Digital Humanities integration and management challenges in advanced imaging across institutions and technologies nondestructive imaging of Egyptian mummy papyrus cartonnage

This rapid development and testing project brought together international partners, scholars and collections in an exploratory, pilot effort from November 2015 to March 2017. The international, multidisciplinary team demonstrated that some nondestructive digital imaging techniques and technologies (Fig. 1) have potential to make texts visible in Egyptian Ptolemaic papyrus mummy mask cartonnages. A major challenge in working across the different technologies, disciplines and institutions was integrating data from diverse technical imaging systems and work processes, requiring new and proven digital humanities data management capabilities.Before this project, other scholars destroyed the masks to access the papyri, denying future researcher access to the primary historical artefacts (Mazza, 2014).This project capitalized on digital humanities skills and data management techniques in assessing the integration of non-destructive digital imaging technologies to make texts visible in layers of papyrus in mummy cartonnages for open research and analysis. Intermediate goals, such as detecting the presence of text, also proved valuable in highlighting the destructive techniques used to study mummy masks and offering scientifically valid approaches for documenting the initial state of objects and their production for future research.