Texts, Illustrations, and Physical Objects: The Case of Ancient Shipbuilding Treatises

One of the main goals of the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (NADL) is to assist nautical archaeologists in the reconstruction of ancient ships and the study of shipbuilding techniques. Ship reconstruction is a specialized task that requires supporting materials such as reference to fragments and timbers recovered from other excavations and consultation of shipbuilding treatises. The latter are manuscripts written in a variety of languages and spanning several centuries. Due to their diverse provenance, technical content, and time of writing, shipbuilding treatises are complex written sources. In this paper we discuss a digital library approach to handle these manuscripts and their multilingual properties (often including unknown terms and concepts), and how scholars in different countries are collaborating in this endeavor. Our collection of treatises raises interesting challenges and provides a glimpse of the relationship between texts and illustrations, and their mapping to physical objects.

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