A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts.

The project will develop an integrated environment in which documents, tools and scholarly resources will be available as a complete and coherent package. Although the research resources on which the VRE pilot project will be based will be ancient documents on various media (stone, wooden tablets, papyri, lead etc.), the tools and the structure of the environment will be entirely suitable for the study of a wide variety of types of documents and manuscripts. The project will also treat documents not as disembodied texts but as artefacts with an original archaeological or physical context which can, in a significant number of cases (in antiquity and later periods) be recovered or reconstructed. The project builds on the work undertaken in the Building a VRE for the Humanities (BVREH) project.