Towards a Reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets: Engineering Science and the Papyrologist

Abstract

We introduce a collaborative project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford regarding the analysis and reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets. We sketch the imaging and image processing techniques used to digitally capture and analyse the tablets, the development of the image analysis tools to aid papyrologists in the transcription of the texts, and lessons that can be learned so far from such an inter-disciplinary project.