New book on Sinai Palimpsests (Open Access)

A very interesting new book has just been published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (and is available on Open Access): 

Claudia RAPP - Giulia ROSSETTO - Jana GRUSKOVÁ - Grigory KESSEL (Eds.), New Light on Old Manuscripts: The Sinai Palimpsests and Other Advances in Palimpsest Studies (link here)

The English abstract: 

The study of palimpsest manuscripts has a long tradition and has led to spectacular discoveries of new texts or new text versions. Recent decades have seen the development of advanced nondestructive methods of multispectral imaging and computer-based image processing. The focus of such research have been individual manuscripts, such as the Archimedes palimpsest that was studied in Baltimore, or the Dexippus fragments in Vienna. The Sinai Palimpsests Project broke new ground by studying for the first time a collection of palimpsest manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai (Egypt). The erased layers preserve texts in eleven languages of the Christian Orient. An international team of scholars has identified numerous new texts or versions of texts, often in very early scripts. This volume has its origin in a conference that was held in Vienna in 2018, where these results of the Sinai Palimpsests Project were presented, along with the advances in image capture and image processing that have made them possible. Additional contributions about current projects in the study of palimpsests, also including Jewish and Muslim text traditions, place the study of palimpsest manuscripts within the larger context of the cultural history of the middle ages. The 30 contributions in this volume thus offer a cross-section, including the most recent technologies, of the current state of research in palimpsest studies.

Handwritten-Text Recognition (HTR) for Syriac Manuscripts

The Beth Mardutho Facebook pages just announced a major development in the quest to use OCR (optical character recognition) technology for manuscripts. Calling it Handwritten-Text Recognition (HTR), they say they have it working for Syriac manuscripts. I know others have tried this for Greek for years and have run into trouble. We can hope the lessons learned here for Syriac can be passed on and used on Greek. If anyone has more details, please share.

Congratulations to the team!

How Present Technology Changes Our View of Past Technology

I’ve been thinking more recently about the significance we attach to technological developments. Think, for instance of the shift from scroll to codex or the change from handwritten books to books printed with movable type. Most readers here will be familiar with some of the significance found in these changes. Did the codex form reinforce the canon for instance? Was it a way that early Christians distinguished their sacred from non-sacred writings? Did Christians become more concerned with textual accuracy with the invention of the printing press? Etc.

These are good questions and it is worth reflecting on the ways new technologies affect or, alternatively, reflect Christian beliefs and practice. But I confess that I sometimes feel skeptical about how much significance is ascribed to them. One reason is because of something Alan Jacobs has written about, which he calls the tendency to “fetishize” past technologies. Here he is in 2015 reflecting on this tendency in Books & Culture (sadly defunct now):

Any given technology changes its meaning when alternatives to it arise: candles began to mean something different when gas lighting appeared; gas lighting began to mean something different when electrical light appeared. Associations form in the public mind with particular times, places, social groups—mental links that would have been impossible to forge without the clarifying power of contrast. This is not to say that technologies have no meaning until alternatives turn up: but the more universal they are, the less likely we are to reflect on them. The comment (I have heard it attributed to Huston Smith) that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles is something that no one would have thought of before the advent of other forms of lighting.

Thus when digital technologies of reading and writing arose, soon thereafter people became intensely reflective about what had preceded them: books, paper, pens and pencils. E-readers make the distinctive features, the characteristic conformation, of books stand forth vividly; a world in which everyone types becomes a world in which pens can be fetishized.

The attention vector of any particular technology goes something like this: from ubiquitous and largely unreflective use to the subject of specialized scholarly research to the topic of personal and idiosyncratic reflections. So the history of the book became a serious scholarly subdiscipline starting in the second half of the 20th century, and emerged onto the general public scene near the end of that century: Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1996) marked, more clearly than any other single book, that emergence... [the rest is pay-walled, sadly.]

I think Jacobs is right and the point is important because we may be tempted to see more in the shifts mentioned above than is deserved. In the case of early Christians and their “bookishness,” for example, I would like to know whether or not they thought of this as distinguishing them from other contemporary groups. If not, then might this be something we are reading into the past because of what Jacobs calls a fetishizing of previous technologies?

Well, I need to keep thinking about it. But it’s something to be aware of at least.

Applying CT scans to a Coptic manuscript of Acts

A few years ago I blogged about the work of W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, who has found a way to read manuscript texts using CT scans. Back in 2015 he used it to read the 6th century Ein Gedi scroll of Leviticus.

Morgan Library MS M.910. (Photo by Nicole Craine for NYT)

Now he is applying it to a New Testament manuscript, this one being Morgan Library MS M.910 which is a Coptic codex of Acts that is too fragile to open. The New York Times reports the details here and says Seales and his team hope to have readable text later this month.

Dr. Seales has developed software that can model the surface of a contorted piece of papyrus or parchment from X-ray data and then derive a legible text by assigning letters to their proper surface.

The site for the Morgan Library doesn’t give a date for the manuscript, but the Times article says it was written sometime between 400 and 600 A.D. From the Morgan Library site we learn this too:

According to Petersen, “the text ... is substantially that of the standard Sahidic version found in the Beatty codex and also ... [M.664B.8] ... The present new text differs from the published texts only in a few individual spellings ... The recension of the text is the ‘Alexandrian’ one, which eventually supplanted a variety of different readings which were current in Egypt before the time of Origen.”

I wonder if any of our Coptologist readers or bloggers can tell us more about this codex. If the dates are 400–600, it will probably not shed a great deal of light on canonicity as the Times suggests, but this is still very exciting technology.

The problem with digitizing our discipline

There is much rejoicing about the benefits of computer technology for the humanities in general and for New Testament textual criticism in particular. I too rejoice as I suspect you do. Who among us is not thrilled, for example,  by the ease of access to so many manuscript images or by the wonderful NTVMR or by the fact that the texts of our modern Greek New Testaments are all freely available online?

But here I want to sound a warning about computer technology. We all know how fast technology changes. Probably none of you have a flip phone any more or use floppy disks to save your work (although I know Maurice has some truly old school tech he still works with still). Technology changes rapidly, usually for the better. But therein lies the problem. Technology changes rapidly. That means that tools that were great five or ten years ago may be difficult or even impossible to use now.

This is one of my fears about digital critical editions. The new digital ECM may be great now, but will it be great in ten years? Maybe, but how do we know? We can’t, because we don’t know the future. There is always talk of future-proofing our digital work. But let us be honest: that is a myth. When I worked on the CBGM, there were parts of the software for the Catholic Letters that only ran  on Mac OS 9. What happens when the computer running that defunct operating system dies?

Nor is the internet the solution. Look, for example, at the genuinely wonderful Codex Sinaiticus website. When it came out in 2008, it was the baddest manuscript viewer in town. You could zoom in and out, switch to raking lighting, and even select words from the transcription and watch them be highlighted right there in the image—it was great. And most of it still is great.

But when I use the site in Chrome now, look at what happens.

The zoom disappears in Chrome

The zoom function does not even show up. I have to move my mouse around until it turns into a hand and then I have to guess how far I am zooming in because there is no visual measurement.

Things are better in Microsoft’s Edge browser, but still a little off.

The zoom is not quite right in Edge, but it is usable

Compare this to Tischendorf’s facsimile of 01 which, as a technology, works just as well today as it did on the day it came off the press in 1863. Obviously, the website for 01 has major advantages over Tischendorf’s facsimile. There is no question about that. But that is not my point. My point is that the usability of Tischendorf’s edition has aged less in 150 years than the Sinaiticus website has in 15! Will the Sinaiticus website work at all in 30 years? 50? 100? Who knows.

What I do know from designing websites for the last 17 years is that there is no way to guarantee that a site built today will still be usable in 10 or 15 years. And usually, the more bells and whistles a site has when it’s built, the worse it ages. Part of this is a matter of funding. It is easier to fund an exciting new digital project than to maintain or update an old, flagging one. But I do not see that changing any time soon.

So the problem remains and it is serious one we all need to think more about in our mad dash to digitally revolutionize our discipline. Are there still things that are better in analog than digital? If so, what are they? Are there things that can be done digitally but shouldn’t be? How can we ensure that our best digital work is still accessible in 100 years time? These are just some of the questions we need to ask ourselves.

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.

Reading Hidden Text with X-Rays

12th c. binding material in a
16th c. manuscript (photo credit).

The Guardian reported this weekend on a relatively new technique for reading metallic inks in book bindings macro x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF). Here’s a clip from the article:

Bindings made between the 15th and 18th centuries often contain hidden manuscript fragments that can be much older. Bookbinders used to cut up and recycle handwritten books from the middle ages, which had become old-fashioned following the invention of printing. These fragments, described by Kwakkel as “stowaways from a distant past”, are within as many as one in five early modern age printed books.

Kwakkel added: “Much of what we’re finding is 15th or 14th century, but it would be really nice to have Carolingian material, so from the ninth century or even older. It would be great to find a fragment of a very old copy of a Bible, the most important text in the middle ages. Every library has thousands of these bindings, especially the larger collections. If you go to the British Library or the Bodleian [in Oxford], they will have thousands of these bindings. So you can see how that adds up to a huge potential.”

Apparently, the process is currently very slow, taking as long as 24 hours for one shot.

As a development of Head’s Rule, the best place to find unknown manuscripts is inside known ones.

Digitally Unrolling the Ein Gedi Scroll of Leviticus

Ein Gedi scroll. (photo credit)

Yesterday, various news outlets reported the recent identification of Leviticus 1.1-8 in a charred scroll from Ein Gedi. First discovered in the 1970, the contents have been a mystery ever since. But with technology developed at the University of Kentucky, scholars were able to read the text by digitally “unrolling” it. The scroll has been carbon dated to the 6th century A.D.

I couldn’t find the full Hebrew text online, but there is a short write-up on the technology used to decipher the text. They also put together some videos of the process which are nicely done (see below).

Photo

Here’s the photo released by the IAA.

(photo credit)

Videos

Xray imaging and the Herculaneum Papyri

New article: Vito Mocella, Emmanuel Brun, Claudio Ferrero & Daniel Delattre, 'Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging' Nature Communications 6, Article number: 5895 doi:10.1038/ncomms6895 (20.1.2015). 

Abstract: 

Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them. This attempt opens up new opportunities to read many Herculaneum papyri, which are still rolled up, thus enhancing our knowledge of ancient Greek literature and philosophy.

This article has been widely picked up in the news (e.g. here from the BBC [from where I have copied the pictures], the New York Times, National Geographic) [HT: Henryk Glogowski, thanks for the email]