Vindolanda Tablets Online

Project Description:

An online edition of the Vindolanda writing tablets, excavated from the Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England. The principal aim of the project was to offer a complete electronic publication of the Latin writing-tablets from Vindolanda published by A.K.Bowman and J.D.Thomas in Tabulae Vindolandenses I-II (1983 and 1994), supplemented by the addenda and corrigenda from volume III (2003). The publication includes all text and commentaries, together with a full photographic record and accompanying historical and archaeological essays. These were an essential part of the objective of the project to make this very important material widely accessible in its archaeological and historical context - the early phases of the development of the Roman frontier in northern Britain. Digital images of the tablets are made available through a zoomable image viewer up to the full resolution of the photographs used in editing and revising the texts. Preparatory work involved the creation of xml texts, the addition of metadata records to the database, and the editing of image files. A second phase is now in progress to create XML-transformed text, enabling searching, indexing, and text mining.