COMPUTING AND THE HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND THE HUMANITIES[Ed: Links to web pages which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]
From June 26 to 28, NYU's Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and its Institute of Fine Arts were hosts to the eleventh annual meeting of "Informatique et Égyptologie" ("Computers and Egyptology"). This international conference, held this year at the Kevorkian Center, brought together Egyptologists and computer specialists from Egypt, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States to discuss and demonstrate the ways in which the microcomputer and the Internet have revolutionized the study of the civilization of Ancient Egypt.
Since this year's sessions were coordinated with the annual meeting in Boston of the International Congress of Professional Egyptologists, a related association largely oriented towards specialists working in museums, most of the scholars attending our NYU conference also represented several of the most famous collections of Ancient Egyptian art in the world: the Louvre, the Turin Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cairo Museum. We were especially honored by the presence of Dr. Mohammed Saleh, the Director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the largest collection of its type in the world, and his chief of Information Services, Dr. Mohammed Shimi.
The "make-or-break" factor in meetings such as this, of course, is the quality of the equipment offered the speakers for their presentations. As the director of the conference, I was truly fortunate in receiving top-notch technical support from the ever-efficient staffs of the Kevorkian Center, Campus Media Services, and the Academic Computing Facility. My colleagues were all very much impressed with NYU's technical expertise. Having attended several annual gatherings over the years, I can say that our NYU meeting certainly provided our speakers with the most glitch-free equipment thus far, including two powerful state-of-the-art computers, LCD screen projectors, and an Internet connection. In the few pages allotted to me here, only a sampling of the talks can be summarized. The Internet thus could make its presence felt not merely in theory, but through connections to active Web sites during three papers delivered at the conference.
As some of the Net surfers among my readers are already aware, major museums are setting up Web sites, allowing the general public to gather information about pieces in their collections and even to view some of the objects. We were informed that within a short time, nearly all of the Louvre's great Egyptian collection will be accessible to professionals needing certain basic technical data about objects, thus greatly reducing one of the most the frequent, and time-consuming tasks curators must deal with. However, because Egyptologists speak many languages, a way had to be found to allow scholars to conduct research in their own tongue. As formidable as this problem might seem at first, these difficulties are actually readily surmounted by the use of lexicons -- multilingual, linking databases that provide an interface for the users. (I've discussed lexicons in more detail in previous issues of this publication; see those of {November 1993} and {September 1994}.)
It is not surprising that such a useful technique has been widely accepted among museum professionals. Quickly grasping the great practical value of lexicons, the Louvre -- one of the first of the major museums to go online -- developed a large-scale descriptive lexicon for its Egyptian objects. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo was given a copy of this database several years ago, and, Dr. Saleh noted, has since adapted it for their own use. Like physicists in their quest for an overarching Universal Field Theory, several Egyptologists have been attracted by the possibility of creating a unifying lexicon and numbering system for all Egyptian collections. Prof. Dirk van der Plas presented an online demonstration of a lexicon recently completed by the Centre for Computer-Aided Egyptological Research and then graciously offered it gratis to anyone wishing a copy.
One of the most productive and instructive discussions ensued at this point, when Dr. Saleh pointed out that even the more modest Louvre project had to be modified to accommodate the procedures of the Cairo Museum, since those collections, naturally enough, are organized differently from the Louvre's. This observation struck a responsive chord among many of the scholars in the room who pointed out that they too have widely varying ways of conceptualizing, hierarchizing, and naming data. One of the attendees with many years experience in the practical business world showed how modification of an international lexicon defeats its purpose by quickly leading to a "classic parts-number problem," where non-standard terms and numbers make it hard to retrieve information about items in the system. International standards are easy to propose, but very hard to implement, given the idiosyncratic nature of scholars.
Dr. Emily Teeter of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum demonstrated a "virtual museum site," a particularly intriguing application which permits people to "visit" the collection, even while it is in the process of being reinstalled. As she "walked" us through the galleries, it was possible to select certain of the artifacts for closer inspection. An added advantage of this program is that, once the new installation has been completed, the museum will have for its archives an interactive record of how the collection was previously exhibited.
Many academic institutions are faced with problems caused by the ever-increasing price of publication, especially when many photographic reproductions are required. Several of the conference papers described efforts to address this problem by offering bibliographical material on the Internet or by producing CD-ROM disks, methods of publication that are not only cheaper than books, but have the advantage of being interactive as well. Dr. Andrey Bolshakov of the Hermitage Museum proposed how he might produce amazingly detailed photographs of Egyptian papyri simply by scanning them and offering the compressed graphics files for sale on CD-ROM. Needless to say, these would be considerably less expensive for both the producer and the customer than finely-printed books. Strikingly enough, this technique actually exposes these delicate objects to less potentially damaging light than a normal photographic studio session might. Another fascinating presentation, by Dr. Peter Der Manuelian of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, showed how a technique called "digital epigraphy" is used to produce highly detailed line drawings of Egyptian reliefs and inscriptions from photographs, using a system that is considerably quicker and cheaper than the normal methods currently employed in archaeological field work.
Most of the final day of the conference was devoted to relating the progress on perhaps the most important computer endeavor in Egyptology today -- the development of the new Wörterbuch, or hieroglyphic dictionary. The Berlin Academy has embarked on a project to store the data on approximately five million cards and thus produce a new dictionary. The highly sophisticated programming techniques that have been developed to accomplish this enormous task would merit an article by themselves and cannot be explained in the brief space allotted here.
I hope that this brief survey of our conference can convey to our readers something of a greater reality in today's academic life: the computer has become far more than a word processor. As small and arcane as the discipline of Egyptology may be, this meeting is a reflection of the many ways in which scholars throughout the humanities now use computers in their daily work.
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[Editor's note: Many of the papers from the previous Informatique et Égyptologie conference are available online at {http://silicon.montaigne.u-bordeaux.fr:8001/HTML/ONLINE/IE10/LISTE.html}. And the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute maintains the Abzu Regional Index: Egypt, which includes virtually everthing currently available on line for the study and presentation of Ancient Egypt on the net at {http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU_REGINDX_EGYPT.HTML} Replacement URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu/.]
Posted: 25 September 1996; Last Reviewed: 2 June 2005
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