The 99% (of untranscribed papyri from Oxyrhynchus)

Funerary art from Oxyrhynchus

I've blogged about the Ancient Lives project before. If I had a lot more free time, it would be fun to go there and help decipher papyri. The site gives you a fragment of papyri and a Greek keyboard (there's a note saying "images must not be offloaded", or I would show you). Anyone at all can go to the site and try to match handwritten letters with keyboard letters. You don't even have to know Greek.

The University of Minnesota is working on an algorithm which, if I understand correctly, would help predict whether the transcriptions that come from the Ancient Lives site are accurate. A professor involved in the project says that "we're drowning in our own data." It tickles me that this project takes the thing that usually causes scholars to drown in data -- the internet -- and uses it to sort through an excess of ancient documents. Shockingly, only about 1% of the Oxyrhynchus papyri have been deciphered in the last 100+ years. Who knows what lost masterpieces may lurk in the former wrappings of mummified crocodiles?

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