Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Paleography app from UCLA

THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT: New app helps students learn to read ancient Japanese writing form (Cynthia Lee, UCLA Newsroom). Although this is in itself an interesting story, it is not directly relevant to PaleoJudaica. But this aside in it is:
If successful, the app could serve as a model for similar tools to teach scripts used in a wide range of ancient and medieval manuscript traditions.

“For example, students might use apps of this kind to learn to read stone inscriptions from ancient Greece and Rome; or Greek papyrus fragments of the kind that have long been excavated in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt; or the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek of the Dead Sea Scrolls; or bronze inscriptions and bamboo texts from ancient China,” said Humanities Dean David Schaberg, a scholar of classical Chinese poetry and thought. “In every case, reading the handwritten versions of the language takes specialized skills that are not necessary for reading modern printed versions of the same texts.”
Cross-file under "Technology Watch."