Imaging incised documents.

Wooden stilus tablets and lead curse tablets from the Roman empire are among the most difficult ancient documents to decipher: the former because they often preserve traces of incised writing from more than one text on a surface characterised by wood-grain and casual damage; the latter because the s...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Literary & Linguistic Computing Vol. 12; no. 3; pp. 169 - 177
Autores principales: Bowman, AK, Brady, JM, Tomlin, RSO
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA 1997
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:Wooden stilus tablets and lead curse tablets from the Roman empire are among the most difficult ancient documents to decipher: the former because they often preserve traces of incised writing from more than one text on a surface characterised by wood-grain and casual damage; the latter because the scratched letters, once bright and shining, have long since oxidized so that they have the same colour as their background, grey on grey, greatly reducing image contrast. Like the stilus tablet scratches, the writing on a curse tablet is only visible under intense, low raking light, which needs frequent adjustment. This paper describes the initiation of a project to develop a new programme of stereoscopic, three-dimensional image enhancement in order to make these texts visible and legible.