Dr. Joshua Sosin
Café Conversations presents Dr. Joshua Sosin on “Ancient Texts in a Modern Age: The Promise and Perils of Digital Scholarship” at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9, in the Baker Center Front Room.
Papyri on the Internet? It seems like a strange match of communication tools, but it could revolutionize our understanding of Roman Society in the first century.
The discovery in an Egyptian sand dune in 1897 of about 500,000 fragments of papyrus found south of Cairo includes private letters, ancient hangover cures, contracts, ancient plays, even hate mail. What do these ancient “posts” tell us about life in the first century?
It’s taken more than a hundred years to transcribe just 12 percent of the whole cache. What will we learn about ancient civilizations when the remaining 440,000 bits are transcribed? How can we speed things up?
[Papyrus fragment Credit: The Egypt Exploration Society]
Café events are free and open to students, faculty and staff. Café Conversations and Science Cafés are both venues for students to share their interests informally during a conversation exchange in a friendly setting. The Science Cafe is hosted by Dr. Sarah Wyatt, Professor of Environmental & Plant Biology and Vice President of the Ohio University Chapter of Sigma Xi. The two series are sponsored by the Ohio University chapter of Sigma Xi and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Find the Science Café on Facebook and Twitter.
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