Ogham is a unique and ingenious writing system among the writing systems of the world it's
Unique for two reasons on the one hand it's like a barcode it consists of sequences of Strokes
or notches along a stem line of an object and secondly it was created as a three-dimensional
writing system not like the two-dimensional writing systems that we use ourselves
the ogham script was probably invented in the 4th Century A.D we are not completely
sure about the time and also not completely sure about the place it's certainly in an
Irish context perhaps in the Irish colonies or in Britain but most likely probably in the
south of Ireland somewhere where we also find the most uh most of the inscriptions later on
the project is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow and Maynooth University it's
funded jointly by the Irish Research Council and the UK's Arts and Humanities research Council and
it runs for three years and our aim is to bring a range of digital yechnologies and techniques to
bear on understanding improving our understanding of all things home so all kinds of inscriptions
manuscripts all kinds of things written in the ogham script one of the main aims of the
project is to create an online database of all examples of their own script in Ireland and in
Britain and that's a total of over 600 different items mostly Stone monuments but also portable
objects and some examples written in the margins of manuscripts and we're going to be adding our
3D models to this database so that they're open for anybody to study whether their interest is
archaeological or linguistic or whether they're from a local area and would like to find out
more about the open where they are all of the 3D data captured in the field we wanted to make
this available freely available online so we developed an open access website where people
could go and download the 3D models but they can also find out about the inscriptions the
stones and the sites where they're found and all of the information is encoded in XML so that it is
machine readable as well as human readable which makes the data searchable under various headings
so what I'm doing here today is I am 3D recording this ogham Stone here and I'm
using photogrammetry that involves taking lots and lots of photographs so I've probably taken
about 350 photographs of this Stone today from all different angles and as you put
those photographs through the software it will look for features that each of
those photos have in common and it will derive the geometry from that
so one of the uses of the 3D data is that you can actually use it to 3D print miniature replicas of
the stones the own script doesn't just survive on Stone monuments we also have many examples of the
writing system in manuscript sources dating from as early as the 9th century all the way up to the
modern period the olm script as well as various ciphers derived from it continue to be used and
discussed in manuscripts of the modern period mostly in the context of work by antiquarians
who sought to explore and document not only the survivalist Stone monuments with ohm inscriptions
but also the use of the script in medieval written sources Orem never died out as a writing system
but it was always remembered and passed on and therefore unlike other ancient writing systems it
never had to be deciphered by modern researchers and even in the modern period even today it is
still being used for sometimes for an ornamental purposes or for art installations we hope that the
OG(H)AM project creates new interest in the open script and that that it keeps a tradition alive
that has been uh important for this island for more than one and a half thousand years