Background

The Virtual Light Table was developed as part of the Crossing Boundaries project, a joint scientific endeavour of the Universities of Basel and Liège together with the Museo Egizio in Turin. The research subject of the project was and is fragmentary papyri from the New Kingdom, originating from the ancient Egyptian workers' settlement of Deir el-Medina.

The basic tasks of the project included not only the complete recording, documentation and research of the previously unprocessed fragments, but also the attempt to reconstruct the original documents. An essential part of the work therefore involved the careful creation of high-quality digital images to make it possible to work with the fragile material even from a great distance.

In the course of this, the need and potential for an application that would simplify work with the papyrus digitizations and enable reconstruction by digital means emerged at an early stage: the Virtual Light Table.

However, papyri are of course not the only group of objects that often have to deal with highly fragmented elements and 2D images. For this reason, the Virtual Light Table was deliberately designed and will be further developed in the future so that it can also be used for other types of objects.

The software was developed as a side project to my PhD thesis between 2019 and 2023. Its release coincided with the 13th International Congress of Egyptologists in Leiden, The Netherlands, on 10 August 2023. Since then, the main focus has been on fixing bugs and implementing features that broaden its usefulness to a wider user base.