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Digitizing Literary Treasures Leads To New Finds
storagedude writes "The WSJ has a cool article on how the race to digitize literary treasures has led to a trove of new discoveries. Quoting: '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 ... By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.'"
As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate, I've long been captivated by the massive papyrus finds finds at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt. The site has been well-explored for over a century, and many of the papyri have already been deciphered and published. The Biblical texts there have gotten the most attention, but one shouldn't neglect the important literary finds as well. See Bowman's Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts for a nice introduction. Over the last few years, there's been more work with using new technologies to examine manuscripts that otherwise can't be deciphered. Classics may seem an unsexy and superseded field, but in fact with digital technology the field is living in exciting times.
I sometimes wonder of our knowledge of great people events and stories from the past; we only know about the ones that were documented or were very famous. Imagine what fantastic times may have existed that history has just forgotten.
Digitization seems to be uncovering some of these.
Computation power, advanced in physics and chemistry and IT improvements not only are helping in digitize literary treasures but also helps curators, historians and normal people to better understand, study, interpret works of art in general. Multispectral applied to paintings reveal hided drawings, xray on pottery or statues give us the exact position of internal pieces and 3D is occupying a role more and more important in documentation and as communication tool.
Well doesn't that bring to mind the original principle of censorship, not to protect the people but to protect the leaders from wrath of the people. One might wonder whether more truth might be found in an ancient garbage dump than in a ancient royal library.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Indeed.
And keep in mind what was going on at the time: The religion of Mithra was growing in the West; the Gnostics were a force to be reckoned with in Egypt; and the followers of the 1st Century BC Yeshu(a) the Nazar were slowly morphing into the so-called Christians. We may finally get a glimpse of the true historical origins of Christianity unvarnished by the official Church authorities, before and just after Constantine took the major religions of the Roman Empire and merged them into a single syncretistic faith.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Fundamentalists are proof to the world that Satan does, in fact, exists.
You bring up a good point, the best way to poison the good roots of any religion is to grow fundamentalists. Those usually are the people who kill others for some stupid parts of something they do not understand while the core message is, do not kill people, do not harm others.
The funny thing is fundamentalists are exactly those Jesus fought against in the bible in the sections where he constantly broke jewish law for the sake of helping others. It was constantly that he tried to give a message of freedom to the people while the fundamentalists tried to frame him for not following their law of trying to lock the people into myriads of rites they have to follow!
And how, exactly does this differ from the Catholic-approved books? I'm not trying to be insulting here, just making a point. The Pauline epistles are letters written to various peoples arguing specific aspects of early Christian theology. The gospels include many aspects that were part of common Middle Eastern "folklore" (the messiah, virgin birth, resurrection, consumption of flesh, the Logos/Arche, etc.).
IANAC, but IAA Palaeographer, Codicologist and Medievalist, and I work on many projects involving the transcription, edition and sometimes translation of ancient texts. The technology you speak of isn't there, and I wonder if it'll ever be there.
OCR's great, and handwriting recognition can be made to work with sufficient training. But handwriting styles before printing often involved abbreviation (in highly inflected languages too, which means that their expansion is dependent not only on grammar, but on the sense). Moreover, in pre-printing handwriting, often the shape of the word matters less than the motion of the pen that it describes, so OCR as such wouldn't work -- you'd need Optical Word recognition. The only problem there is that before the 17th Century, the notion of orthography (aka proper spelling) was very fluid. Finally, all these parameters: abbreviation style, character and word formation, spelling, all have a range and style that is heavily dependent on the scribe and time involved. Since we have (for computing purposes) very little data, the piece being scanned helps define those parameters.
Even top experts in the field read texts wrong from time to time. Even for a machine to produce a quick-n-dirty transcription (to say nothing of translation) would be an expensive proposition that would have to be extensively checked and corrected by an expert. At that point, I could just transcribe it myself much faster and more accurately.
So I'm saying that my job is safe for the time-being, since it's still several orders of magnitude cheaper to have trained experts transcribe and translate than to figure out how to teach a computer to do it (and the applications are wider).