The VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts is a 2-year JISC funded project designed to complement research into damaged and illegible documents, funded by a major e-Science grant, at the Classics Faculty's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. The pilot VRE allows researchers access to image collections, supported by annotation tools and reference and support resources from around the world. The new project will incorporate communication and collaboration tools to allow researchers to work with widely dispersed colleagues with access to advanced imaging tools.

Study of Documents and Manuscripts


Start date: 1 March 2007

End date: 31 March 2009

Funding programme: Virtual Research Environment programme

Project website: http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM

JISC theme(s): e-Research

Committees: JISC Content Services Committee

After testing the pilot within epigraphical and papyrological communities the context of the VRE will be extended to address the wider needs of documentary and manuscript scholars working within the humanities. By deploying the VRE for use by other interested researchers the project will test the degree to which VRE tools can be re-used by other disciplines.

The project will link to a related VRE at the University of Reading VERA supporting research in archaeology at the Silchester Roman Town. By treating documents as artefacts with an original archaeological or physical context, the two projects will demonstrate the benefit of Virtual Research Environments in providing seamless access to a richer range of research data and tools.

Aims and Objectives

The aim of the VRE-SDM project is to construct an integrated environment in which the data (documents), tools and scholarly instrumenta will be available to the scholar as a complete and coherent resource. In the first instance the project will validate the pilot VRE against the requirements of researchers drawn from the Papyrological and Epigraphical communities and then will extend the system to further humanities disciplines. The objectives of the project will be to create a system through which a researcher will be able to:

  • View, manipulate and enhance digitized images of documents and manuscripts within a portal framework
  • Search across multiple, distributed data sets, images and texts
  • Select, store and organise items from the above, in a ‘personal workspace’
  • Add annotations to these items to store personal thoughts and responses
  • Support collaboration by allowing multiple researchers in separate locations to share a common view of the workspace, in conjunction with real time communication via Chat, VoIP and desktop integration with AccessGrid
  • Allow a collaborator to comment, point/highlight, discuss and annotate the items in the shared workspace
  • Gain comprehensive user requirements and expand the use of the VRE for documentary and manuscript scholars in other fields of humanities research

project staff

Project Manager               
Project team
  • John Pybus (Technical Support) john.pybus@humanities.ox.ac.uk
  • Professor Alan K. Bowman (Principal Investigator) Brasenose College
  • Dr C.V. Crowther  (Principal Investigator) Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies
  • Dr Michael Fraser  (Principal Investigator) Oxford University Computing Services
  • Dr Marina Jirotka (Project Consultant) Requirements Consultant