Senior Seminar "Layers of Light: Scientific Imaging and Material Analysis of Manuscript Objects"
Senior seminar organized by Prof. Gregory Heyworth, Rochester University, Director of the Lazarus Project imaging and visiting professor at MemoryLab.
Italy holds more uncatalogued medieval manuscript material than any other European country, spanning literature, law, history, mathematics, theology, and music. Many of these works remain unreadable or only partially accessible because of water damage, fading, chemical reagents, and palimpsesting. Recent advances in multispectral imaging and related technologies, however, have opened unprecedented avenues to the recovery of lost, illegible, and previously unknown texts, including major discoveries such as new works by Menander and Apuleius, as well as some of the earliest Latin translations of the Gospels.
The Senior Seminar will introduce participants to the emerging interdisciplinary field of Textual Science, which combines philology, manuscript studies, digital humanities, imaging science, and cultural heritage preservation. Particular attention will be paid to the science and methods of textual recovery, as well as to the practical challenges involved in working with damaged archival materials.
Designed especially for graduate students and early-career researchers, the series will present both the technologies and the humanistic approaches necessary to develop independent recovery projects at the level of individual manuscripts and larger archival collections. Through case studies drawn from collaborative work in Italian archives, the seminars will also explore how textual recovery can generate new research questions.
The initiative builds on the experience of the INTRADAMS Summer School in Textual Science, developed through collaboration between the University of Bologna, the University of Milan, and the University of Rochester, reflects a broader commitment to project-based and interdisciplinary learning in the preservation of cultural heritage.
The seminar consists in three lectures (two hours each) and a workshop (four hours):
- Wednesday, 27 May (3 pm to 5 pm), Aula Fumagalli, San Giovanni in Monte
Layers of Light: A Historical Overview of Imaging for Textual Recovery From Henry Fox Talbot to the Digital Age
A century before the Archimedes palimpsest, innovators had begun using multispectral imaging on manuscripts. The story of photography, in fact, runs parallel to the story of the evolution of textual science and conservation. Here is the story of the pioneers and occasionally the villains, followed by an overview of major innovations in the last ten years.
- Friday, 29 May (3 pm to 7 pm).
Multispectral image processing workshop
Most of the magic of making a hidden text reappear happens in image processing. This workshop introduces participants to the theory and practice of multispectral image processing via Hoku, the only software designed expressly for cultural heritage recovery. With image sets drawn from recent work, we will cover basic deterministic and statistical methods and add a few more advanced techniques for those with prior experience.
- Monday, 22 June (3 pm to 5 pm). Aula Specola, San Giovanni in Monte
An Introduction to Forensic Codicology: Scientific Imaging and Material Analysis of Manuscripts
The job of the codicologist is to understand the history of manuscripts, the artisans (scribes, rubricators, redactors, illuminators) and scriptoria which produced them, the owners who used and commented on them, and above all the materials, methods and styles of production. This lecture introduces the technologies that extend codicology’s reach and refines its grasp of that history: X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging, DNA sampling and others.
- Wednesday, 24 June (3 pm to 5 pm). Aula Specola, San Giovanni in Monte
Light, Color, Fluorescence, and Silicon: The Physics, Engineering, and Optics Behind Spectral Imaging
How does a black-and-white camera make color pictures? What is ΔE and why is it important? How do camera sensors work? What is the Stokes Shift and why is it essential to the recovery of texts? What is the relationship between wavelength and ink visibility? How do apochromatic lenses improve sharpness in the UV and IR? Why does spectral resolution come at the cost of spatial resolution and vice versa? Designed for humanists, this lecture lays out the science of spectral imaging in clear and accessible terms and answers the questions you did not know to ask.