Imaging of Historical Manuscripts



Imaging of Historical Manuscripts

Roger L. Easton, Jr.

Activities in this area were directed primarily at three artifacts: the Archimedes Palimpsest, the Waldseemüller Map, and the Charter of the City of Annapolis.

The work on the Archimedes Palimpsest project was dominated by a month-long imaging session in August 2007, during which time the entire book was re-imaged with a new camera and illumination system. The images of several pages showed interesting and thus-far unexplained infrared features that may assist the scholarly readings. The images were processed by Dr. Keith Knox in Hawai’i. The X-ray fluorescence images and the 1906 Heiberg photographs of were registered to the images from 2007 by Allison Bright, an undergraduate student in the Center. All images (> 1 TByte of data) have now been posted online at under a Creative Commons license, which means that any person can process/use/publish these images under the terms of that license.

The results of this imaging session were reported at the Archimedes Palimpsest Colloquium, Texts, Traditions, and Technology at the Eötvös Collegium in Budapest, Hungary in September 2007. Other invited talks on the subject were presented at the RIT President’s Roundtable in October 2007, the University of New Mexico and the Rochester Museum and Science Center in February 2008, and the RIT Summer Mathematics Institute in July 2008. A technical talk was also presented to the SPIE Conference 6810 “Computer Image Analysis in the Study of Art” in San José, California in January 2008.

The work on the Archimedes Palimpsest also penetrated popular culture, when the team consulted with the scriptwriter and prop team for the movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” The design of the system “used” in the movie to image the page from the diary of John Wilkes Booth was based on an earlier version of the system designed by the Archimedes Palimpsest imaging team.

The so-called “Waldseemüller Map” was the first printed map that specifically names “America.” The map, called “Universalis Cosmographia,” was a map of the world originally published in April, 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller. The United States Library of Congress purchased a copy of the map in 2001 for $10 million. Prior to long-term encasement and display, the conservation staff of the library desired to assess the condition of the map. The imaging team for the Archimedes Palimpsest was contacted, and along with Ken Boydston of Megavision, Inc., imaged the twelve sheets of the map at different resolutions and under different illumination conditions. These images have been delivered to the Library of Congress for study. This work was reported at a presentation in the series Topics in Preservation Science at the Library of Congress in March 2008. The relationship begun here has led to additional work for the Library and also has resulted in a submission to the NSF competition for Science and Technology Centers. This work also led to a contact with Dr. Edward Papenfuse, Archivist of the State of Maryland, to image what had been thought to be the original copy of the Charter of the City of Annapolis in May 2008. Claire Mac Donald, undergraduate student in the Center, participated in the imaging and is processing the data for her senior project.

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