| Sumario: | Digital papyrology encompasses artefact digitization and digital support for its interpretation. Digitization is never neutral, and this article presents how, within the e-Science and Ancient Documents project (eSAD), we are developing a software tool that strives to support the act of interpretation while both avoiding spurious exactitude and allowing genuine uncertainty. We first assert that digitization is both sampling and interpreting. Our model of papyrological interpretation thus takes on board the types of expertise that papyrologists draw onto while interpreting ancient and scarcely legible documents. Mimesis serving as a guiding principle, we present how we digitize our text-bearing artefacts (in particular incised documents), taking into account the real-world strategies of the experts. We then argue that, throughout the interpretation process, uncertainty plays a key role, which we illustrate with the example of a Roman stylus tablet that was interpreted twice 92 years apart. To allow the expression of uncertainty, we show how mimesis is again our design strategy: our tool aims to enable the experts to trace the text—a strategy we observed them deploying; further it will support reasoning about hypotheses of interpretation by setting an epistemological framework in which pieces of evidence towards hypotheses of interpretation can be evaluated as in crossword puzzle solving—another expert strategy.
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