Posted on 05/04/2018 5:22:34 PM PDT by marshmallow
A new project untangles the handwritten texts in one of the world’s largest historical collections.
The Vatican Secret Archives is one of the grandest historical collections in the world. It’s also one of the most useless.
The grandeur is obvious. Located within the Vatican’s walls, next door to the Apostolic Library and just north of the Sistine Chapel, the VSA houses 53 linear miles of shelving dating back more than 12 centuries. It includes gems like the papal bull that excommunicated Martin Luther and the pleas for help that Mary Queen of Scots sent to Pope Sixtus V before her execution. In size and scope, the collection is almost peerless.
That said, the VSA isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand.
But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world.
OCR has been used to scan books and other printed documents for years, but it’s not well suited for the material in the Secret Archives. Traditional OCR breaks words down into a series of letter-images by looking for the spaces between letters. It then compares each letter-image to the bank of letters in its memory. After deciding which letter......
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
This is a clear reference to the current Pope. ;-D
if Bergie gets Facebooks's crowd to program the AI then two thirds of what it helps read into a computer will say whatever Bergie wants it to say.
Wow! Enjoyed that. Thanks for posting it.
once franky enforces his no-gun zone in vatican city, maybe a few drunken rabel rousers can go in there and take over that tiny country, scan all their documents, and post them on wikileaks. that would be great.
It is easier to indoctrinate the ignorant.
Pretty certain there is a reason that all that information is hidden, long after modern technology of copying, cataloging and publishing has become common ( circa 17th century).
“It’s also one of the most useless.” Nope, no bias in the Atlantic magazine.
Useless? The author is clueless. Historians love the archives.
bttt
Nope, no bias in the Atlantic magazine. Useless? The author is clueless. Historians love the archives.
Regardless of my antipathy towards the Atlantic, I would like to point out that, to be fair, an archive's utility will naturally rise exponentially when made more-accessible in this way.
Example: As a hobby-genealogist, I often contact distant relatives who will - upon my inquiries - proudly respond that they have plenty of family records, old photographs, etc. When I then ask if I might be given access to one or two of those records / photos, they inevitably reply: "Oh, it's all stored in boxes somewhere in my attic. Too much bother to pull out and search through!"
The actual utility of those "vast stores" of info? Nil!
Regards,
Lots of information that could damage a lot of people and institutions. Suppression of the Templars anyone?
The book version by the scholar who unearthed the key document in the Vatican archives, "The Templars: The Secret History Revealed" by Barbara Frale. Wikipedia has her bio.
Lots of news stories in 2007. Search "Vatican Publishes Knights Templar Papers"
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