Digital Worlds Institute receives grant for project with classics department

April 20, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida College of Fine Arts and Digital Worlds Institute has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.

The award will fund the Digital Epigraphy Toolbox project, a collaborative research initiative between the Digital Worlds Institute and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences department of classics.

The project is led and coordinated by Digital Worlds Institute professor Angelos Barmpoutis. This project is an open source, cross-platform web application designed to facilitate the digital preservation, study and electronic dissemination of ancient inscriptions. It allows epigraphists to digitize in 3-D their epigraphic squeezes using a novel cost-effective technique, which overcomes the limitations of the current methods for digitizing epigraphic data in 2-D only.

The proposed toolbox contains several options for 3-D visualization of inscriptions as well as a set of scientific tools for analyzing the lettering techniques and performing quantitative analysis of the letterform variations. Furthermore, the users have the option to share their data as well as to search for other uploaded collections of 3-D inscriptions in a semi-supervised dynamic library.

This dynamic library is organized thematically according to language, area of origin, and date and will contain a comprehensive record of the inscription in the form of plain text, 3-D model, 2-D photographs, and other epigraphic information.

The award will fund the project for the next two years.