SSriceboat

I know my colleagues have worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I'm pretty sure are as old as they come. But personally, the Archimedes Palimpsest is the oldest document I've worked on.

Wow thank you! While I'm not sure of the significance of the findings for the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Archimedes (in terms of history, culture, or the translations), I do know that so far, there have been many successful recoveries on both documents. I am not literate in the languages of the text I try to reveal, so unfortunately I can't read as I go, I pass along my data to the experts who can.

Getting successful recoveries is the best outcome because:

1) The information is now preserved digitally and won't fade over time, so it can be studied for an indefinite period of time.

2) We are able to reveal text that hasn't been looked at in over 2000 years... We hope that the text is significant in terms of it's content, and if it is, it can literally change what we know about our world's history.

Yes there is significant risk in removing some of the documents from their casing and exposing them to intense light. However, my group is very conscientious about how we expose the target. Previous imaging teams used broad-spectrum light which exposed the targets to way more light than they should have, and that resulted in heat transfer and the loss of ink/pigment.

We use LED light sources which emit a very narrow bandpass, which dramatically reduces the light energy incident upon the target to the point where there is almost no risk.

Not accurate. They had a very whimsical interpretation of document imaging techniques. Great movies though.

Thanks for the question!

Well, considering the amount of text that was lost on the Martellus in the 500 years since it was painted, and also considering the fact that the documents that many people want imaged are much, much older than 500 years old, we need to act as soon as we can to try to preserve as much as possible.

In my opinion, I think not. We need a larger community working on this type of research. The imaging science community is surprisingly small considering its applications in almost every other field in the world. While that kind of job security should make me happy, it actually worries me that we aren't putting enough resources into preserving our history and culture when it's sitting in museums doing nothing but deteriorating.