Visualizing and Transcribing Complex Writings Through RTI

Abstract

This paper presents our digital publishing process and its editing system developed for a specific use case - the scholarly digital edition of a set of Roman inscribed lead tags - but suited for analyzing a broad variety of text-bearing objects. This pipeline covers the spectrum of the activities from data acquisition of the visual aspects to complex analysis of the writings and text of incised inscriptions. It employs a two-dimensional medium, Reflection Transformation Images (RTI), to support visual analysis. The visual and textual data it generates are open access, ready to be used for machine learning processes.