RECREATE

Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, RECREATE aims to foster the recovery of new texts from badly damaged papyri whose condition has led to their neglect by scholars. Far from being worthless, this kind of material can be rich in information, but requires the integrated application of different kinds of expertise and advanced methodologies, which can hugely benefit from purpose-built digital tools. The project is developing Maque-IT, a software tool for the virtual reconstruction of papyrus scrolls. This tool will facilitate, check, and partially automate the work of papyrologists dealing with fragmentary texts. It will be the first tool developed expressly for this purpose and will provide valuable help to scholars, no matter the provenance and character of the fragmented papyrus scrolls with which they work. While its potential scope of application is very broad, this tool was primarily conceived with the specific aim of addressing common issues in the study of carbonized papyri from Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.