Today I'm here to talk about how I propose to aid the process of interpreting ancient
documents.
Are we ready now?
Here's this one, okay.
My talk today is based on my nearly finished Defill thesis, which has the title, a decision
support system for the reading of ancient documents.
The thesis is conducted as a part of the e-science and ancient documents project, so the ESAD
project, and I'd like to thank my supervisors and my fellow project members and colleagues
at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford e-Research Centre for their
support throughout my research.
My main research question is how can decision support system software or technology be used
to aid the interpretation process of reading ancient documents?
It fits into the overall scope of the ESAD project, which was how can IT tools be used
to aid the reading of ancient documents?
By ancient documents, my research sort of centres around the ancient documents of Greek
and Latin documents, and in particular the vendor Lander tablets from the fort of vendor
Lander at the Hadrian's Wall in the UK, which we see an example of here also is tablet 670.
When I use the term scholars in my research, I particularly mean paparologists, which was
what my case study is looking into, but also epigraphers and paleographers.
Of course I know that there's a lot of other scholars out there who read ancient documents,
and I also hope that the ideas that I've come up with in my research is something that can
be applicable to other types of ancient documents, and everything from Nordic ruins to 18th century
love letters, and that it can be useful to the scholars who read these.
So the first step in my research was to determine how IT could be used to aid the reading of
ancient documents, and one of the main points that I was looking at was the realisation
that decisions in humanities is often interpretations.
These interpretations are often subjective, they usually have very little supported material,
they can be near impossible to quantify, and they can be very difficult to map to any specific
structure.
So with interpretation it often boils down to who we believe and why.
A very experienced stick professor like the guy up here might say that a reading reads
socks, and I know this professor, I've met him or her at many conferences over the years
maybe, he or she has published a lot of material in this subject, so when they say that this
reads socks I might choose to believe them, because I think it's a quite likely interpretation
of the document.
Next up is the undergraduate, I don't know that much about them, they haven't been around
for that long in the subject, they might only have a very basic knowledge of Latin,
they can still possibly read something, but I might feel that when they say that it reads
beer instead, it's a bit of an unlikely reading.
However the computer at the end, I don't have any means of judging its interpretation or
its output.
I don't know if the knowledge base that is the basis of the computer program is collected
from a large group of experienced scholars or whether it's just used maybe some aggregated
data from a bunch of undergraduates, I don't know.
So when there's an interpretation as an output from a computer, you simply don't know how
to look at it, and that's why I've focused on the fact that computers are aiding but
not making the decisions.
This is why I turned towards the concept of decision support systems, which in 1987 was
defined as computer based systems to aid decision making.
Within decision support systems there's a focus on support of those making the decisions
and not on replacing these decision makers in the same way that I never sought to replace
the scholars reading ancient documents.
The decision support system's finest task is to help decision makers understand the
ramifications of selecting an option.
In my research I've translated this into aiding scholars to understand the complex reasoning
process that they're undertaking.
In contrast, there are a lot of decisions all around us in our everyday lives where
it is possible to map all the likely parameters and understand all the possible outcomes.
In these cases it would be possible and very relevant to train a computer to make these
decisions by developing an expert system.
An example of an expert system could be where my poor stick person here is looking for an
insurance quote and you could compute all the different parameters into that and then
we would get an output based on what you put in.
That's quite a simple expert system, but that's of course not what we're dealing with when
reading ancient documents.
To support systems, they can be set to sit in between management information systems
which are very good at organizing data but which doesn't really analyze the data itself
and expert systems on the other side which seek to reproduce the logic of an expert for
a particular decision.
So what can we use computers for?
The reasoning that goes into reading ancient documents can be quite complex.
Last week my stick scholar here was so sure that her reading of a particular letter was
Q, however this week she can't for the life of her remember why she thought this.
Now it's clearly A to her and this is where it would be a great advantage if she had a
decision support system that could allow her to go back and review the decision she made
last week and the arguments that were behind that decision.
Give her at least a clear picture of why she said it was Q last week.
She might still change her reading to A this week, but at least she has a basis for it.
If she finds the argumentation for Q last week was a bit weak, then that's her choice.
The decision support system prototype that I've been developing also looks into other
tools that can be combined with it for a more well rounded decision making experience.
A decision support system could output XML which in turn could be reused as part of a
web service and that in turn can be reused as a suggestion engine for the decision support
system.
So I've developed a word search web service which I've called a PELO and it can search
through a corporate of XML encoded editions that then you can send off a pattern to it.
So if you have a couple of letters that you know and there's some letters that are unknown
in this word, you can send off this pattern and it will return a list of words that fit
the pattern depending on what corpus you sent it off to.
This is a way of reusing when you've already read a document and you've output it as XML,
you can then reuse the same document as a part of your suggestion engine.
It's also something that can be used for interactive websites and things like the vendor lander
tablets website that I've been working on and it's something that I'm quite interested
in continuing to work with.
So the actual DSS decision support system prototype that I've built is not just a working
prototype but more of a proof of concept to show how decision support systems can actually
aid the interpretation of ancient documents.
In this particular case study, I wanted to kind of figure out if it's possible to create
a decision support system structure that enables the scholars to remember their decisions and
thus aids them in their further interpretation process.
It's built upon a very close study of some different popularologists at the University
of Oxford which were done by Melissa Terraz and Zeglen Tartt.
The development of my concept or proof of concept was close cooperation with the paparologists
and the epigraphers as a part of the ESAT project.
The DSS prototype uses mainly the idea of argumentation to structure the interpretations.
The first step was understanding the readers and Melissa Terraz made this model of the different
reading levels and she found that there were some certain levels that the readers spent
more time at while they were reading.
For example the features of characters, the identification of characters and the identification
of possible words.
We used this to kind of to make a network of percepts which focuses on the transition
between these three most used levels and found that it was a kind of circular process between
for example finding although the first letter is P then you might go up and find out okay
if the first letter is P it would fit into the context that the word would be pulley
and that would give us the other letters so in that sense it's a circular process between
these different levels, you can go up and down.
Zeglen Tartt defined two different approaches when she was studying the readers, one was
the crucivabilistic approach and the other was the kinesthetic approach.
The crucivabilistic approach is more like a sort of a cryptic crossword puzzle approach
where it sees the reading of ancient documents as a sort of cryptic crossword where you have
some letters but you don't have others and you have some letters and you don't have others
and you have to figure out what the words are.
The kinesthetic approach is more a question of understanding the message in the document
by trying to recreate what the original scribe was doing while he was writing the document.
So for example by drawing out what you think is of the letters in the document.
I tried to put this into the decision support system prototype and so the structure, the
main structure is the sections, the lines, the words and the characters.
There's of course also other structural parts of reading ancient documents, there's the
sections and there's the document itself and there's the context of the document but I
haven't focused on that in this particular prototype.
Then again I've focused on the actual reading of the characters and how the meaning of the
characters is the letters so if you have a character space as you see here you might
have different character spaces and different word spaces and each character space you
can go in and interpret.
So for example for the character space where there's a question mark in the fifth letter
up here, they're unsure about whether the letter is an A, a U or an I. So I've tried
to kind of model how they could have all three letters in the system and then they could
add arguments for and against each of these letters.
So these are taken out of the actual edition of the actual reading, for example an argument
for and against the letter A's, an argument for is that there's a reference to Ganati
Patris which would make good sense in this document but there's also arguments for that
it could be a U and there's an argument for that it could be an I. In this case they haven't
actually decided on an interpretation, they've left it open which is also something that
the decision support system had to deal with, the fact that they didn't actually decide
but they still have all these arguments. So for the later date something came up which
made them want to go back and look at this, they could still see okay this is their arguments
for why we didn't decide on this letter, now we have some extra arguments for or against
one of the letters which might lead us to a decision.
The conclusion of it was that DSS software is something that could be used to aid the
reading of ancient documents and it is something that would be very useful to remember the
complex reasoning that each interpretation is. Argumentation is also a really good way
of storing and visualising these different interpretations and decisions because it doesn't
enforce itself upon the scholar to say well I think I am 50% sure that this is an A or
something like that, they can just have arguments for and against and it doesn't really matter
how many arguments they have for or against, it's not going to go and count oh you have
three arguments for and two arguments against so you must say it isn't A, it will leave
that open to the scholar.
So what is the future for this prototype for decision support systems? I like the idea
of a layer based system, I think that's the GIS and the archaeologist in me, for me all
the little pixels in the documents are little bits of a map really, so I like the idea of
a system where you would have the different layers you can turn on and off and have more
less transparent and you can work between them, you could start with the original image,
you could enhance the image and have that clear view of it, you could have a transcription
view which would work for the kinesthetic scholar, they could write what they see or
draw what they see rather, you could have a structure layer where you could draw around
make polygons around this is a letter and this is a character space and this is a character
space, you could have a more meaningful layer where you could say okay this character space
is a Q or it could be a Q, it could be P or something like that and then you could have
a DSS layer which would allow you to put the arguments in and then top most you could have
a suggestion layer which is what I was talking about before with the web service where you
could send off a pattern which might be the nearest you've come to interpreting it, you
send off the pattern to some different web services and it suggests some words back to
you. Of course a much, a better system like this would require a much larger user study
and also a much larger user base and that's why I started out by mentioning that I'm very
aware that there are a lot of other ancient documents out there and a lot of other scholars
and I think that for something like this to be built properly it would need to kind
of be useful to a much larger user base than just people reading Latin and Greek documents
and what I would really love to come out of it would be a bigger sort of collaborative
virtual research environment where the decision to what system could be part of an integrated
tool.