Fragmentarium: Digital Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments

The Fragmentarium website seems like a great idea and one that could be useful for Biblical manuscripts as well. (Note Tommy’s post from a few years ago.)

Fragmentarium enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them.

On her blog, Lisa Fagin Davis gives more detail:

The recently-launched Fragmentarium project (based in Fribourg) combines IIIF with a powerful mySQL database to allow for the cataloguing of individual fragments and leaves and the virtual reconstruction of parent manuscripts in a shared canvas workspace. Brought to you by the incredible team behind e-codices, Fragmentarium uses a flexible and well-designed data model that is fragment-centric and follows international standards of authority and data modeling. It is the culmination of decades of development on the technical side and of metadata design on the scholarly side. Several institutions are already working on Fragmentarium case studies, uploading images (if they don’t already have IIIF purls), cataloguing them, and creating virtual reconstructions.

Besides the obvious examples of Codex Sinaiticus and P46, what examples come to mind that could use this in NT studies? 

DeVining the NT.VMR in 1947

Writing in 1947, the Catholic scholar Charles DeVine seems to have foreseen the value of the NT.VMR. The only piece missing from his vision is the internet. No one can anticipate everything, I guess.

True, we have critical editions which cite the main codices, but “to err is and the probability of error becomes greater when but a single text is in question. This prompts the thought, how fine it would be if all the principal codices of the New Testament were gathered in one place and could be compared at leisure and systematically. A vain desire! And yet in this age that has seen such tremendous progress made in the use of all forms of photography and electric facsimile, why should it be altogether beyond the realm of practicality to have codices preserved in microfilm or equivalent facsimile at some Catholic educational centre in America? In connection with an up-to-date filing-system, and with the co-operation of scholars, such an arrangement would be of inestimable benefit. It could also serve as the basis for a new and fully complete, Catholic, critical edition of the text of the New Testament.

From Charles F. DeVine, “The ‘Blood of God’ in Acts 20:28,” CBQ 9, no. 4 (1947): 381–408.

CSNTM Expedition in the Greek Press

As noted earlier on the blog, CSNTM is currently on a major expedition in Greece digitizing the entire Greek NT collection of the National Library—over 300 manuscripts. It’s a huge undertaking and the results should be well worth it. If you read modern Greek (or know how to use Google translate), there are two articles in the Greek press on the expedition. There are some nice pictures included. Godspeed to the team, especially in what look like very tight working conditions!

Update:

In further confirmation of Head’s Rule, Dan reports on his blog of discovering an uncatalogued manuscript of the apostolos in the binding of a 12th century lectionary.

Breaking News: CSNTM to Digitize MSS at the National Library of Greece!

Today the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) publically announced the breaking news that they are to digitize all the NT MSS of the National Library of Greece in Athens. Manuscript lovers world wide can be happy that more MSS are becoming available in digital format for study. The fact that this major project has been agreed upon by one of the largest repositories of Greek MSS in the world, the National Library of Greece, is a great acknowledgement of the CSNTM as a professional organization for manuscript photography and digitization. In addition, this undertaking may open up many more doors in the future. We owe our gratitude to Dan Wallace and his staff and we look forward to seeing the results. I am proud of being a member of the board of the CSNTM.

Extra: Watch Dan Wallace breaking the news.

Here is a part of the press release from CSNTM.

Press Release
12 January 2014
On January 7, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts’ Executive Director, Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, and Research Manager, Robert D. Marcello, traveled to Athens to meet with the Director of the National Library, Filippos Tsimboglou. After meeting with the Director last September to begin discussions of a collaboration, they worked out final negotiations and signed a contract for CSNTM to digitize all the New Testament manuscripts of the National Library. This is a historic collaboration between one of the five largest repositories of Greek New Testament manuscripts and the world’s leading institute in digitizing Greek New Testament manuscripts. Approximately 300 manuscripts with 150,000+ pages of text will be digitized over the next two years. CSNTM is excited to be working with Dr. Tsimboglou and his staff on this strategic undertaking.

Read the whole press release here.

Up-date report (Feb 20) here. 

Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project – (Vatican and Bodleian Libraries)

Three years ago (March, 2010), we reported on this blog about a major project to digitize 80000 Vatican MSS.  Although the announced project was divided into various phases, there seems to have been some delay. And in 2012 the Vatican began to co-operate with the Oxford University Bodleian Library in a four-year project – Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project – "to digitize some of the most important works in their collections of Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and early printed books." As the name implies, the project, which aims to democratize access to information, is funded by the Polonsky Foundation.

A few days ago NBC News (AP) could report that the first MSS were now put on-line, among which are "the two-volume Gutenberg Bibles from each of the libraries, an illustrated 11th century Greek bible [LXX] and a beautiful 15th-century German bible, hand-colored and illustrated by woodcuts." (HT: Jac Perrin)

Of special interest among the digitized items are MS. Laud Gr. 35 (Greg.-Aland E 08) – the "Laudian Acts" accessible here.

CSNTM: New Manuscripts On-line

News from the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (Robert D. Marcello):

In November of 2011 CSNTM traveled to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (BML) in Florence Italy. This is a phenomenal library founded by the Medici family. Here, the old library, which was designed by none other than Michelangelo himself, can be seen in all of its glory. It now holds over 2500 papyri, 11,000 manuscripts, and 128,000 printed texts. Because of this trip, CSNTM is proud to announce the addition of new images of 28 manuscripts from the BML. This excellent collection contains papyri, majuscules, minuscules, and lectionaries. Among the many treasures we digitized was an eleventh-century lectionary, written entirely in gold letters (GA Lect 117). Another manuscript had Paul’s epistles after the book of Revelation—a very rare phenomenon GA 620). And we photographed a complete Greek New Testament manuscript—one of only sixty known to exist (GA 367). We thank the library and their staff for their graciousness and willingness to digitally preserve these manuscripts. The following manuscripts may now be found HERE.

P35, P36, P48, P89, P95, 0171, 0172, 0173, 0175, 0176, 0207, 198, 199, 200, 362, 365, 366, 367, 619, 620, 1979, L112, L117, L118, L291, L510, L604, L2210.

Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

Google is involved with the digitization of various European treasures and even with the Iraqi National Museum, and is now collaborating with the Israeli Antiquities Authority to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls using multi-spectral imaging. Read the AFP article online. Pretty pictures, here. I am not sure when the project will be completed.

UPDATE:
Wieland Willker has provided this link to the official IAA release on the subject. The funding for this project is private, and Google is not involved with the actual digitization project. Digitization will begin sometime in 2011.

Codex Bezae Digitization

As we reported several years ago (here), a transcription and translation of Codex Bezae is already on-line at this site compiled by Sylvie Chabert d'Hyères (I don't know about the quality of this material), but now, due to a large donation, we can hope for a digitization of the codex following the paths of Codex Sinaiticus.

The Telegraph now reports that the former businessman Dr Leonard Polonsky has donated a neat sum of £1.5m that will be used by Cambridge University Library to first create an infrastructe and then start digitising the vast collection of 600-year-old institution.

The first stage of the digitization project is called "Foundations of Faith" which, as the name suggests, will focus on the religious collections, among which we find some of the world's most ancient Qur'ans, the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection (some 193,000 fragments of MSS), and Greek New Testament MSS, including Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis.

Perhaps the excellent scholars at Tyndale House could offer the library their expertise in this process. Speaking about the Cambridge scholars, I recall when I went with Peter Head on a racewalking tour to see Cambridge, and we passed the university library, he told me that the staff there were not to keen on letting people see Codex Bezae nowadays (although they had a good eye to Pete). Apparently, a former professor in Cambridge has left his physical marks on the manuscript, as he has intimately showed the manuscript to his classes during many years (Pete can fill in the details).

HT: Paleojudaica.

80,000 Vatican mss to be digitized!

[Via David Parker, the Vatican Library Newsletter. Obviously this is massive news for NT and OT TC, Patristics, etc., and a bad day for conspiracy theorists...]

Newsletter 5/2010
Dear friends and readers,
The Osservatore Romano dated March 24 has published the following story which we felt certain would be of interest to you.
I am sending it as an “extraordinary Newsletter”, to which I add my very best wishes for a blessed Easter.

Msgr. Cesare Pasini
Prefect

An initiative of the Vatican Library Digital manuscripts

Cesare Pasini
The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.

And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.

The technological project of digitization with its various aspects is now ready. In the past two years, a technical feasibility study has been prepared with the contribution of the best experts, internal, external and also international. This resulted in a project of a great and innovative value from various points of view: the realization of the photography, the electronic formats for conservation, the guaranteed stability of photographs over time, the maintenance and management of the archives, and so forth.

This project may be achieved over a span of 10 years divided into three phases, with possible intervals between them. In a preliminary phase the involvement of 60 people is planned, including photographers and conservator-verifiers, in the second and third phases at least 120. Before being able to initiate an undertaking of this kind, which is causing some anxiety to those in charge of the library (and not only to them!), naturally it will be necessary to find the funds. Moves have already been made in this direction with some positive results.

The second announcement is that some weeks ago the “test bed” was set up; in other words the “bench test” that will make it possible to try out and examine the whole structure of the important project that has been studied and formulated so as to guarantee that it will function properly when undertaken in its full breadth.

The work of reproduction uses two different machines, depending on the different types of material to be reproduced: one is a Metis Systems scanner, kindly lent to us free of charge by the manufacturers, and a 50 megapixel Hasselblad digital camera. Digitized images will be converted to the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS), a non-proprietary format, is extremely simple, was developed a few decades ago by NASA. It has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.

In addition to the servers that collect the images in FITS format accumulated by the two machines mentioned, another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images both by the shelf mark and the manuscript's descriptive elements, and also and above all by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory.

The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican's manuscripts – only think of when it will be possible to do such research on the entire patrimony of manuscripts in the Library! – was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm in the field of computer science, to which, moreover, we owe the entire funding of the “test bed”.

For this “bench test”, set up in these weeks, 23 manuscripts are being used for a total of 7,500 digitized and indexed pages, with a mountain of computer data of about 5 terabytes (about 5,000 billion bytes).

The image of the mustard seed springs to mind: the “text bed” is not much more in comparison with the immensity of the overall project. But we know well that this seed contains an immense energy that will enable it to grow, to become far larger than the other plants and to give hospitality to the birds of the air. In accepting the promise guaranteed in the parable, let us also give hope of it to those who await the results of this project's realization.

How To Do Digitization?

Over at Parchment and Pen, Dan Wallace, recently home from his trip to Athens where he and his team photographed MSS (see our previous reports here) notes the recent article in Wall Street Journal on digitization of MSS by Alexandra Alter. One issue is the costs for expeditions, for the CSNTM about $10,000 a week, as compared to another undertaking led by Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota, who says a digitization project costs roughly $20,000 a year, since they apparently use a different strategy: "Armed with 23-megapixel cameras and scanning cradles, he sets up imaging labs on site in monasteries and churches, and trains local people to scan the manuscripts." Wallace says "That’s a remarkably efficient model, but I don’t think it’s the best one for what CSNTM does." Then he goes on to explain the reasons:

The equipment we use requires a technician on-site. Things break down, especially the cameras—sometimes on a daily basis. And they need to be refurbished after about 30,000 pictures. If we had 23 sites where our equipment was being used (as this other organization does), the cost just for the equipment alone would exceed $400,000. This does not include the ongoing costs of paying locals to do the work. Also, CSNTM goes through multiple check-points to ensure the highest quality of images. We do all this on-site. We realize that we have only one shot at shooting (pardon the pun!) the manuscripts, and we must get it right.

Read more here.