Manuscripts and inscriptions have been part of our daily lives from the invention of writing
until today.
Traditionally, studying a written artefact means studying its content, but also its material,
layout, script and many other elements tell stories about its production and use.
The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg uncovers these
stories, created at different times and places.
In the cluster of excellence, understanding written artefacts, scholars and scientists
from almost 40 disciplines reveal the secrets of these artefacts.
My name is Ivan Shevchuk and I'm an imaging technician here at the University of Hamburg
at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures.
My main job is to recover lost and erased writing in cultural heritage objects.
Multi-spectral imaging is a remote sensing technique.
We are able to collect information from the objects, from manuscripts, without touching
them really.
Therefore, it's non-destructive, non-invasive and of course our system is mobile.
It needs to be because we need to go to libraries where the manuscripts are.
So the ink is invisible to our eyes, but there are tiny remainders of the ink which are still
in a parchment, which we cannot see, but when we use the LED panels to project light
which is invisible to us, for example like UV or the infrared, we can make these remainders
of the ink visible again and readable and take the images and analyse the data later
in image processing to recover the writing.
My problem is I cannot read the ancient text or even Latin.
I can read MATLAB code, but not the manuscripts and so I don't know where to look for.
I maybe have now with experience a bit better understanding what is needed, but ultimately
I need guidance from the scholar.
My name is Andreas Janke.
I'm a musicologist and I have a project on late medieval music manuscripts in Italy.
There are some more notes here, but actually we believe it's the same piece.
But to understand this, we need to read the rest here, otherwise it will not be possible
to say if it's the same piece or not.
The manuscript we were talking about is the so-called Atri Fragment.
It's the remnant of a music manuscript by Antonio Zacharadateramo, a very prolific Italian
composer from the late Middle Ages.
It's just one leaf and one side is legible and the other side is not legible because
this fragment has been used two times by bookbinders.
The fragment was discovered 45 years ago, more than 45 years ago, and what we can read
is just the beginning of the piece and it says Belo Sadio.
We know there is some writing, but we actually cannot read it and so with the multispectral
imaging camera and the processing, we are then able to recover this.
I'm a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and I'm what
we call an aseologist.
It's not a very common discipline.
We have very few in the world, let's say something like 450 people.
The aseologists are historians or philologists and we read cuneiform clay tablets, objects
like that, and these were written in the ancient Near East.
The script is called cuneiform and this script was invented around 3400 BC and was in use
in a very large area of the Near East covering Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey and other countries
around and was in use for more than 3000 years.
So the aseologist read the text and then from the reading of the text, we reconstruct the
history of the population and civilization which were living in this area.
Here we have a sample of tablets, some are replicas of real tablets that are preserved
in the museum and some others I wrote myself.
Some types of tablets were covered by clay envelope.
This is the case for legal text.
The envelope gave the validity of the legal validity of the tablet, of the contract or
any type of legal tablets and the others are envelopes of letters because these people
were writing letters, sending letters away and they would cover their letters with an
envelope like we do today.
The envelope protects the tablet itself, its integrity, but also it hides the text
of the tablet so nobody can read it except the recipient of the tablet of the letter
who would break the envelope to read what is inside.
This is an envelope of a contract, all Babylonian.
If they break the envelope, the contract is no more valid.
So they need to know what is inside.
So most of the text of the contract is copied on the envelope and you don't need to open
it.
On the envelope of a letter, you have very few texts on it because you have only the
name of the sender and the name of the recipient.
And then you have several times unrolled like that, so on the surface, the seal of the sender
and that's it.
So this is extremely frustrating for the seriologists who only have the names, the heading of the
letter and nothing else.
The whole text is hidden.
So we had a retreat and I met Christian Schuur.
He found the idea really nice and so we built a project together.
My name is Christian Schuur.
I'm a physicist and a lead scientist here at DESI and I'm responsible for the synchrotron
radiation source, Petra III.
Synchrotron radiation is generated by very fast electrons that run around in circles
with almost the speed of light and they generate the brightest X-rays in the world.
The key strength of X-rays is that we can look through things.
We do it in radiography when we go to the doctors, but also we can, of course, look
through artefacts, in particular, our nice clay tablets.
And this gives us the opportunity to look through the envelopes and see what actually
is written inside.
Colleagues used medical scanners at hospitals to scan tablets, but this is possible only
for small private collections because you can move the collections outside of where
they are kept.
But tablets kept in a museum, you don't take them out.
This is why we built an instrument that we can bring to the museum to actually do the
studies on site.
This is our early tomograph that we built some years ago.
It is made from much smaller samples and this is why we need to build a new one.
But the principle is exactly the same.
So we have our X-ray source here, you can see it in here, and the detector on the other
side, and this is the rotating table to put the sample on.
What is the weight of this machine?
This machine is also about 300 kilograms, but it's quite a bit.
And the machine will come in several parts that you can fix together as a puzzle so you
can put them in different suitcases?
Exactly.
So you can basically carry it in smaller pieces and then assemble it and it snaps into place
so that also the safety issues and everything is taken care of.
So the difficulty is to get this shielding done.
And the shielding is heavy in itself.
So we don't use lead, but tungsten, but it's similarly heavy material.
And so the main idea is to build as little of this material as possible and make this
instrument as compact as possible.
And this is the reason why the instrument is actually rather short, it's less than a
meter long, and the enclosure is as small as possible.
So it's really challenging for the tomographic scanners and for the physicists to try to
distinguish between the tablets and the envelope, because it's the same material.
We have basically the same gray value, the same contrast from the envelope and the inner
tablet, and we have to distinguish between them.
So in principle, if there is a small air gap, we can see that by X-rays.
And this is, of course, the contrast that we use.
And now it's, of course, the challenge of the computer scientists to actually distinguish
between the two and identify the outer surface of the envelope, the inner surface of the
envelope, and the outer surface of the tablet.
And sometimes it's not easy when they really touch.
We cannot distinguish between them, but then we need to find ways of interpolating.
And in some parts, in some tiny parts that we can also see here, we are actually guessing.
Yeah, there you go.
Miletus is in actual Turkey on the west coast, and it's a site where one of the biggest
cities of antiquity has existed.
It's a place where trade routes from Inner Anatolia and the Western Mediterranean connected.
Like in many cities in antiquity, Miletus has been equipped with many, many inscriptions.
You can imagine inscriptions everywhere on statue bases, on these squares, big letters
on buildings, but also small inscriptions, just graffiti written on some columns.
Hello, Christina.
Hello.
I can hear you.
Okay.
How are you?
Well, I'm fine.
We are all fine.
Did you already meet the museum director and the district chief?
Yes, of course.
We met him at the left side.
He's waiting for you.
And we met of course also the director of the museum, Padan, and he's also waiting
for you.
That's great.
Maybe we can visit him together as soon as we come.
That's very good.
Yes, yes.
That's very good.
So did you already start to clean a little bit on the side?
Yes, we are waiting for you.
Thank you.
I'm a professor for ancient history and Greek epigraphy, so Greek inscriptions, at the University
of Hamburg.
I'm an ancient historian, so I'm basically interested in the life of Greeks and Romans
in antiquity, so my interest in this research project would be what do the people who visit
the theater of my leaders actually see, maybe how would they feel when they enter the theater,
and what's the surroundings for them?
Yeah, what I can show you here are so-called squeezes.
This is unglued paper that you fix when it's wet to the inscription actually, then you
take your brush and then you have a negative impression of the inscription.
Once the squeezes are dry, you can transport them, you can store them, that's no problem
at all.
For instance, these squeezes are about 80, 90 years old.
The good thing about this squeeze is that we already see a little bit of the three-dimensionality
of inscriptions.
You can see how large the letters are.
You can see how deep the letters are.
What you cannot see is you don't see where in the theater the inscription is.
It's only the text, and this is the major problem that usually epigraphers work with
the text or with the content, and not with the whole written artifact.
But we want to know where was it in the theater, were there other inscriptions next to it,
were there pictorial elements or game boards next to these inscriptions.
These are things that the squeezes cannot tell me, and therefore I either have to go
to my liters or I can use the virtual reality that we have here.
If you just see, we have completed the third part of the theater here, and you are standing
currently on the stage, which would be right behind us at this point.
Then we might want to have a look at the panels here.
So Jenny, maybe you can zoom into the panel, we have the different colors to show the different
kinds of inscriptions.
So this is something you should pay attention to.
And also the panels itself is the size of the panels, good enough.
Can you read the content?
Inscriptions in this case provide just the domain.
So typically as a professor or researchers in human computer interaction, we work in
some application fields, and in this case the inscription is just another application
field.
However, in this case, it's very interesting for us because those inscriptions, we consider
them in a three-dimensional context.
So the interesting challenges arises, how can we display and analyze and develop tools
which help the researchers from humanities to analyze those inscriptions in a spatial
layout.
Well, you have a nice anaerobic inscription showing to the front.
So this has just been cleaned this summer.
And then you have the blue pin and the blue bar, which shows you that there is a TOPOS
inscription again, which basically says it's the place of a person called Claudius Aquila.
We've started to wonder when we had your 3D reconstruction here, is why would somebody
have his inscription there?
Why is it somewhere hidden?
There's not a lot of people walking by on this side.
So who's the audience of this inscription?
So only people on the stage could actually see and read the inscription?
Keep people on the stage.
So like us now?
Yeah, like us now.
We analyzed several requirements from the experts from archaeology and also epigraphics
in which they defined what kind of interfaces they prefer for the interaction, what kind
of data should be visualized in the three-dimensional context, how the interaction should be implemented.
And this is done in a very so-called human-centered design approach.
That is, we iteratively analyze those requirements, implement them in prototypes, and then show
it to the experts from humanities and then perceive feedback and iterate and reiterate
again until we have hopefully some tools which can be really used in a very natural and intuitive
way.
Just seeing the theater from different points of view, actually points of view which you
couldn't enter as a real person, you can basically fly over the theater.
And it's a lot of fun.
It's not only fun, but it's fun combined with research.
At the CSMC, we are about 150 researchers and more than 50 PhD students from around
the world.
And also many research fellows, guests, and artists in residence.
Together, we conduct a wide range of research projects, some of them over a very long time.
The Yajami Lab studies sub-Saharan language in Arabic scripts.
Beta Mujaheft creates a digital home for manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea.
This will take until 2014.
We also do a lot of work in the fields, cultural heritage, and preservation.
For example, here in Nepal.
Our laboratories include mobile units ready to operate around the world.
Also part of the CSMC is the cluster of excellent understanding written artifacts.
Another 55 projects are manuscripts and inscriptions.
With researchers from almost 40 academic disciplines.
Humanities.
Natural science.
Computer science.
New world psychology.
And more.
Crew just now.
We are looking forward to see you.
Thank you.