Filipe Castro

A multilingual approach to technical manuscripts: 16th and 17th-century Portuguese shipbuilding treatises

Shipbuilding treatises are technical manuscripts written in a variety of languages and spanning several centuries that describe the construction of ships. Given their technical content, understanding terms, concepts, and construction sequences is a challenging task. In this paper we describe a scalable approach and a multilingual web-based interface for enabling a group of scholars to edit a glossary of nautical terms in multiple languages.

Outfitting the Pepper Wreck

This article is part of a series of papers on the attempts to reconstruct and understand an early-17th-century Portuguese Indiaman based on the archaeological remains of the presumed Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, a Portuguese nau that sank at the mouth of the Tagus River, Portugal, in September 1606. With the help of 3-D computer software, the authors try to understand how the interior space of this ship was used and occupied, and propose a plausible size, weight, and configuration for the cargo storage, which will be tested in terms of the fully loaded ship’s intact stability. The result is intended as a theoretical model of a ca. 1600 Portuguese nau. Only further archaeological probing will tell whether it is an accurate model or not.

Using an ontology and a multilingual glossary for enhancing the nautical archaeology digital library

Access to materials in digital collections has been extensively studied within digital libraries. Exploring a collection requires customized indices and novel interfaces to allow users new exploration mechanisms. Materials or objects can then be found by way of full-text, faceted, or thematic indexes. There has been a marked interest not only in finding objects in a collection, but in discovering relationships and properties. For example, multiple representations of the same object enable the use of visual aids to augment collection exploration. Depending on the domain and characteristics of the objects in a collection, relationships among components can be used to enrich the process of understanding their contents. In this context, the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (NADL) includes multilingual textual- and visual-rich objects (shipbuilding treatises, illustrations, photographs, and drawings). In this paper we describe an approach for enhancing access to a collection of ancient technical documents, illustrations, and photographs documenting archaeological excavations. Because of the nature of our collection, we exploit a multilingual glossary along with an ontology. Preliminary tests of our prototype suggest the feasibility of our method for enhancing access to the collection.

In Search of Unique Iberian Ship Design Concepts

Defining 15th- and 16th-century Iberian shipbuilding traditions related to European expansion overseas is a difficult task. Scarce documentary evidence and the systematic destruction of Spanish and Portuguese shipwrecks by those with a purely monetary agenda make the task even more complex. In spite of these obstacles, data suggests that a distinctive shipbuilding tradition existed on the Iberian Peninsula. Through careful mining of the documentary and archaeological evidence, the concepts behind Iberian ship design can be articulated as well as compared and contrasted to other European shipbuilding traditions.

A Preliminary report of recording the Stella 1 Roman River Barge, Italy

The remains of a Roman barge were found in 1981 in the River Stella, Udine, Italy. Its cargo consisted mainly of roof tiles. It was excavated in 1998 and 1999, and detailed recording of the hull, and a second wooden structure, was achieved in 2011. A spread of material upstream of the wreck has been investigated 2012–2015. The barge was originally dated to the first quarter of the 1st century AD by the in situ cargo. This article describes the bottom-based sewn-plank hull construction and examines it in the light of local boatbuilding traditions. The second wooden structure is also described, along with recent finds and new dating evidence from the dispersed material. The Stella 1 excavation was part of the Anaxum Project, a wider study of the Stella Rivers cultural landscape through time.

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.

Moulds, Graminhos and Ribbands: a pilot study of the construction of saveiros in Valença and the Baía de Todos os Santos area, Brazil

The survival of late medieval Mediterranean techniques to conceive and build ships and boats in Brazil was noted by John Patrick Sarsfield in the 1980s, but his study of the Valenca shipwrights was interrupted by his untimely death in 1990. This paper summarizes Sarsfields account of these shipbuilding techniques, examines that published by Lev Smarcevski (1996), and provides some preliminary results of the pilot stage of a project to further research traditional shipbuilding in Valenca and the Baia de Todos os Santos region.

The nautical archaeology digital library

In Nautical Archaeology, the study of components and objects creates a complex environment for scholars and researchers. Nautical archaeologists access, manipulate, study, and consult a variety of sources from different media, geographical origins, ages, and languages. Representing underwater excavations is a challenging endeavor due to the large amount of information and data in heterogeneous media and sources that must be structured, segmented, categorized, indexed, and integrated. We are creating a Nautical Archaeology Digital Library that will a) efficiently catalog, store, and manage artifacts and ship remains along with associated information from underwater archeological excavations, b) integrate heterogeneous data sources in different media to facilitate research work, c) incorporate historic sources to help in the study of current artifacts, d) provide visualization tools to help researchers manipulate, observe, study, and analyze artifacts and their relationships; and e) incorporate algorithm and visualization based mechanisms for ship reconstruction.

Cultural Heritage Resources Profiling: Ontology-based Approach.

Cultural heritage (CH) resources are very heterogeneous since the information was collected from vast diversity of cultural sites and digitally recorded in different formats. With the progress of 3D technologies, photogrammetry techniques become the adopted solution for representing CH artifacts by turning photos from small finds, to entire landscapes, into accurate 3D models. To meet knowledge representation with cultural heritage photogrammetry, this paper proposes an ontology-profiling method for modeling a real case of archaeological amphorae. The ontological profile consists of all needed information to represent a CH resource including typology attributes, geo-spatial information and photogrammetry process. An example illustrating the applicability of this profiling method to the problem of CH resources conceptualization is presented. We also outline our perspectives for using ontologies in data-driven science, in particular on modeling a complete pipeline that manages both the photogrammetric process and the archaeological knowledge.

New Portuguese legislation on management of the underwater cultural heritage

In 1997,with the publication of Decree-Law 117/ 97, May 14th, and Decree-Law 164/97, June 27th, the government (jfPortugal sharply revised the philosophy it had previously adopted for the management of the underwater cultural heritage. The first Decree established the complete autonomy of archaeology within the Ministry of Culture by creating the new Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia (IPA).Before this, all issues related to archaeology had been handled by a department within the larger Instituto Portugues do Patrim6nio Arquitect6nico e Arqueol6gico (IPPAR), which had complete responsibility for the cultural hefitage as a whole. For nautical and underwater archaeology, the IrA includes a specific body, the Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Nautica e Subaquatica (CNANS),which is autonomous, with its own personnel and budget. The second Decree pertains to the management of the underwater cultural heritage and repealed a previous one issued in August 1993 (Decree-Law 289/93, August 21st), that opened up broad opportunities for salvage companies and treasure hunters, triggering a reaction of outrage from the scientific community. Conflicting with the established principles ofmodern archaeology, this law was immediately contested by a pressure movement. led by the nonprofit organization Arqueonautica, which organized a public debate over this issue [1].The media showed strong interest in this debate, which was enriched by the