Help researchers at Oxford University decipher ancient texts

Through the Ancient Lives Project, researchers at Oxford University are asking for help in deciphering fragments of text recovered from the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, at around the turn of the 20th century.Approximately 50,000 fragments of papyri were saved from garbage tips at the site and the texts identified so far include the Gospel of St. Thomas and the writings of Plato. The sheer volume of fragments still to be transcribed has led researchers to ask for help from the public in deciphering the texts for subsequent translation by scholars. You don’t need to know Greek to participate!

You can help by matching the letters handwritten on fragments of papyri to examples of Greek letters provided for reference. Operated under the Zooniverse network of projects (see our earlier post on Galaxy Zoo, another Zooniverse project), you just need to login and begin transcribing your first fragment of text. You can save your work at any time and come back to it later.

If you think you’d like to participate in this latest citizen science project, you can take the tutorial first without needing to login and see just what you have to do: http://www.ancientlives.org/guides/tutorial

Posted on August 19, 2011