Saturday, September 01, 2007

MULTI-SPECTRAL IMAGINING, THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, AND THE ARCHIMEDES PALIMPSEST: the Rochester Institute of Technology has a brag sheet on their scientitsts' accomplishments, and good for them.
New life for Dead Sea Scrolls, Archimedes

RIT’s reputation for using modern imaging technologies to illuminate historical documents began with the late Robert Johnston, former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts and, later, a visiting scholar in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. His use of imaging to recover information from artifacts led to RIT’s involvement in the 1990s with the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish texts that hold clues to the early development of Christianity. Johnston became involved in the project after traveling to Israel and was among the first to suggest the use of digital imaging technology in deciphering the scrolls.

In 1996, Johnston, Roger L. Easton Jr., professor of imaging science at RIT, and Keith Knox, currently an imaging senior scientist and Boeing Technical Fellow at Boeing LTS, digitally recovered several characters from the Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The RIT team originally used digital images created from color transparencies of the Temple Scroll and, later, at Princeton Theological Seminary, imaged actual fragments of other scrolls borrowed from the Syrian Orthodox Cathedral in Teaneck, N.J. The scientists used Johnston’s first-generation Kodak DCS-100 digital camera with filters over the lens to capture multispectral data – information visible on different wavelengths – that they processed using digital imaging software. Their efforts successfully enhanced the contrast between text and parchment for scholarly study.

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UPDATE: Hindu philosophical writings in Sanskrit too.