The Book of the Dead-Project Bonn started in the early 1990s. Prof Ursula Rößler-Köhler, who had previously laid the foundation for modern Book of the Dead studies by her work on BD chapter 17 applying the method of textual criticism, achieved a 10-year funding from the German Research Society (DFG). In 2004 the project was granted another 9-year funding by the Academy of Sciences and Arts of North Rhine-Westphalia. One aim of the project was to gather all available evidence of Book of the Dead manuscripts spread across collections around the world. Today, the archive comprises approximately 3000 records of BD sources. In 2012 the corresponding database, after undergoing a transfer from FileMaker to XML format in collaboration with the department of e-Humanities at the University of Cologne, was launched and made publicly available online. The data sets include various different kinds of information about the objects and the sets of BD spells and vignettes found on them. These are now easily accessible for statistic analyses such as evaluations of neighbouring spells and sequences or occurrences in specific locations or time periods. Furthermore, the database includes several metadata such as bibliographical information, translations of spells and a motif index. It is cross connected with other Egyptological databases such as Trismegistos and the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae. After the project was completed at the end of 2012, the online database has been operating for a considerable amount of time with scholars using it and trying the several opportunities it provides. Now is the time for a first evaluation to actually see which functions of the database work well, which might have been ignored by users and what information the database could provide scholars with for their actual research. Naturally, there is a need for a continuous maintenance and update on new findings and the latest research. Furthermore it is important to understand which possibly missing functions or information the users wish to be included and if this is actually realisable. On the other hand, there might be opportunities for analyses that have not been fully understood and therefore have not been made use of. This presentation aims to address some of these issues concerning the BD online database and to gather ideas and possible collaborators for future BD project plans.

By using the technique of photogrammetry for the 3D visualization of ancient Egyptian coffins decorated with magical texts and iconography, this project aims at building up a new digital platform for an in-depth study of the ancient Egyptian funerary culture and its media. It has started in August 2015 through the support of a Mellon Fellowship for the Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley and up until now it has focused on ancient Egyptian coffins kept at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of UC Berkeley. The main outcome will be a digital platform that allows to display a coffin in 3D and where users will be able to pan, rotate, and zoom in on the coffin, clicking on areas of text to highlight them and view an annotated translation together with other metadata (transcription of the hieroglyphic text, bibliography, textual variants, museological data, provenance, etc.)

Encoding hieroglyphic texts is time-consuming. If a text already exists as hand-written transcription, there is an alternative, namely OCR. Off-the-shelf OCR systems seem difficult to adapt to the peculiarities of Ancient Egyptian. Presented is a proof-of-concept tool that was designed to digitize texts of Urkunden IV in the hand-writing of Kurt Sethe. It automatically recognizes signs and produces a normalized encoding, suitable for storage in a database, or for printing on a screen or on paper, requiring little manual correction. The encoding of hieroglyphic text is RES (Revised Encoding Scheme) rather than (common dialects of) MdC (Manuel de Codage). Earlier papers argued against MdC and in favour of RES for corpus development. Arguments in favour of RES include longevity of the encoding, as its semantics are font-independent. The present study provides evidence that RES is also much preferable to MdC in the context of OCR. With a well-understood parsing technique, relative positioning of scanned signs can be straightforwardly mapped to suitable primitives of the encoding.

In der heutigen Filmindustrie bietet das 3D-Design ein anerkanntes Mittel, um virtuelle Welten oder Charaktere zu erschaffen. Doch das 3D-Design dringt mittlerweile auch in andere Bereiche vor, so etwa der Medizin und der Architektur. Dabei bietet die virtuelle Rekonstruktion auch vielfältige Möglichkeiten für die Archäologie/Ägyptologie. Beispielsweise können von kleineren Objekten oder Papyri virtuelle 3D-Modelle erstellt werden. Der große Vorteil dabei ist, dass die Originale nicht beschädigt werden und mehrere Wissenschaftler zur gleichen Zeit an ein und demselben Objekt forschen können. Selbst für die Bauforschung dürfte das 3D-Design immer bedeutender werden. Gebäude, die sich heute nur in ihren Grundrissen erhalten haben, können mithilfe des 3D-Designs nahezu vollständig rekonstruiert werden. Nicht zu unterschätzen ist dabei auch die Wirkung, die virtuelle Rekonstruktionen von ägyptischen Tempeln, Gräbern, Gebäuden auf die Gesellschaft erzielen. Durch die 3DRekonstruktionen kann nicht nur Wissenschaftlern, sondern auch Interessierten ein anschaulicher Eindruck von der Lebenswelt des Alten Ägypten vermittelt werden. Bislang steht das 3D-Design allerdings in dem Ruf, besonders schwer erlernbar und sehr kostenintensiv zu sein. Doch gibt es neben einigen aufwendigen 3D-Design-Programmen auch nahezu kostenfreie Alternativen, die man sowohl privat wie beruflich nutzen kann. Diese Programme sind dabei sehr anwenderfreundlich gestaltet und relativ leicht zu erlernen. Ziel des Vortrages ist es, diese Programme und ihre Möglichkeiten für die Ägyptologie vorzustellen.

Data life cycle and research data managemet plans are just two of many key-terms used in the present discussion about digital research data. But what do they mean - on the one hand for an individual scholar and on the other hand for a digital infrastructure like IANUS? The presentation will try to explain some of the terms and will show how IANUS is dealing with them in order to enhance the reusability of unique data. The presentation starts with an overview of the different disciplines, research methods and types of data, which together characterise modern research on ancient cultures. Nearly in all scientific processes digital data is produced and has gained a dominant role as the stakeholder-analysis and the evaluation of test data collections done by IANUS in 2013 clearly demonstrate. Nevertheless, inspite of their high relevance digital files and folders are in danger with regard to their accessability and reusability in the near and far future. Not only the storage devices, software applications and file formates become slowly but steadily obsolete, but also the relevant information (i.e. the metadata) to understand all the produced bits and bytes intellectually will get lost over the years. Therefore, urging questions concern the challenges how we can prevent – or at least reduce – a forseeable loss of digital information and what we will do with all the results, which do not find their way into publications? Being a disipline’s specific national center for research data of archaeology and ancient studies, IANUS tries to answer these questions and to establish different services in this context. The slides give an overview of the centre structure, its state of development and its planned targets. The primary service (scheduled for autumn 2016) will be the long-term preservation, curation and publication of digital research data to ensure its reusability and will be open for any person and institution. One already existing offer are the “IT-Empfehlungen für den nachhaltigen Umgang mit digitalen Daten in den Altertumswissenschaften“ which provide information and advice about data management, file formats and project documentation. Furthermore, it offers instructions on how to deposit data collections for archiving and disseminating. Here, external experts are cordially invited to contribute and write missing recommendations as new authors.

The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA; http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla) is the publication platform of the project „Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Texts and Knowledge in the Culture of Ancient Egypt“ (formerly known as “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch”) located in Berlin and Leipzig. It contains the largest corpus of Egyptian texts (ca. 1.4 million text words) and it is a very important tool for linguistic, philological, lexicographical, and cultural research. My paper introduces you to the software behind the TLA. I will show how easy it is to add a new text to the corpus with transcription, translation, Hieroglyphic codes, and metadata and how easy you can add any annotations of different types like rubra, citations from other texts, comments, direct speech. The software itself is freely available and platform independent. You are welcome to use our software to edit your texts and to cooperate with us!

In a project called "A Library of a Billion Words" we needed an implementation of the CTS protocol that is capable of handling a text collection containing at least 1 billion words. Because the existing solutions did not work for this scale or were still in development I started an implementation of the CTS protocol using methods that MySQL provides. Last year we published a paper that introduced a prototype with the core functionalities without being compliant with the specifications of CTS (Tiepmar et al., 2013). The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate the MySQL based implementa-tion now that it is fulfilling the specifications version 5.0 rc.1 and mark it as finished and ready to use. Fur-ther information, online instances of CTS for all de-scribed datasets and binaries can be accessed via the projects website1. Reference Tiepmar J, Teichmann C, Heyer G, Berti M and Crane G. 2013. A new Implementation for Canonical Text Services. in Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH).

Many Greek and Latin papyri, originally belonging to only one book (be it in roll or codex form), are currently scattered among different libraries. While it is not possible to physically rejoin these fragments as they cannot be moved from their institutions, they may be virtually reunited thanks to the techniques of digitisation, image processing and electronic publishing. This paper focuses on some issues – emerged from the work of my MA dissertation – that virtual reunification of Greek and Latin papyri presents. Firstly, I propose a workflow for the creation of a digital edition of virtually rejoined fragments, by applying the model of virtual reunification recently suggested by R. Punzalan in Understanding Virtual Reunification (2014), the first systematic study on this topic. Also, as a principal reference point among the existing projects, I follow the Sinaiticus Project website, which, similarly, deals with an ancient Greek manuscript now dispersed in different institutions; however, while the Sinaiticus Project is exclusively dedicated to that artefact, the edition here proposed includes the possibility to be widened, in order to allow researchers to possibly include more reunified papyri in the future. Secondly, I propose some recommendations that can be followed by the owning institutions in order to digitise their fragments according to a common strategy. Finally, I focus on how a virtual reunification of papyrus fragments can be technically achieved – in other words, how the transcription code can present unified information about the papyrus as a whole and mark the parts of text belonging to each fragment. This project will hopefully help researchers study papyri divided among different libraries in a more systematic way, thanks to the availability of an electronic edition including the whole text and images of the virtually reunited fragments, and thanks to a consolidation of metadata.

In the previous years, 3D imaging has found his way into the world of Egyptology. This lecture will present two case studies where 3D technology is used for the documentation of hieratic inscriptions. The inscriptions, painted in (red) ochre or black paint, were applied on different carriers, and required a different methodology. The Egyptian collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH Brussels) contains a large number of small decorated and/or inscribed objects. Some of these objects are currently in a bad condition - any operation carried on them can result in considerable material losses -, making it necessary to document them in such a way that it allows future scholars to study them in detail without handling them. The EES Project therefore aims to create multispectral 3D images of these fragile objects with a multispectral ‘minidome’ acquisition system, based on the already existing system of the multi-light Portable Light Dome (PLD). The texture/colour values on the created 2D+ and 3D models are interactive data based on a recording process with infrared, red, green, blue, and ultraviolet light spectra. Software tools and enhancement filters have been developed which can deal with the different wavelengths in real-time. This leads to an easy and cost-effective methodology which combines multispectral imaging with the actual relief characteristics and properties of the physical object. The system is transportable to any collection or excavation in the field. As a case study, the well-known Brussels “Execration Figurines” (Middle Kingdom, c. 1900 BC) were chosen. These figurines are made of unbaked clay and covered with hieratic texts, listing names of foreign countries and rulers. The study of this type of collections is mostly hampered by the poor state of conservation of the objects, but also by the only partial preservation of the ink traces in visible light. The method has also been applied to other decorated objects of the RMAH collection, such as a Fayoum portrait, ostraca and decorated objects made of stone, wood and ceramics. The final goal will be to publish the newly created multispectral 3D images on Carmentis (www.carmentis.be), the online catalogue of the RMAH collection, making them accessible to scholars all over the world. The second case study presents the quarry inscriptions of the New Kingdom limestone quarries at Dayr Abu Hinnis (Middle Egypt). These gallery quarries contain hundreds of hieratic inscriptions, written on the ceiling. The texts are mainly related to the general administration of the quarry area. In documenting the abundance of ceiling inscriptions and other graffiti, we had to decide upon a practice that would allow not only to capture the \"content\", but also to document the location and orientation of each record. Every inscription can be photographed in detail, but this is insufficient to provide the reader access to vital information concerning the spatial distribution of the inscriptions, which may, for instance, relate to the progress of work. After experimenting with a variety of other methods, we adopted a photogrammetric software for 3D modelling photographs of the quarry ceilings, AGISOFT PHOTOSCAN, which uses structure from motion (SFM) algorithms to create three-dimensional images based on a series of overlapping two-dimensional images. The ultimate goal of this whole labour-intensive process in the quarries is not the creation of pure threedimensional models, but rather to generate an orthophoto of the entire ceiling of a quarry. Based on these images, each graffito could be analysed in context.

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