another, so that there are five texts. Each of the three papyri was described as an object with one or two canvases in a IIIF manifest. The texts on the papyri had already been transcribed, translit-erated and translated in publications by Donker van Heel [3–5]. The new digital transcriptions were made in JSesh [9] and exported as SVG and PDF. The transliterations were created in Microsoft Word with the Trlit_CG Times font [1]. This font makes specific characters look like transliteration characters, following [10]. We reverse-engineered the font and converted those character to the correct Unicode characters. The translations were also created in Word and are in English.
4
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
The online environment1is based on the WordPress content
man-agement system to allow the subject experts to work on textual
DATeCH 2019, May 08–10, 2019, Brussels, Belgium Verhaar et al. content directly in an access-controlled environment. Through a
custom WordPress plugin and theme, we created a custom post type to support the storage and display of metadata, texts and images associated with the papyri.
Texts are stored as the textual body of the post. The SVG files are stored as media uploads. Images of the papyri are served by the Cantaloupe image server2using the IIIF Image API. The images,
provided by the Département des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Louvre, had to be hosted by the project team, as they were not available on another IIIF image server.
The papyri have been manually described as objects in JSON manifests following the IIIF Presentation API. These manifests could then be loaded in the embedded Mirador viewer.
Using the Mirador image viewer3, words in the images were
marked up using polygon selectors. Each word was then individu-ally annotated with its transcription, transliteration and translation (in lemma form).
Mirador saves annotations in the Open Annotation4JSON-LD
format. The body of the annotation is an HTML fragment with an SVG image of the transcription, and transliteration and translation as text. WordPress does not provide the API endpoints that Mirador needs, which is why we set up a Simple Annotation Server that Mirador can use.
A custom Python script5indexes the annotations at regular times, exporting the annotations from Simple Annotation Server, parsing the various parts from the HTML in the annotations into specific fields and storing records in Elasticsearch.
A PHP script6allows users to search the indexed annotations and follow the results back to the WordPress environment.
5
RESULTS
The website which has been developed by the CDS offers access to a number of digitised manuscripts, with notes and questions for self-assessment. The scans have been made available via the In-ternational Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for inspection in high detail. Making use of annotation tools within the Mirador image viewer, each individual word has been identified and an-notated separately. For each word, the researchers have added a transcription to hieroglyphs, transliteration, a translation and an indication of the grammatical category of the word. Data such as these can be very helpful for learners of the Abnormal Hieratic writing system.
By indexing the annotations and providing a simple search form, the system allows searching the texts that have been annotated. Researchers and students are able to search for (parts of) the translit-eration and find all occurrences of the words on the scans, to quickly see various writing styles for a single word and understand the contexts in which words are used. The project offers an interesting
2See https://medusa-project.github.io/cantaloupe/. 3See http://projectmirador.org/.
4Open Annotation has been superseded by the Web Annotation standards, but is still
in use in the IIIF Presentation API v2.1. See http://www.openannotation.org/.
5The indexer script is available at https://github.com/LeidenUniversityLibrary/
abnormal-hieratic-indexer.
6The search script is part of https://github.com/LeidenUniversityLibrary/
abnormal-hieratic.
illustration of the way in which texts can be annotated with spe-cialised research annotations, and of the possibilities for connecting texts with images on a word-by-word basis.
6
FUTURE STEPS
After launching the public beta in May 2019, we hope to improve the integration of the Mirador viewer and WordPress for better provenance and discussion of annotations.
We also intend to explore different ways to connect text to the images, for example by accepting TEI as input format for transcrip-tion, transliteration and translation. Still a future objective is to create a shared dictionary and a book of names, based on existing works such as [6].
Although the SVG transcriptions are useful and look good, they do not allow for searching the transcription. By including the direct hieroglyphic transcription using the Manuel de Codage [2, 10] or Revised Encoding Scheme [7], we hope to improve the search possibilities and create better support for using Abnormal Hieratic texts in corpora [8].
To make this a true Global Portal, we will create connections with other text databases like papyri.info and Trismegistos7.
And last but not least, we will set up similar systems for source materials from different communities, such as Arabic papyri.
REFERENCES
[1] [n.d.]. Trlit_CG Times font. Retrieved 2019-04-29 from https://www.wepwawet. nl/dmd/fonts.htm
[2] Jan Buurman, Nicolas Grimal, Michael Hainsworth, Jochem Hallof, and Dirk van der Plas. 1988. Inventaire des signes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique: manuel de codage des textes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie sur ordinateur(3ième ed.). Imprimerie Lienhart & Cie, Paris.
[3] Koenraad Donker van Heel. 1997. Papyrus Louvre E 7852. A Land Lease from the Reign of Taharka. Revue d’Égyptologie 48 (1997), 81–93.
[4] Koenraad Donker van Heel. 1998. Papyrus Louvre E 7856 verso and recto: Leasing Land in the Reign of Taharka. Revue d’Égyptologie 49 (1998), 91–105. [5] Koenraad Donker van Heel. 1999. Papyrus Louvre E 7851 Recto and Verso: Two
More Land Leases from the Reign of Taharka. Revue d’Égyptologie 50 (1999), 135–147.
[6] Alexander Ilin-Tomich. 2018. Persons and Names of the Middle Kingdom. https: //doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1411392 type: dataset.
[7] Mark-Jan Nederhof. 2002. A Revised Encoding Scheme for Hieroglyphic. In Proceedings of the XIV Computer-aided Egyptology Round Table. Pisa, Italy. https: //mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/res/ie2002.pdf
[8] Mark-Jan Nederhof. 2013. The Manuel de Codage Encoding of Hieroglyphs Impedes Development of Corpora. In Texts, languages & information technology in Egyptology: selected papers from the meeting of the Computer Working Group of the International Association of Egyptologists (Informatique & Égyptolgie), Liège, 6-8 July 2010, Stéphane Polis and Jean Winand (Eds.). Number 9 in Aegyptiaca Leodiensia. Presses Universitaires de Liège, Liège, 103–110. OCLC: 843421912. [9] Serge Rosmorduc. 2014. JSesh Documentation. Retrieved 2019-04-28 from
http://jseshdoc.qenherkhopeshef.org/
[10] Hans van den Berg. 1997. Manuel de Codage: A standard system for the computer-encoding of Egyptian transliteration and hieroglyphic texts. Retrieved 2019-02-12 from http://www.catchpenny.org/codage/
