About me

Welcome! I am a classicist working with digital methods in the field of Ancient Greek papyrology. My long term goal is to utilize the potential of digitization and modern computational approaches to help papyrology gain more public visibility. Inspite of its permanent relevance for our understanding of antiquity, the subject papyrology must assert itself over the strongly promoted disciplines mathematics, IT, and natural sciences. I want to close this gap by incorporating innovative digital methods into papyrological studies.

Currently, I am working on a PhD project with the working title Book Format in Hellenism and the Imperial Period. William A. Johnson’s monograph Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus established that the ancient book format was a phenomenon shaped by “deliberate design and attention to what is stylish”, requiring meticulous care and executional exactness from a scribe. While Johnson illuminated scribal designs in the papyrologically significant region Oxyrhynchus, his scope remained not only geographically but also quantitatively limited. My PhD project will deliver new insights into the ancient book format using AI and modern algorithms on a large-scale dataset of annotated papyri. It aims to answer the following question: Which yet undiscovered patterns of deliberate design in the ancient book can be revealed through the systematic application of modern computational methods?