Posted on 05/08/2009 1:18:44 PM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.
In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.
In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."
High technology used to recover ancient literature that would otherwise be lost. Rarely is science of such direct benefit to the humanities.
For the work of Father Columba Stewart (the Benedictine monk), see here. For the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (the garbage dump) see here and here. For the Timbuktu archives, see here. For projects to digitize the manuscripts of the St. Catherine's Monastery, see here and here. For the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, see here. For the Archimedes palimpsest see here, here, and here.
This is a very worthwhile endeavor.
Not true at all. This kind of thing has been going on for a VERY long time. Development of advanced imaging and chemical restoration of artifacts were being used back when I was in grad school forty years ago. The techniques have been hugely improved, especially by the addition of computer processing, but the basics are by no means new stuff.
As to ancient manuscripts, the scale, technical sophistication, and benefits of the current effort are far beyond anything we have seen before. Better preservation of artifacts is all for the good, but it is the recovery of otherwise lost ancient literature that uniquely offers a “Second Renaissance.”
And I say again, that that is simply not true. There is no gigantic difference between techniques used forty years ago and those used today. They are simply faster, cheaper, and more widely applied. My major professor was good friends with an English scientist who moonlighted from his day job as a spectroscopist at a major instrument company to collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum of Art doing exactly this kind of stuff. He did fascinating slide shows of "hidden" versions of painted-over artwork revealed by non-destructive methods of analysis (in those days, done by neutron activation analysis).
Al
According to an encyclopedia article on Neophron published in the 1970s (by Franz Stoessl), three fragments of Neophron's Medea were known. From their style they were assigned to the 4th century, and the author seemed to be trying to improve on Euripides' Medea on the basis of Aristotle's critique of Euripides in the Poetics.
I am old enough to have read of those and other advances in image analysis in Scientific American and elsewhere and to have studied their fruits in Art History in college.
The reason that the Wall Street Journal has written a story about the new imaging technology is that its cost and capability permit wide scale application to ancient manuscripts, often in remote locations. That has revolutionary consequences, just as the modern PC and jet airliners have revolutionary consequences that far eclipse their technological antecedents.
Imagine the trash and confusion 1000 years hence when (if) people are reviewing our contemporary output in the way of "academia" and news.
If those are your sources, then it's understandable that you don't have all of the facts. Try the actual technical journals in chemical analysis (which is where ALL these techniques originated). I'm old enough that I watched the birth of these technologies, long before they ever made their way to Scientific American. Yeah, they're smaller and more powerful today, but that was and is inevitable as technology improves. What matters is the initial discovery/invention. I suspect that the Wall Street Journal reporters are equally as ignorant of the lineage of these items.
But if the Obama administration gets their way with "national health care", you can kiss any future such developments good-bye, because the typical development route of all these methods has been 1)physics, 2)chemical analysis, 3) medical analysis, 4) "ancillary applications" (like art). Stage 3 is where the big bucks get infused that make the methods sufficiently automated that they can be used by non-professionally trained operators.
No matter how 'inevitable' progress in imaging technology may be, it is notable that such progress has been achieved and that researchers are widely and productively applying it to ancient manuscripts.
I am confident though that appreciation of, for example, any newly recovered plays by Sophocles would not require reading the 'actual technical journals' so as to know the history, chemistry, and physics of the multi-spectral imaging technology by which the plays were recovered. The development of such technology is of interest but is another subject entirely.
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Thanks Mike Fieschko. |
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Fine! Make us wait!
If the US is, indeed, becoming Eurobamasocialist then the Age of Discovery will not happen unless, perhaps, in India. The US went to the moon. It will likely wait for India to go any farther- if India can avoid resocializing as that country gets rich.
Now if the stuff can be reprinted on some durable medium so it doesn’t get lost again when digital formats change.
imho the significance of this stuff is on the scale of rediscovery of greek texts in Moslem libraries on Cordova and Cadiz in the 15th century after Ferdinand and Isabella kicked out the moors.
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