Textual Science: A Curriculum for Cultural Heritage Recovery
FAIN: AKA-265594-19
University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)
Gregory G. Heyworth (Project Director: October 2018 to February 2022)
Roger Easton (Co Project Director: April 2019 to February 2022)
The development of curriculum and resources for a
new certificate in textual science, focused on cultural heritage recovery.
How should the humanities respond to the dual threat posed by global warming and terrorism to cultural heritage worldwide? Are the imaging technologies developed to recover the Archimedes palimpsest and restore lost works to the canon enough to safeguard the future of the past? Is science alone the answer? Textual Science: A Curriculum for Cultural Heritage Recovery offers a two-fold solution. First, it defines a new discipline combining the traditional skills of the humanistic scholar – paleography, codicology, bibliography – with imaging-, material-, and computer science. Second, drawing on the traditional strengths in optics, imaging, and humanities of both the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology, whose scholars are at the forefront of cultural heritage imaging, this proposal aims to formalize a curriculum for Textual Science through a joint UR – RIT certificate program for undergraduates at the 22 institutions of the Rochester Area Colleges consortium.
Associated Products
Manuscript Studies (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Manuscript Studies
Author: Anna Siebach Larsen
Abstract: This course explores books and documents before print, exploring them as material objects within their historical and social contexts. We will ask questions about who made books and other documents, how they were designed, who used them, and how they were used. These lines of inquiry (producer, design, user, and function) are closely intertwined: understanding the purpose of a book or document can help us decode its design and even the words on a page – and vice versa. This course will cover all aspects of manuscript production, dissemination, readership and reception, and ownership. The focus will be on Latinate manuscripts of Western Europe, but we will give you the tools to approach manuscripts across a range of cultures and languages.
While exploring the context of medieval manuscripts, the course will provide a practical grounding in the terms and practices of manuscript description and transcription, covering paleography (the history of scripts), codicology (the study of the material and physical history of the book), decoration, and diplomatics (the study of official documents).
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate
Digital History: Historical Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Museums (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Digital History: Historical Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Museums
Author: Michael Jarvis
Abstract: This course introduces students to some of the techniques of digital history using the Virtual St. George's Project, Digital Elmina Project or historical digital simulations of your own design to practically apply technology to humanistic research and public education.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
Historical Document Imaging and Processing (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Historical Document Imaging and Processing
Author: Roger Easton
Abstract: This course will introduce undergraduate students to the primary imaging technologies used to discover new information about cultural heritage. Specifically, multispectral imaging and image processing will be considered in a practical way where students will complete projects to gain hands-on experience in spectral image capture, calibration and processing.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
The Hidden Canon: A History of the Search for Lost Texts, 1345-2020 (Course or Curricular Material)Title: The Hidden Canon: A History of the Search for Lost Texts, 1345-2020
Author: Gregory Heyworth
Abstract: This course is not a history of the book. It does not follow the epic parade of culture from alphabet to quill, printing press to keyboard. The story we tell here is in the elegiac mode: how cultures failed and their artifacts disappeared, how fabled texts and records were lost and forgotten, and how, with effort and ingenuity, a paltry few were clawed back from oblivion. From Europe to the Middle East, Asia to Latin America, an unsung group of scholars, adventurers, scientists, and rogues trekked across deserts and over mountains, plundered tombs and monasteries, rummaged between the legs of mummies, entered hidden caves and bricked up rooms, deciphered lost languages, and developed new technologies all so as to recover for the world a group of texts that would change the history of the past.
That is if anyone actually bothered to read them.
Here is the history of the hidden canon, great yet little-known books drawn from far-flung collections: Monte Cassino, Verona, Herculaneum, the Fayum, Dura Europos, Ras Sharma, St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, the Cairo Genizah, the Qumran caves, Khotan, Dun Huang, Chichen Itza, and Guatemala City. Its cast of characters includes the famous, the flamboyant, and the obscure: Petrarch, Poggio, Flinders Petrie, Grenville and Hunt, Solomon Schechter, Marcus Aurelius Stein, Zelia Nutall, Brasseur, Alexander von Humboldt, Konstantin Tischendorf, the Smith sisters. Because the territory this course covers is large, the format will be lecture and exam. In a companion course, Reading the Hidden Canon, students will consult excerpts from the most important documents and pieces of literature these scholars recovered, many still largely unknown.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
Digital Imaging: 2d, 3D (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Digital Imaging: 2d, 3D
Author: Gregory Heyworth
Abstract: This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of Multispectral Imaging, Reflectance Transformation Imaging, 3D imaging, spectral image processing using ENVI, stitching in 2D and 3D, and photogrammetry. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
Image Text and Technology (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Image Text and Technology
Author: Gregory Heyworth
Abstract: Image, Text and Technology is an interdisciplinary course in the history of the book as a textual and visual medium, an artistic object, and a technology of communication. Beginning with Aristotle’s insight that we think in images, we will consider writing as bound up in a theoretical relationship with seeing (aesthetics), perceiving (phenomenology), and historically with technologies of dissemination, both analog and digital (manuscripts, printing, photography, television, the internet). We will explore the limits and conjunctions of visual and verbal media through theoretical and scientific readings in Plato, Lessing, Benjamin, Derrida, and McLuhan, and primary texts including the Bible, and the Precepts of Ptah Hotep..
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
Between the Lines: Nature, Space, and Time in Italian Illuminated Manuscripts of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Between the Lines: Nature, Space, and Time in Italian Illuminated Manuscripts of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch
Author: Gregory Heyworth and Alessandra Baroni
Abstract: Bringing together textual and artistic traditions at the inception of the Italian Renaissance, this course will examine closely key illuminated Italian manuscripts of the 14th century – The Thompson Divine Comedy in the British Library, Petrarch’s Vergil in the Ambrosiana Library of Milan, the holograph copy of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (Vatican 3195), and Boccaccio’s Dante in the Riccardiana Library of Florence (Ms. 1035) – as the cornerstones of Italian high culture. Our focus will be on the way these manuscripts, and the authors and artists who created them, construct notions of aesthetic space and narrative time. Supplementing primary readings in Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, will be secondary theoretical readings by Cennini, Vasari, Alberti, Lessing, and Camille. Beyond literature and art, this course will also consider the problems of conservation of medieval manuscripts and early books, and their availability for a larger audience with the employment of digital technologies. The broad objective of the course is to give students a material appreciation and interdisciplinary knowledge of the sources of Italian medieval and Renaissance culture and their relevance for Humanities and Science.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate
Hoku (Computer Program)Title: Hoku
Author: Keith Knox
Abstract: Hoku is an open-source, cross-platform imaging processing software. Written in Java, it is designed to allow users to process multispectral and hyper spectral images both deterministically and statistically. Its graphical user interface and features have been refined by use in courses in Textual Science at the University of Rochester, and members of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester have written a user manual for the application.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
http://www.cis.rit.edu/~ktkpci/Hoku.htmlSecondary URL:
https://r-chive.com/software/Access Model: Hoku is free and open source and can be downloaded at http://www.cis.rit.edu/~ktkpci/Hoku.html. More information can be found about downloads and installation at https://r-chive.com/software/.
Programming Language/Platform: Java
Source Available?: Yes
Multispectral Image Processing for Cultural Heritage with ENVI: A User's Guide (Book)Title: Multispectral Image Processing for Cultural Heritage with ENVI: A User's Guide
Author: Easton/Heyworth
Abstract: A complete user's guide to multispectral image processing of manuscripts for ENVI. The guide covers both methods for making damaged text legible, as well as trains image processors in the material qualities of inks, pigments, substrates and chemical reagents and how they behave under various wavelengths of light. It is designed to be a complete course in analysis of damage and methods of recovery.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
http://lazarusprojectimaging.comPrimary URL Description: The website is currently being updated to offer downloads of both the ENVI and Hoku manuals.
Access Model: Open access
Publisher: n/a
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: n/a
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Multispectral Imaging for Cultural heritage with Hoku (Book)Title: Multispectral Imaging for Cultural heritage with Hoku
Author: Helen Davies and Katie Albers
Abstract: A user's manual to image multispectral processing with Hoku.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
http://lazarusprojectimaging.comPrimary URL Description: Website is being updated to allow downloads. Hoku and ENVI guides will be available in October 2021.
Access Model: open access
Publisher: n/a
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: n/a
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes