The Digital Rosetta Stone project was  featured on November 28, 2019 in MDR, a German news outlet.

The article by Dr. Daniel Niemetz was titled “LEIPZIGER FORSCHERINNEN SCHAFFEN DIGITALEN STEIN VON ROSETTE” and described our process for 3D scanning the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. “Leipziger Wissenschaftlerinnen haben ein digitales Abbild des weltberühmten Steins von Rosette geschaffen. Mit der Applikation ist es jedermann möglich, den dreisprachigen Text des altägyptischen Monuments per Mausklick zu übersetzen. Das Tool erleichtert auch das Erlernen alter Sprachen.”

The article can be found here: https://www.mdr.de/wissen/stein-von-rosette-digital-leipzig-100.html

and a different version is also available here: https://www.mdr.de/sachsen/leipzig/leipzig-leipzig-land/forscherinnen-app-stein-von-rosette-100.html

“I am holding a sculpture! I cannot believe how real it feels! It’s right there, in front of my iPad!” a UF sophomore said while wearing 3D glasses and holding an iPad.

The Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology group at the University of Florida organized a special virtual reality exhibition for the inauguration of the 12th President of the University of Florida. The grand opening of the exhibition and its presentation to the general public took place during the Open House event of the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in honor of President W. Kent Fuchs on Wednesday, December 2 at the Pugh building at the main campus of the University of Florida. Hundreds of visitors experienced this unique exhibition either in person or on-line at the website of the DEA Virtual Museum of World Heritage¹.

Figure 1. Photo from the grand opening of the virtual exhibition of dragons and lions at the University of Florida.

Figure 2. Example screenshot of the VR visualization, using the fish-eye format of the Oculus Rift.

A list of supported 3D projection renderings is presented in the following table:

The interaction design details of this project will be presented in detail in the lecture “Augmenting the workspace of epigraphists: An interaction design study” by Prof. Angelos Barmpoutis (University of Florida) at the 2nd International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ancient World to be held in Rome, Italy on January 27-29, 2016².

To learn more about how to use our open-access tools to digitize, analyze, and disseminate your own collection feel free to contact us or visit the web-site of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project.

The DEA editorial team

References:

1. The Virtual Museum of World Heritage, www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/museum.

2. A. Barmpoutis and E. Bozia, “Augmenting the workspace of epigraphists: An interaction design study”, In the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ancient World, January 27-29, 2016,
Rome, Italy.

Funded in part by the University of Florida College of the Arts and the Center for Greek Studies.

Humanities Insights, the NEH blog for Congressional Staff, featured on March 18, 2014 the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project. Part of the project, specifically the Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, was previously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and was recently completed and released for public use.

The article states that “Since its creation, the toolbox has been presented at national and international conferences, such as the 104th American Institute of Archaeology Annual Meeting and the 13th Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy hosted by Oxford University. In 2012 it placed second in an international competition for an eHumanities Digital Innovation Award; the competition was hosted by the University of Leipzig in Germany. The National Archives [UK] used the toolbox to digitize 13th-16th century artifacts in its collection. More recently, the DEA group teamed up with Cornell University and the Library of Congress to digitize historical documents written by President Lincoln, including the Gettysburg Address.”

The full article can be found here: https://humanitiesinsights.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/march-madness-at-the-neh-university-of-florida/

JustNews.it an Italian news outlet featured on Jan 8, 2014 an article about our Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project. The article focused on the recent collaboration between the University of Florida and the Cornell University on 3D scanning and distribution of inscriptions.

The article states that:
“USA: Tele-Epigrafia in 3D JustNews.it Il portale delle news Ecco un passo veramente importante nell’uso delle stampanti 3D per le comunità accademiche di tutto il mondo. Da qualche mese dall’ Università della Florida e dalla Cornell University , entrambe …”

Read the full article here: http://www.justnews.it/2014/01/08/usa-tele-epigrafia-3d-16555.html

Here is a challenge: An archaeologist in Europe wants to share an important ancient inscription with a colleague in a north American university. It would be nice if she can teletransfer the inscription so that her colleague can receive it as a tridimentional tangible physical object so it can be studied better.

An interdisciplinary team from the University of Florida and the Cornell University successfully achieved the first tele-transferring of 3D inscriptions between their institutions and printing in 3D of the transmitted artifacts. This is an important step towards the electronic dissemination of tri-dimensional epigraphic material to the academic community as it facilitates the study of ancient inscriptions, according to the Associate Director Dr. Eleni Bozia, who led this experiment.

A close photograph of a 3D printed sample of one of the reconstructed ancient inscriptions with the latin word QVA. Click to enlarge.

Dr. Eric Rebillard (Classics and History, Cornell University) and Dr. Ben Anderson (History of Art, Cornell University) with Rhea Garen (Institute for Digital Collections, Cornell University) scanned a set of ancient inscriptions, which were transferred through this novel pipeline to the University of Florida, where the Digital Epigraphy group Dr. Eleni Bozia (Classics, University of Florida), Dr. Robert Wagman (Classics, University of Florida) and Dr. Angelos Barmpoutis (Digital Worlds Institute, University of Florida) reconstructed in 3D the original object and printed a tri-dimensional copy of the tele-transferred inscription.

This experiment was performed on a set of squeezes of the Res Gestae made on the Monumentum Ancyranum in 1907. According to Prof. Rebillard “this collection of squeezes is a very valuable testimony to the inscription that had much suffered since and it even has the potential of being a better testimony than the Mommsen casts upon which all modern editions are based.”

Visualization of the 3D reconstructed model of one of the inscriptions of the Res Gestae. Click to enlarge.

The DEA editorial team

References:

1. A. Barmpoutis, E. Bozia, R. S. Wagman, “A novel framework for 3D reconstruction and analysis of ancient inscriptions”, Journal of Machine Vision and Applications
2010, Vol. 21(6), pp. 989-998. PDF

2. Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/toolbox.

Funded in part by the NEH grant HD-51214-11.

The DEA Virtual Museum of World Heritage¹ opened its electronic gates yesterday, July 12, 2013, during our lecture at the Digital Classicist Seminar in London, United Kingdom. This electronic museum is part of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project at the University of Florida.

Dr. Eleni Bozia lecturing at the University of London, Digital Classicist Seminar, 2013.

The goal of the Virtual Museum interface is to facilitate the digital preservation and dissemination of important historical tri-dimensional artifacts in a form easily accessible from the web-browser of a personal computer, or other electronic devices, such as tablets and smart phones. Furthermore, the 3D exhibits can be easily embedded into other web-sites, databases, or digital platforms, such as interactive digital books.

The DEA Virtual Museum can be accessed at the following address: www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/museum.

The DEA editorial team

References:

1. DEA Virtual Museum of World Heritage, www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/museum.

2. Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/toolbox.

Funded in part by the NEH grant HD-51214-11.

The Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology group is proud to present the first HTML5 embeddable 3D epigraphic viewer. You can now easily embed the 3D objects of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology database into your own web-site, blog, or personal database, using this embeddable viewer. Each virtual exhibit has an HTML tag that can be found in the archaeological record of the exhibit (see image below).

You can copy and paste the corresponding tag into your web-site at a location and size of your choice. The viewer is based on the new canvas capabilities of HTML5 and webGL¹, which can render 3D content on websites. There is no need to download additional plugins to use these technologies, since they are already included in the majority of the popular desktop and mobile web-browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

The main advantage of this viewer is that it can be easily embedded into websites by using the following HTML tag:
<iframe src=”https://www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/<span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span>view?heightmap=d1a7a25fdaf3010f” width=”600px” height=”400px”></iframe>

The width and height can be customized according to the design of your website by changing the corresponding parameters in the above HTML tag. Multiple objects can be added to the same website by using this tag with the corresponding identification number of the archaeological artifact from the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology database, which can be accessed using the interface of the DEA Virtual Museum of World Heritage, or the Digital Epigraphy Toolbox².

This is an example of a 3D digitized artifact embedded in this website using the above HTML tag.

Move your mouse over the above viewer in order to interact with its features. You can move, rotate, zoom, and relight the exhibit by clicking on the proper icon and dragging your mouse over the inscription. Other options include 2D visualization of the heightmap of the inscription as well as full screen mode of the viewer.

You can easily create your own database of 3D inscriptions by digitizing your squeezes in 3D using a regular flatbed office scanner and our 3D digitization algorithm (Barmpoutis, Bozia, and Wagman, Machine Vision and Applications, 2010)³.

“This easy-to-embed viewer facilitates the interoperability of various epigraphic and archaeological projects and is a big step towards the unification of digital epigraphic databases.&quot, according to Dr. Bozia, Associate Director of the DEA project.

Our team supports Open-Source Programming as a form of academic collaboration, and we provide the source code of this viewer, which can be easily accessed using the Developer Tools of your browser.

For questions or other inquiries please do not hesitate to contact us, using our contact details at www.digitalepigraphy.org or our Facebook group www.facebook.com/groups/digitalepigraphy/.

Support and Technology Tips:
For smooth interaction with all the features of the viewer, it is advised that you set the width of the embedded viewer to 330 pixels or more.

WebGL is implemented in the majority of popular desktop and mobile web-browsers. A list of supported browsers can be found in Wikipedia⁴. The most popular choices are:
Windows: Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer (v.11+). (In earlier versions of IE, webGL can be manually added using a third-party plugin.).
Mac OSx: Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. (In Safari for OSx it can be enabled from the Preferences menu > Advanced tab > Show Develop menu in menu bar, and then from the Develop menu > Enable WebGL.)
Linux: Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera.
Mobile and Tablets: WebGL is supported by the majority of web-browsers for Android or Microsoft Windows 8.1+ devices. It is also supported in Microsoft Surface, BlackBerry PlayBook, Nokia N900, and many other tablets and smart phones.

The DEA editorial team

References:

1. WebGL specifications, www.khronos.org/webgl.

2. Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, www.digitalepigraphy.org/legacy/toolbox.

3. A. Barmpoutis, E. Bozia, R. S. Wagman, “A novel framework for 3D reconstruction and analysis of ancient inscriptions”, Journal of Machine Vision and Applications
2010, Vol. 21(6), pp. 989-998. PDF

4. List of browsers that suppport WebGL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL.

Funded in part by the NEH grant HD-51214-11.

The Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology group at the University of Florida showcased their innovative Augmented Reality Exhibit at the HARN Museum of Art to a large and enthusiastic audience.

More than 100 visitors experienced the Augmented Reality Exhibit. Using augmented reality head-mounted displays the visitors experienced the presence of virtual exhibits within the real spaces of the Harn Museum of Art. The rendering of virtual tridimensional objects within the real space was made possible using a pair of high resolution cameras in front of the head-mounted device in conjunction with stereoscopic displays.

Visitors included students and faculty from UF Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Psychology, Clinical and Translational Science Institute, College of Nursing, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of Journalism and Communications, College of Law, SHANDS Arts in Medicine, Museum of Natural History, and the Digital Worlds Institute.

The University of Florida makes a public announcement about the recently funded Digital Epigraphy Toolbox project. The announcement was featured in the main web-site of the University of Florida and provided the details of the award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The article titled “Digital Worlds Institute receives grant for project with classics department” was authored by Andy Howard from the Deans Office of the College of Fine Arts.

The University of Florida College of Fine Arts and Digital Worlds Institute has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.

The award will fund the Digital Epigraphy Toolbox project, a collaborative research initiative between the Digital Worlds Institute and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences department of classics.

The project is led and coordinated by Digital Worlds Institute professor Angelos Barmpoutis. This project is an open source, cross-platform web application designed to facilitate the digital preservation, study and electronic dissemination of ancient inscriptions. It allows epigraphists to digitize in 3-D their epigraphic squeezes using a novel cost-effective technique, which overcomes the limitations of the current methods for digitizing epigraphic data in 2-D only.

The proposed toolbox contains several options for 3-D visualization of inscriptions as well as a set of scientific tools for analyzing the lettering techniques and performing quantitative analysis of the letterform variations. Furthermore, the users have the option to share their data as well as to search for other uploaded collections of 3-D inscriptions in a semi-supervised dynamic library.

This dynamic library is organized thematically according to language, area of origin, and date and will contain a comprehensive record of the inscription in the form of plain text, 3-D model, 2-D photographs, and other epigraphic information.

The award will fund the project for the next two years.

Andy Howard, ahoward@arts.ufl.edu, 352-273-1489