Personalizing image enhancement for critical visual tasks: improved legibility of papyri using color processing and visual illusions

This article develops theoretical, algorithmic, perceptual, and interaction aspects of script legibility enhancement in the visible light spectrum for the purpose of scholarly editing of papyri texts. Novel legibility enhancement algorithms based on color processing and visual illusions are compared to classic methods in a user experience experiment. (1) The proposed methods outperformed the comparison methods. (2) Users exhibited a broad behavioral spectrum, under the influence of factors such as personality and social conditioning, tasks and application domains, expertise level and image quality, and affordances of software, hardware, and interfaces. No single enhancement method satisfied all factor configurations. Therefore, it is suggested to offer users a broad choice of methods to facilitate personalization, contextualization, and complementarity. (3) A distinction is made between casual and critical vision on the basis of signal ambiguity and error consequences. The criteria of a paradigm for enhancing images for critical applications comprise: interpreting images skeptically; approaching enhancement as a system problem; considering all image structures as potential information; and making uncertainty and alternative interpretations explicit, both visually and numerically.

Take this Work Global

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History elaborates a general program for the study of literature centered on the question, “What is the thing read?” Concepts of document, text, and work are parsed with care, generating many valuable insights and clarifications, but there is need for more thinking about the linguistic medium of literature. To textual studies, bibliography, and book history — the trio of foundational disciplines advocated by Eggert — one should add philology, or the study of literary language.

A Wandering Hyphen, The Reader and the Work

This is a reply to commentary by Matt Cohen, Ian Cornelius, and Alan Galey occasioned by the publication of Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and to a review of the book by John K. Young. A theory of the work based on the negative dialectic of document and text grounds the work as a regulative idea rather than an ideal entity and finds the role of the reader to be constitutive of it. The relationship (envisaged in the book as a slider) of archival and editorial digital projects, the potential cross-fertilization of philology and textual criticism, and an expanded role for textual studies inspired by D. F. McKenzie’s writings are discussed.

Scholarly Editing and AI: Machine Predicted Text and Herculaneum Papyri

In 2016 the Digital Restoration Initiative (DRI) at the University of Kentucky, under the direction of Professor Brent Seales, virtually unrolled a carbonized parchment scroll from Ein Gedi, revealing a copy of Leviticus written in iron gall ink. In 2019 the DRI applied a new machine learning method to reveal a Greek character written in carbon ink from an actual Herculaneum papyrus fragment. Virtual unwrapping of cultural heritage objects is a reality. The application of machine and deep learning methods to enhance difficult-to-detect ink signals in tomography will continue to evolve. This raises an important question. How will the process of editing texts that are ‘true-born virtual’ (the object can never be opened to verify the results) change to reflect the presence and dependency on AI? This paper produces a theoretical model for how a critical edition of a virtually unwrapped papyrus text must document the role of the machine. It also engages the possible requirements, in terms of Data Science, that this new type of text compels in order to ensure transparency at the level of its ‘birth’. Put simply, a new virtual edition model that is a fusion of humanities and science is needed.

Archiving Dossier Narrative: Transcribing "Le Pelerinage de Damoiselle Sapience"

The archived documents were created for Transcribing “Le Pelerinage de Damoiselle Sapience”: Scholarly Editing Covid19-Style, a digital transcription, edition creation and writing project in November 2020 as part of the 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age. International teams of medieval scholars and paleographers divided into three teams the first of which transcribed a unique manuscript copy of Le Pelerinage de Damoiselle Sapience, a previously unedited French-language text that survives in f. 86r-95v of UPenn MS Codex 660. The second team reviewed the work and the third team provided final editorial sign off and created a micro-edition with commentary that was submitted to the journal Digital Medievalist.

Seven Deadly Sins: Culture’s Effect on Scholarly Editing and Publishing

The opinion piece aims to draw readers’ attention to the effects cultures other than English-related ones exert on the processes of scholarly editing and publishing. Non-Anglophone writers with little academic English skills or a weak command of English tend to face desk-rejections or very difficult and time-consuming rounds of edits and revisions. Second-language researchers often are biased toward national schools of thought with the most prominent international research ignored. Such authors are unaware of the recent developments in their field on a global scale and are sometimes prone to misunderstanding scientific and academic genres in the internationally accepted mode. Non-Anglophone writers are also inclined toward native-language patterns of thought and, consequently, rhetorical schemas different from English. Such second-language researchers may have their specific understanding of ethics and criticism, responding to the latter in an unexpectedly harsh way. This combination of factors can lead to unoriginal, vague, unimportant, and unacceptable submissions to international journals, resulting in failures to disseminate their research globally. The authors share their approaches to curbing unpleasant and inefficient experiences for second-language contributors, editors, and reviewers.