A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts

Charles Crowther points out a VRE award closely related to the Image, Text, Interpretation e-Science award posted yesterday.

A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts

The Humanities Division at Oxford University has been awarded two years of funding by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) as part of the second phase of its Virtual Research Environments Programme to develop a VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts (VSDM).

The VSDM project aims to create an integrated environment within which documents, analytical and collaborative tools, and scholarly resources will be available to users as a complete and coherent ensemble. The research resources around which the VRE will be built are, in the first instance, ancient documents on various media (inscriptions, wooden tablets, papyri, lead tablets, etc.), but the tools and the structure of the environment are intended to be suitable for the study of a wide variety of types of documents and manuscripts across humanities disciplines. Within the VSDM environment documents are treated not as disembodied texts but as artefacts with an original archaeological or physical context which can, in principle, be recovered or reconstructed. VSDM will be collaborating closely with the VERA archaeological VRE project at the University of Reading (https://vera.rdg.ac.uk).

The VSDM project builds on previous work undertaken as part of the Building a Virual Research Environment for the Humanities project (BVREH: http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk), and is led by Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther, Michael Fraser (Principal Investigators), and Marina Jirotka (Co-Investigator), with a team comprising Ruth Kirkham (Project Manager), John Pybus (Technical Manager) and an additional developer (to be appointed).
Initial results of the project will be presented at both the XXV International Congress of Papyrology (Ann Arbor, July 29 – August 4 2007) and the XIII International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Oxford, 2-7 September, 2007).