The Digital Rosetta Stone Project

Abstract

The goal of this contribution is to present The Digital Rosetta Stone, which is a project developed at Leipzig University by the Chair of Digital Humanities and the Egyptological Institute/Egyptian Museum Georg Steindorff in collaboration with the British Museum and the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project at the University of Florida. The aims of the project are to produce a collaborative digital edition of the Rosetta Stone, address standardization and customization issues for the scholarly community, create data that can be used by students to understand the language and content of the document, and produce a high-resolution 3D model of the stone. First, the three versions of the text were transcribed and encoded in XML according to the EpiDoc guidelines. Next, the versions were aligned with the Ugarit iAligner tool that supports the alignment of ancient texts with modern languages, such as English and German. All three texts were then parsed syntactically and morphologically through Treebank annotation. Finally, the project explored new 3D-digitization techniques of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum in order to enhance traditional archaeological methods and facilitate the study of the artifact. The results of this work were used in different courses in Digital Humanities, Digital Philology, and Egyptology.