To celebrate the launch of our new multi-media ebook Scripts and Texts(Vol. 1 of the Manual of Roman Everyday Writing), we’re delighted to welcome Prof. Alan Bowman with a guest blog this month.
The volume is co-authored by Prof. Bowman and LatinNow’s Principal Investigator, Alex Mullen, and complements Anna Willi’s volume Writing Equipment, to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about how the Romans wrote in their daily lives. Both volumes are Open Access, and completely free to use and ideally viewed in their Flip-book format. Static PDFs are also available to download from our Publications page. If you like the manual and use it, please drop us a tweet @LatinNowERC – we’d love to hear from you!
This article first appeared in Newsletter 26 (pages 17-18) of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, University of Oxford (Autumn 2021). Many thanks to CSAD for allowing us to reproduce it.
In this blog Alex Meyer (Western University, Ontario) tells us about his project Illuminating the Vindolanda Tablets which started last year and in which the LatinNow team is involved: Alex Mullen is a Co-Investigator and Anna Willi has been writing messages on replica tablets made by Roy Lawson to put in the CT scanner… For RTI work in 2019 on the Vindolanda tablets led by LatinNow at Blythe House, see our video.
The pandemic hasn’t been great for research that seeks to generate new evidence based on physical artefacts. It has been hard or impossible to travel and many libraries and museums have limited access to or closed their collections. Fortunately, digital technologies are making artefacts more and more accessible to scholars around world. For example, while I haven’t been able to travel outside of North America in the last seventeen months, work on Illuminating the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets has resumed in my absence and is producing new high-resolution 3D images of stylus tablets from Vindolanda. Vindolanda is most famous for its extensive collection of ink tablets, but excavations on the site have also produced over 300 stylus tablets. Although about a quarter of those stylus tablets have visible writing on them, none of them have yet been published, because the writing that remains is illegible using current techniques.
This past month the Illuminating the Vindolanda Writing Tablets project, with the assistance of James Miles from Archaeovision, was able to use a state-of-the-art 3D laser scanner to examine some of the unpublished stylus tablets from Vindolanda Roman Fort now on loan to the Vindolanda Trust from the British Museum. These scans are accurate to approximately 30 microns (.03 mm). We hope that scans of this accuracy along with new image manipulation techniques will allow us to read previously illegible tablets.
James Miles of Archaeovision scanning a fragmentary tablet at the Vindolanda Museum.
Over the last century several large collections of stylus tablets have been published from places like Pompeii, Vindonissa and London, but the vast majority of tablets remain unpublished. Some of these tablets are apparently blank, while others have writing that can’t be made out. This is largely because what writing is preserved on stylus tablets is the result of inadvertent incisions that were made through the wax that once covered the tablets but is now almost always lost. To make matters worse, stylus tablets were generally reused. This means that stylus tablets often have overlapping, fragmentary texts that are difficult to interpret in the best of circumstances.
In order to read the tablets, scholars traditionally depend on their naked eyes, assisted by raking light which serves to highlight the texture of the incisions left behind by over-zealous writers. In the past 25 years, this technique has been augmented by the advent of Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI), which produces composite digital images of tablets with a virtual, movable light source. This technique has done wonders to help read problematic texts. However, it has its limitations. Color and shading can be misleading and some marks are still too shallow or faint to make out.
Illuminating the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets is a collaboration between me, Alex Mullen of Latin Now, Roger Tomlin of Oxford and Barbara Birley of the Vindolanda Trust, and is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We’re exploring new methods by which we might be able to recover texts preserved on these tablets. High-resolution 3D scanning is just the first step. There are many technologies to apply to this problem. For example, in the coming months we’ll be running a replica tablet through a CT scanner and trying various methods of manipulating the results of the 3D scanning and the CT scan to recover and read texts that have so-far eluded interpretation.
The applications of this research are extensive. Not only may this process represent a significant advance in our knowledge of Vindolanda and the Roman empire’s northern frontier, but these same techniques could be applied to previously illegible stylus tablets from other sites, of which there are hundreds. Similarly, these techniques could be applied to other media, including other types of wooden artefacts, bronze tablets, inscriptions on stone and almost any other inscribed or incised material. Most excitingly, these technologies improve everyday and promise to continue revealing new evidence of the ancient world.
Do we think that the Roman dead might be perceptive to a message from the living today? Because I think some of them may be interested in this…
Fig. 1: Can anyone else hear the opening theme of HBO’s ‘Rome’? Roman mosaic at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. 109982, Wikimedia Commons).
It has always struck me how much the Romans thought of their dead as being part of their living world, and how they included them in that living world by honouring their memory through rituals. You may have heard that the dead were fed milk and wine on certain days of the year, sometimes through holes or pipes in their graves. You may also know, and have chuckled at, Ovid’s description of night-time bean throwing to appease unfriendly spirits that appeared during the Roman version of Halloween, the festival of the Lemuria in May (Ovid, Fasti, 5.421ff.). You may even have raised an eyebrow or two in appreciation of the trusts that were set up to guarantee the maintenance of burials and yearly gifts to the dead in eternity (see e.g. CIL III 703 from Philippi, Macedonia). The perhaps most touching result of this interactive approach to the afterlife is the way in which the Roman dead seem to talk to us from their grave, through the inscriptions on their tombstones: ‘stop here, traveller, and read about me and my life!’ (see e.g. CIL XIII 7070 from Mainz, Germania superior, where the deceased laments that he was killed by a slave).
It was very important to the Romans that their memory was kept alive, and inscriptions and imagery on funerary monuments was used to express or shape this memory. I think of depictions on funerary monuments as a kind of iconographic blurb about the deceased, one that was also ‘legible’ for those that were unable to read. In most cases, there was little space for images and the scenes and items featured must have been chosen carefully. Interestingly, some of the dead seemingly wanted to tell us: ‘look, I had writing equipment!’
Fig. 2: A ghostly appearance: drawing of a fresco in the tomb of the aedile C. Vestorius Priscus in Pompeii showing him as he enters a room with lots of writing equipment in it (from G. Spano, La tomba dell’edile C. Vestorio Prisco in Pompei, Atti della reale accademia d’Italia. Memorie della classe die scienze morali e storiche, ser. VII vol. III.6, 1943, 237–315).
This week I attended an online conference at the University of Pécs, Hungary, that was all about the depiction of writing equipment on Roman funerary monuments (check out their ‘Scroll in Hand’ project here). Funerary depictions of writing equipment are particularly well (but not exclusively) known from the Danube provinces and the Greek East. Writing tablets, scrolls and writing sets containing pens and inkwells are particularly common, and they are sometimes shown on their own and sometimes in use. This is great news for us researchers working on Roman everyday writing because it gives the objects we know through archaeological finds some context and we can learn a lot from such depictions about how these objects may have been used (e.g., no tables, and no quills either!). But can we also learn something about the significance of writing for the representation of the dead?
Sometimes there is a clear professional connection, for example when people are shown or described as teachers or as accountants (this applies to both men and women), or if they were officials or magistrates who would have dealt with a lot of ‘paper’-work. But in some cases, the inscription does not mention the deceased’s occupation, or no inscription is preserved at all. In such cases it is difficult to know if writing equipment was in fact used by the deceased during their life time, or whether its depiction had a symbolic function. Literacy and writing represented education but also more generally social and professional status. The symbolic function can be even more abstract, with a scroll representing a legal document or act such as the manumission of a slave and thus the free status of the person shown holding it.
Where detailed writing sets or individual writing implements are shown, or where people are shown in the act of writing, we can at least assume that it somehow related to the identity of the deceased. It was clearly important to them, whether they were literate or not, whether they used writing for their occupation or not. It was so important that they wanted to be remembered as writing in eternity. It has not been an eternity yet, but I think those writing dead men and women would be pleased to know that we’ve seen their writing equipment – and took a long hard look at it, too!
The LatinNow team has been busy putting together the Manual of Roman Everyday Writing on and off over the past few months. Volume 2, on writing equipment, written by Anna Willi and turned into an eBook by Janie Masseglia, jumped the queue and came out earlier this summer. We’re hoping Volume 1, Scripts and Texts, co-written by Alan Bowman and me, will generate similar interest. Just one of its figures, a table of cursive scripts from corpora ranging from first-century Pompeii to sixth-century Ravenna, has taken me days to create: I wrote out the cursive letter forms in the cells literally 5,000 times before getting it right. The thought that someone, one day, might possibly find it useful inspired me to keep going!
One of the reasons for choosing the eBook format was the fact that we could use as many images as we liked and could even embed videos. We’ve made three new videos for Volume 1, which you can watch now as a kind of sneak-preview trailer for the book, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. They are designed for people new to RTI.
The first is a feat of multitasking skill. Our senior scientist Janie, from the University of Leicester wrote it, starred in it, shot it and produced it all on her own. All in a day. I’m in awe. In the video she explains how we can use RTI to help us to read worn inscriptions – in this case the epitaph of a Victorian couple on a tombstone from a Leicestershire village.
Video 2 is more of a team effort. Scott Vanderbilt shot the footage in Blythe House in London in summer 2019 when we were capturing the unpublished stylus tablets from Vindolanda with the superdome RTI machine. It features a noisy RTI dome, me (out of breath because I’m pretty pregnant with LatinNow baby #7), Richard Hobbs from the British Museum, and some rather special tablets. The legible marks on the stylus tablets are exceptionally hard to read and work is still underway to try to decipher their texts. It’s a case of ‘watch this space’…
The third video is about deciphering a tricky-to-read text on the base of a pot from East Farleigh in Kent and it accompanies the section on ‘How to read cursive texts’ in the manual. It shows how we can use the RTI technique demonstrated in the other two videos to read a text that hasn’t been read for 1800 or so years.
The LatinNow team has been doing quite a bit of RTI over the course of the project: training others to use it and getting involved in some new adventures imaging understudied collections in museums. We’ll blog about some of these soon.
If you are interested in fuller details about how RTI works, these can be found in chapter 8 ‘Modern technologies for reading everyday texts’ in the Manual (we’ll let you know when it is published online), including how you can do it yourself without the expense of a dome. Do contact us if you know of a Roman collection that needs deciphering!
As academics, every now and then we get confronted with just how much we live in our own little world, and how easy it is to forget to look beyond its limits. I had one of these moments earlier this month, when I was tagged in a tweet and found myself staring at a tool that got me excited. The tweet was by Roy Lawson (@RAeliusVictor) who had just made a number of brilliant replicas of Roman writing tablets for us (Fig. 1). But let us go back to the beginning of the story.
In autumn 2019, LatinNow travelled Europe with the Touring Exhibition ‘Voces Populi’. Our senior scientist Janie Masséglia had designed a number of wonderful outreach activities for the tour and we let school children have a go at inscribing wax tablet replicas with styli. More than a year later, when Janie was working on the production of the first volume of our Manual of Roman Everyday Writing (open access here: bit.ly/MREW2), she stumbled over a passage I had written that described how the eraser ends of styli were used to ‘flatten’ the wax where corrections to the text were to be made. During the Touring Exhibition she had discovered that flattening was almost impossible with the kind of erasers commonly found on metal styli, which are shaped like small spatulas (Fig. 2). Instead, she resorted to removing a thin curl of wax, ‘like a parmesan shaving’, as she put it. This remark led me to reconsider in some detail just how wax tablets were erased, and to a series of delightfully nerdy Skype sessions with graduate student and stylus specialist Alessia Colombo (a short article on what we found out is due to be published in Instrumentum later this year). But while writing up my thoughts, I realised that I needed to get my hand on a replica and try myself.
This is where the SSHRC comes in. The SSHRC is Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and last year they awarded a grant to an exciting new project on wax tablets led by Dr Alex Meyer (Western University, Ontario), and on which our own PI, Alex Mullen, is a co-investigator. The Alexes are exploring new ways to decipher Roman wax tablets with imaging technology, and because the originals are fragile and difficult to move from museums, they needed inscribed replica tablets as test objects. I was happy to act as LatinNow’s scribe in return for the opportunity to experiment with erasing techniques. I got myself a stylus and a spatula and sent a wish-list of specifications to Roy Lawson, who was willing to produce the tablets for me to inscribe. In the process I also asked him about their production, sharing my thoughts about styli and the erasing process. And while I was experimenting with the replicas (there is something to be said here about using a toddler’s wooden xylophone stick as a replica bone stylus eraser!), inscribing and reinscribing them with the first verses of the Metamorphoses and happily piling up heaps of wax shavings, Roy tweeted an image and tagged me in it.
Looking at it on the small screen of my phone I first thought the Lego legionaries were carrying a Roman stylus. Point, shaft and spatulate end were all there, and even the size was right, but something seemed off. Since the tweet did not provide an explanation, I asked Roy what the object is and he uses it for. As it turns out, this tool is a scribe or scriber, made of hardened steel and used by engineers and metalworkers for scribing, i.e. making marks on metal; similar tools are also used by jewellers, for example. As Roy explained to me in an email, he uses it on all kinds of materials: ‘I use the point for marking on almost everything, it produces a fine constant line. The flat end is very useful for marking out fine cuts in wood, it helps locate the saw or chisel.’
I was very happy when I learned about this tool. I love how many tools look similar throughout time. But more importantly, ever since I researched Roman styli for our Manual, I had a hunch that writing may not have been the primary function for all Roman styli finds, as is often assumed, particularly in case of heavier, bulkier examples or those found in areas that can be interpreted as workshops. Roman styli were not made of steel like Roy’s scriber. The majority were made of iron, more delicate examples also of copper-alloy, and apart from the earlier bone styli we can assume that wooden versions were also used. But a good iron tip would have been useful to make marks into many surfaces from softer metals to wood and plaster for example.
Writing implements are often seen as very specific instruments that were used in the fairly restricted context of literacy. The case of the scriber shows that we may have to be more open to multiple uses for any given shape of tool, and the further implication is that we need to be cautious when using finds of writing equipment as a proxy for literacy. There is still a lot of work to be done on styli and the practicalities of Roman everyday writing, and a lot is clearly to be gained for this kind of research from experimental archaeology – and from venturing beyond the academic world.
This month sees the launch of LatinNow’s first volume (although it’s Volume 2!) in our new series Manual of Roman Everyday Writing, available as an Open Access interactive flipbook:
We’re delighted for Anna and the whole team send our congratulations for completing such a stellar publication in the strangest of years. I’ve nobbled this month’s blog to write about the business of publishing an ebook, and what we’ve learned about getting the new volume into ‘print’.
We were first inspired by the gorgeous publications by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, who produced their Medea book back in 2016 and their Agamemnon book last year. For academic projects and researchers looking to dip their toes into Open Access publishing, an in-house ebook has a number of advantages:
You can control everything about the look and layout of the book
You can share your work easily online, encouraging a wider readership
You can embed links and videos
You can update your publication instantly
You can track and study the traffic to your site (e.g. using Google Analytics), giving you that all-important data when reporting your research ‘impact’
But there are some areas where it might seem easier to fall back on a traditional Press, particularly peer review and permanency. We’ve been working hard to negotiate our way around these problems, and wanted to share both our new publication and our findings:
Self-publishing isn’t incompatible with Peer Review
It’s now more important than ever that scholars receive acknowledgement for their hard work. We were adamant that we wanted our books to be officially recognised as ‘proper’ Open Access books, and so held in mind the criteria that would allow us to apply for Certification with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) once they were published. If you can set up a Board of Editors, an Editor-in-Chief, follow the steps to have the manuscript frankly appraised by external experts, and make your processes open and transparent, you don’t need to rely on a traditional Press for your ebook to be peer-reviewed. You just need to be brave!
Get yourself an ISBN number
If you are attached to a University and part of a research project, the chances are that your Library will be able to provide an ISBN number. If not, these can be purchased easily online.
Choose the right type of ebook for your readers
In most cases, preparing an ebook begins with making a PDF. I used Adobe InDesign to prepare the layout, but any word-processor which prints to PDF (including good ol’ MS Word) would work. If you insert logical bookmarks, cross-references and links into your PDF, you make it more interactive and easier to navigate. But there is a snag when dealing with long texts in PDF: all that scrolling. With a hard-copy book, the reader can check a reference or view an appendix before returning to their original location just by putting their finger between the pages. With PDFs and some ebooks, once you’ve followed a link elsewhere, there’s not always an obvious way to get back. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
In the case of Anna’s ebook, she had built a fantastic appendix of literary sources with original texts and translations, and these could be found by following a hyperlink in the main text. How could we get the reader back from the appendix to the original page they were reading? We could have programmed another link, this time from the appendix back to the main text. But what if several places in the main text referred to the same item in the appendix? The manuscript would become littered with options. In fact, there is a way to return to your previous location in a PDF (Alt + left arrow key in a PC, or Command + left arrow key on a Mac) but this manoeuvre isn’t familiar to all users. How could we make the book as user-friendly as possible, retaining the best bits of a traditional book and an ebook? The answer came in choosing an additional software to turn the PDF into a “flipbook”.
What’s a Flipbook?
Flipbook software processes your PDF and gives a smart on-screen interface that also provides helpful navigation buttons and reading features. Very little of the flipbook software on the market is made with long, finger-in-the-page-while-you-check-the-references-type text in mind, so finding one that offers the right features for an academic book is essential. Our wish-list for usability included:
a ‘back’ button to help the reader return to a previous location
the option to have the Table of Contents visible alongside the book while reading
a search box to function as an index
the option to embed videos and media in the text
a standard format which could easily be made available and shared online
We compared lots of software packages by using the free trial version before finally settling on one called FLIP PDF Professional, the only one we could find that really lent itself to the way researchers use books. It uses HTML5 so works like (well, it is) a webpage (cave emptor: avoid any software which only uses Flash, as this is being phased out and you’ll have bought a white elephant). This little video shows these functions in action for Anna’s new book:
Future-proof your ebook
The current trend in flipbook software is for monthly subscriptions. Aimed primarily at the journalism and publicity sectors, these payment plans mean that, for an ongoing fee, users always have the most up-to-date features and have the option to store their publications in the provider’s online repositories. But when the payments stop, the ebooks and brochures disappear. Most academic research projects only last a few years, so it’s important not to become tied to a subscription service. The one we settled on happened to be one of the few services which we could buy outright, up-front, meaning we had complete ownership in perpetuity of our publications.
Finding a permanent webpage to house the ebook was important. LatinNow, like many research projects, uses a subscription-based WordPress blog as our main project site, which is linked to the life of the project. Again, we needed a home for the book which would outlive the blog site. We decided to use GitHub as a cost-free way to store our flipbook permanently online. This did require a bit of IT know-how to get started, but with the help of Jasper Donelan at Nottingham and Jezcentral (you’re never too old to ask your big brother for help with coding), we got there (a tip for other GitHub beginners: do download the GitHub desktop app).
We hope you enjoy the book which you can find online here. Huge congratulations to Anna, and thanks to everyone who helped us find our way from draft to flipbook.
The last few days we’ve been working hard again on our epigraphic database. We have just released a video which describes a little how we will use this in combination with our other datasets to try to answer some big historical questions about life and languages in the Roman west. It’s a talk Pieter (in the Netherlands) and I (in the UK) gave jointly on a Friday night for the Digital Humanities centre at San Diego State University. We had a great host – David Wallace-Hare (the David I occasionally mention in the talk!) – to whom our thanks for the invitation. It was nice to be asked to talk specifically about the DH side of our project.
In our last blog, we explained the nature of our epigraphic dataset and some of our tasks over the past couple of years. We are now very close to pressing the button to initiate ‘The Great Merge’. Up until this point we have been working with 181,000+ different EpiDoc records mostly from EAGLE which are derived from a number of digital epigraphic sources. Over the last couple of years we have identified, by machine and by hand, many thousands of duplicate records (in addition to the numerous duplicates already found by EAGLE). Now we will merge these records to make one set of records (c. 135,000) for each text-bearing object and will assign them LatinNow URIs. All the original data will, of course, also be kept. And everything will be open access.
Merging records might sound straightforward but what goes into the single merged record is complicated and requires even more complicated coding (the latter our wonderful Technical Director’s specialty thankfully!). Everything is fine if the attributes in each record match or one provides metadata that the other doesn’t. The issue is when the values for the same attribute in the duplicate records don’t match. The first pass at the merge coding turned up a scarily high number of non-matching attributes, over 24,000, even after our attempts at harmonizing the vocabularies and cleaning of the dataset. Luckily a good chunk of these are solved by adding rules about hierarchy (‘stone’ and ‘stone: limestone’ are not conflictual) and telling the machine how to cope with the same attributes which been assigned differing levels of confidence. Many of the non-identical attributes are also complementary – so we can tell the code to keep both of them when merging the records. But there, as always, remains a set of ‘problematic cases’. It is unlikely, for example, that the same inscription is simultaneously ‘stone’ and ‘ceramic’ (perhaps a researcher in one of the source epigraphic databases has assumed votive texts with VSLM will be on stone for example), and inscriptions are rarely both a milestone text and an epitaph. We have had to find clever ways to deal with these but many must be checked by hand.
One example may serve as an indicator of some of the knotty issues we face. As ancient historians we are interested in mapping the lapidary epigraphic habit so it is important that we have a reliable set of georeferenced data points of stone inscriptions. A few stone inscriptions have the attribute ‘material: rock’ in the database. Of course stone is also rock, but epigraphers do normally want to make a distinction. Worked rock – what we call stone – made into an object that is then inscribed (e.g. a tombstone or an altar) is different from rock in a cave or mountainside that is carved or scratched into directly. There are interesting links to make between the two formats, but we want to be able to categorize them separately and not subsume the rock inscriptions into the much larger lapidary set. We can of course keep rock within the series of attributes for the material of lapidary texts, for example having rock, stone and limestone in a descending hierarchy.
View of the Lances de Malissard (photo: Patrice78500, CC-BY-SA-3.0)
One of our fun tasks this past week was trying to ensure the rock and stone inscriptions were not lumped together. Pieter took on the Iberian Peninsula, Anna the Germanies and I Gaul and Britain. This led me to rediscover some really interesting rock texts, including the slightly unusual text on a rock face of the crête de Malissard, which reads hoc usque Aveorum, which can be translated roughly as ‘this is the border of the territory of the Avei (?)’ and shows the double I for E which is much more common in handwritten texts using the stylus than in rock or stone-carved texts. Who the Avei (?) might be is unclear. It’s an intriguing inscription to which I’d like to return, and perhaps even try to visit one day when travel is permitted.
Rock-hewn inscription on the crête de Malissard (photo: Yoan Mollard, CC-BY-SA-4.0)
Next up for our post-‘Great-Merge’ database is to decide exactly how we can best make our data accessible for the general public and the academic community.
By Simona Stoyanova, Scott Vanderbilt and Alex Mullen
We play with a lot of data in the LatinNow project and we thought we’d tell you a little about our biggest dataset: the 180,000 record strong epigraphic database.
Considering the large geographical and temporal scope of LatinNow, we asked the EAGLE-Europeana network to share their epigraphic data from the north-western provinces. They kindly agreed and that was the start of our core dataset. That meant that we had EDH, EDCS, Hispania Epigraphica, Ubi Erat Lupa and PETRAE, amongst others, all in EpiDoc, while data from RIB is being added directly by Scott. Of course, the different focus and approach of each of these corpora mean that the granularity of encoding is different – e.g. some projects annotate evidence for dating or very detailed provenance information while others are more interested in the text and provide minimal metadata. However, the shared use of the EpiDoc standard and EAGLE’s efforts enabled us to leverage all available metadata and to query records on a scale otherwise impossible.
We gradually started adding our own corpora into the mix – e.g. Gaulish (Gallo-Greek and Gallo-Latin), Raetic and Noric, as well as the spindle whorl collection discussed here. Using the same attributes and vocabularies allows us to query and compare features of these inscriptions alongside those coming from EAGLE and RIB. Simona also worked with Francesca and Alex on picking a set of socio-linguistic attributes, starting from the massive list in the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of the Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age and building on Francesca’s and Alex’s linguistic research on specific regions. After much debate we decided on half-a-dozen most representative and relevant for our provinces (particularly those with relevance for language contact). Mapping these with our more precise coordinates gives us a clearer picture of socio-linguistic processes across the western part of the empire.
Representation of data flows to and from the LatinNow project (Simona Stoyanova)
Data can be a messy business and has to be curated and analysed with care and understanding of the principles followed in its collection. Differences in encoding, as mentioned above, come from project-specific needs, while differences in, say, bibliographic reference style, may come from national practices, even personal preferences. Another issue can be the files’ date of publication. We noticed some duplication of records between our dataset and the current EDH, which turned out to be a case of EDH having updated those records post-2015 – the date of the EAGLE data transferred to us. Further complications arose from the different approach towards fragmentary texts/objects. While Trismegistos catalogues all parts of a fragment under one identifier, other data providers treat each fragment as a separate item with its own identifier. Each of these issues, and numerous others, had to be addressed with a combination of epigraphic, publishing, encoding and data science experience. Reconciling varying approaches to the recording of our material is no easy task and is not a trivial task.
We, especially Scott and Pieter, worked hard on the improvement of geospatial coordinates, since mapping is a key tool in our research. This involved pouring over publications in an attempt to figure out how to pin down ‘the south-west corner of Don Pedro’s farm’ and trying to work out why different projects had recorded sometimes radically different co-ordinates. It was always important to work out whether ‘dump sites’ had been deployed by projects, i.e. a consistently chosen central location used to place inscriptions whose provenance was not known e.g. beyond a province.
Messing around with mapping, Latin inscriptions and the road network (Pieter Houten)
We also spent a lot of time adding to and harmonizing attributes. A starting point for our metadata consolidation was the EAGLE vocabularies for material, object type and text type. The importance of EAGLE’s attempt at reconciling complex terminology in multiple languages from multiple projects cannot be overstated. It has made projects like ours possible and has encouraged the epigraphic community to work with more concertation on the digital future of our field. Currently, there is an effort from both the epigraphy.info and the Linked Pasts community to review and streamline the vocabularies, and build more robust Linked Open Data mechanisms around them. While we wait for this work to be completed, we spent hours debating issues such as: what is a Tafel vs table vs plaque vs tablet vs plate; do we actually need to leverage them with one or two terms, or can we keep them all and still perform meaningful searches and analyses?
But without a doubt the most time-consuming task was deduplication. Projects at the time of the download from EAGLE did not consistently link up their data – e.g. with a Trismegistos ID or similar. As a result, with downloads from multiple different digital epigraphic projects, some of the same objects had as many as half a dozen records. Finding them is easy if they share identifiers, but the majority were not straightforward to find, requiring bibliographical/text comparisons, for example. And ultimately, for a frustratingly large number, time-consuming checking of original publications. Once we have a fully deduplicated dataset, Scott will set in motion ‘The Great Merge’, which will allow the metadata from multiple projects to show under one new merged record, making one set of very rich records for our provinces.
Our metadata efforts are now bearing fruit beyond our own convenience. We are collaborating, for example, with the Michel Feugère at the CNRS Lyon, where he and his team are working on a corpus of inscribed small finds drawn from his Artefacts website. Our taxonomy has been consulted by them, to ensure consistency and compatibility between our data sets.
All of our research outputs will be open access and we follow the FAIR principles of data management for our digital assets. Our final results will be available in Zenodo, GitHub, and as many other repositories as we can find. We are in conversation with our colleagues to work out how best to feed back to them our additions to the data they provided. And, importantly, we will follow the best practice set out by the epigraphic community on standardization and Linked Open Data.
We thank all those projects who have shared data with us and look forward to our linked data future!
As a classicist I seem to have this nerd’s-eye view on all things related to our field. Yes, I will write about the Netflix-series ‘Die Barbaren’. But, no, I will not write about how it is not historically accurate enough. We can put salt on all snails, as we say in Dutch. They didn’t need to make the mistakes of having the Germanic warriors ride horses with stirrups (was it for insurance reasons?) and having a tiger skin, rather than a lion, in the military outfit of the eagle-bearer. Yes some of us notice these things, but we also realise it is a series created for entertainment. For me the interesting choices they have made about language have made the series even more entertaining and to explain why I will give you a peak into my nerd brain.
The series starts with the Germanic people speaking modern German, no surprise there as it is a German series. But then the eagle-bearer and a small troop of Roman horsemen led by the centurion Metellus enter. And this is when the fun starts. Metellus rides to the Cherusci for an announcement: in Latin. That is when I realised that the modern German is supposed to represent the Germanic language of the Cherusci. We could start a debate about how far off modern German is from the language spoken 2000 years earlier. However, unlike Latin, the Germanic languages of the time have not been preserved beyond names. Unfortunately, the Germanic Batavian commanders at Vindolanda, for example, learned Latin so well that there is no obvious evidence, apart from the odd Germanic name, of Germanic in the reams of Latin they left behind. Admittedly, some bright people could have been hired to reconstruct a variety of Proto-Germanic from known early Germanic languages such as Gothic. However, that would open up new debates: for example, if you start going down that lane you should perhaps also consider the possible dialectal differences between the Germanic of the Cherusci and Bructeri. So we can easily forgive the use of Modern German.
The tombstone of Marcus Caelius who was the First centurion of the 18th Legion. His brother set up this monument to commemorate his death in the ‘bello Variano’.
The choice to have them speak different languages is a nice touch allowing viewers to understand a bit more of the difficulty of interactions in a new province. Metellus announces in Latin that there is a new legatusAugusti for Germania, the one and only Publius Quinctilius Varus. However, Metellus quickly realises that the Cherusci did not understand a word of the announcement. That is also when we get the next surprise: Segestes steps up as interpreter. Apparently, this Cheruscan elite member has learned Latin. Bilingualism in the northwest, in action – exactly the kind of thing we study in LatinNow!
Interestingly, Segestes’ role as the conniving-double-playing interpreter fits the classical idea of multilingual people that we sometimes see in elite literature. In antiquity, multilingual people were not always received with much laus and gloria. In Plautus’ play, Poenulus, the Carthaginian Hanno is portrayed as speaking all languages (Poen 112). When he switches from Punic to Latin, Milphio calls him a double-tongued snake (Poen 1029-34). Moreover, Livy recounts that the Carthaginians, the famous rivals of Rome, could not be trusted for their multilingual capabilities, they could write in Latin to mislead the Romans (Liv. 27.28.4). Back in Die Barbaren we also see that Roman officer Arminius uses his bilingualism to plot and scheme with the Germanic peoples. That Arminius was bilingual is also noted by Tacitus who records that Arminius spoke his Germanic language with Latin interference (Tac. Ann II.10). I will not go into this any further as that might entail spoilers for the next season…
Similarly in this season, we learn about Arminius’ bilingual background when he contacts the prefect Talio of the Germanic auxilia. We have to note here that the auxilia in the Roman army were drafted from the provinces. As Arminius leaves, Talio makes a joke in German. As it was about the Roman Empire and Arminius overheard it, he responds in German. Again the bilingual speaker is shown as something to fear, and unfortunate Talio is whipped for his insubordination. The ending of the first episode reinforces Arminius’ bilingualism with the code-switching cliff-hanger: “Salve Vater” “Greetings, Father” (Latin, German).
When Arminius and Thusnelda visit the legionary camp Arminius’ forked tongue is clear. He is not literally translating what is being said. But that might have been a wise choice. Thusnelda is not inclined to be friendly to the Romans and insults them in Germanic. However, this is a dangerous game, as there is an interpreter on the Roman side: Pelagios. We know from inscriptions the Roman army had interpreters. In the Germanic area of the Marcomanni there is an inscription from Boldog (Senec, Slovakia) mentioning the centurion Atilius who also served as inter(p)rex.
Looking for these linguistic references in the series is quite fun. They are a nice touch for a series in the sword-and-sandal genre which focuses on the warlike interactions. The series could even have stretched the story to show more aspects of the Roman and Germanic interactions – for example the development of cities and trade in the new province and how interpreters like Segestes might have fitted into this too. The interactions in the new province were not only of war-like nature, it was all a bit more complex. Die Barbaren is a great watch though and hunting down these linguistic features is a fun activity diverting my mind, at least, from the problems of our own time.
We’ve done our best in the LatinNow family to support one another and our colleagues through this strange period. We’ve had regular online research meetings, joined lots of virtual conferences, given talks, submitted papers and had G&T nights to keep our ‘spirits’ up. We have always supported flexible working and have team members in different countries so we were perhaps not hit as hard as some other projects given our already extensive online resources. But, frankly, we have struggled with anxieties, lack of changes of scenery and personal contact with colleagues, kitchen table work and the sometimes less than helpful input of small humans. There have been several disappointments: plans to head to Vindolanda for research and public outreach had to be shelved, along with an exciting summer outreach events programme; numerous in-person conferences and meetings have been postponed, including a London hook-up with the wonderful EAGLE people and Pieter’s lectures in China; and our work (especially on RTI) with museums in Switzerland and the Netherlands has hit the annoyingly constantly-moving buffers.
A LatinNow research meeting in the new COVID format
But we know that we have so much to be thankful for and there have been some restorative highlights. In the Autumn we welcomed our 7th ‘LatinNow baby’, a boy (for those keeping score it’s 4:3 to the girls), and I’ve been at home more so have caught the first words and steps of LatinNow baby no. 6. We’ve saved money and trees not traveling and have managed to extend the contracts of our two current post-docs, Pieter and Anna, so that we can, together, make up for lost time. We’ve finished several articles that had been long in progress due to the usually very busy LatinNow schedules and Anna, Alan Bowman and I have completed the manuscript for two volumes of the ‘Roman Everyday Writing Manual’ which should be out in 2021. Work is also underway on editing the social factors in Latinization volume – we’ll be releasing cutting-edge chapters in Open Access format as soon as we possibly can. We’ve been particularly delighted to work with early career researchers and others who are preparing projects using our data.
The participants of the LatinNow ‘Social factors in Latinization’ conference in pre-COVID times
We have blogs lined up for your delectation in the New Year on our fancy database and LatinNow insights into the TV series Die Barbaren.
Season’s greetings and our best anti-Granola (as LatinNow baby no. 1 calls it) wishes to you all.
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