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The Next Age of Discovery (fascinating stuff!!)
Wall St Journal ^ | 5/8/2009 | ALEXANDRA ALTER

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 ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: archimedes; archimedespalimpsest; egypt; epigraphyandlanguage; godsgravesglyphs; herculanaeum; oxyrhynchus; oxyrhynchuspapyri; palimpsest; romanempire
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1 posted on 05/08/2009 1:18:44 PM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
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To: SonOfDarkSkies
From the article:
"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."

2 posted on 05/08/2009 1:22:22 PM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
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To: SonOfDarkSkies

High technology used to recover ancient literature that would otherwise be lost. Rarely is science of such direct benefit to the humanities.


3 posted on 05/08/2009 1:48:15 PM PDT by Rockingham
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To: SonOfDarkSkies; SunkenCiv
Jim Davila's paleojudaica blog had a post today on this article, TECHNOLOGY WATCH: The Wall Street Journal has a good survey article of recent developments in the digitization of ancient and medieval manuscripts.

He links to previous blog posts:
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.

4 posted on 05/08/2009 1:51:06 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko (et numquam abrogatam)
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To: SonOfDarkSkies

This is a very worthwhile endeavor.


5 posted on 05/08/2009 1:56:36 PM PDT by henkster (The GOP is housebroken window-dressing displayed to portray the fiction of a Republic.)
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To: Rockingham
"Rarely is science of such direct benefit to the humanities."

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.

6 posted on 05/08/2009 2:33:49 PM PDT by Wonder Warthog ( The Hog of Steel)
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To: Wonder Warthog

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.”


7 posted on 05/08/2009 2:51:40 PM PDT by Rockingham
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To: Rockingham
"As to ancient manuscripts, the scale, technical sophistication, and benefits of the current effort are far beyond anything we have seen before."

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).

8 posted on 05/08/2009 3:28:37 PM PDT by Wonder Warthog ( The Hog of Steel)
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To: SonOfDarkSkies
Think maybe they can scan our Constitution and send the results to Washington. It certainly something the representatives could ponder over, since the current version is all Greek to them.

Al

9 posted on 05/08/2009 3:47:29 PM PDT by UpToHere
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To: SonOfDarkSkies
The article implies that Neophron was earlier than Euripides.

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.

10 posted on 05/08/2009 3:50:04 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Wonder Warthog

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.


11 posted on 05/08/2009 6:42:22 PM PDT by Rockingham
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To: henkster
-- This is a very worthwhile endeavor. --

Imagine the trash and confusion 1000 years hence when (if) people are reviewing our contemporary output in the way of "academia" and news.

12 posted on 05/08/2009 6:45:04 PM PDT by Cboldt
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To: Mike Fieschko
Thanks Mike Fieschko. I was going to be lazy and ping this after I did the Digest, but now I'm not.

I think there's actually an oxyrhynchus keyword, but that's FR for ya. :')

Okay, I'm dozing off in the chair. This will have to wait.
13 posted on 05/08/2009 8:54:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/____________________ Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: Rockingham
"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."

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.

14 posted on 05/09/2009 4:37:20 AM PDT by Wonder Warthog ( The Hog of Steel)
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To: Wonder Warthog
We are at cross purposes and have veered from the essential point of the WSJ article: that using new technology, wide scale imaging of ancient manuscripts is leading to new knowledge and a potential "Second Renaissance."

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.

15 posted on 05/09/2009 7:10:18 AM PDT by Rockingham
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To: Mike Fieschko; StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1ofmanyfree; 21twelve; 24Karet; ...

· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic ·

 
Gods
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Glyphs
Thanks Mike Fieschko.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
 

· Google · Archaeologica · ArchaeoBlog · Archaeology · Biblical Archaeology Society ·
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· The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists ·


16 posted on 05/09/2009 1:59:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/____________________ Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: SunkenCiv

Fine! Make us wait!


17 posted on 05/09/2009 2:14:37 PM PDT by null and void (We are now in day 110 of our national holiday from reality.)
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To: SonOfDarkSkies

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.


18 posted on 05/09/2009 4:11:47 PM PDT by arthurus (ACORN + Amnesty = Venezuelan Democracy in the USSSA)
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To: Mike Fieschko

Now if the stuff can be reprinted on some durable medium so it doesn’t get lost again when digital formats change.

http://www.moonviews.com/


19 posted on 05/09/2009 10:39:48 PM PDT by lepton ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)
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To: SonOfDarkSkies

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.


20 posted on 05/10/2009 12:37:06 AM PDT by ckilmer (Phi)
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