Annotating Hieroglyphic Text

Mark-Jan Nederhof (SACHI) and Angela McDonald (Glasgow)

Overview

Bringing the hidden to light – annotating inscriptions and their contexts
This was a collaboration between Mark-Jan Nederhof (SACHI) and Angela McDonald (University of Glasgow), together with the McManus art gallery and museum in Dundee and the Manchester Museum. The purpose was to explore how modern web technologies can be used to help the public learn about aspects of Egyptological textual artefacts that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. The primary testcase was a stela from Dundee that is not on display in the museum. A high definition photograph was enriched by information about what is depicted and how the hieroglyphs should be interpreted. The user can zoom in and out and interactively switch between different views of the stela.
This project was part of a broader strand of research into tools and techniques to process Ancient Egyptian texts, including encoding of hieroglyphic text, interlinear text with translations and transliterations, and corpus linguistics.
For the stelas see: mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/stelae/

Publications

M.-J. Nederhof and F. Rahman. ‘ A probabilistic model of Ancient Egyptian writing ‘. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing, Düsseldorf, Germany, June 2015.

M.-J. Nederhof. ‘ Flexible use of text annotations and distance learning ‘. In S. Polis and J. Winand, editors, Texts, Languages & Information Technology in Egyptology, pp. 75-88. Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2013.

M.-J. Nederhof. ‘ The Manuel de Codage encoding of hieroglyphs impedes development of corpora ‘. In S. Polis and J. Winand, editors, Texts, Languages & Information Technology in Egyptology, pp. 103-110. Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2013.

Understanding the glyphs

A closer look

Stela of Ramose, Manchester Museum

Interpreting the Hieroglyphs

Stela of Iy – McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee