In early June 2019, the Crossing Boundaries team met in Basel for the second general meeting. The main goal was to decide upon a detailed workflow for handling the thousands of papyrus fragments stored in the Museo Egizio.

In May, Stephan Unter (PhD candidate) – a computer scientist and Egyptologist – had joined the project. His PhD project deals with the application and development of machine learning methods on the fragments in order to classify and rejoin them. Among his first tasks is the implementation of the Virtual Light Table, a digital research environment allowing the team to virtually explore and move fragments in order to reconstruct documents by making use of the available high resolution images and additional meta information within the TPOP database.

The recruitment of another PhD candidate was processed. A decision will be made in August. Finally, we scheduled a workshop at the Museo Egizio for September 2020 during which the team and invited experts shall work together on fragments which fall in the general category of “heterogeneous documents”.