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On January 26, 2013,
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a band of al Qaeda militants entered
the ancient city of Timbuktu
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on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.
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There, they set fire to a medieval library
of 30,000 manuscripts
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written in Arabic
and several African languages
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and ranging in subject from astronomy
to geography, history to medicine,
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including one book which records
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perhaps the first treatment
for male erectile dysfunction.
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Unknown in the West,
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this was the collected wisdom
of an entire continent,
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the voice of Africa at a time when Africa
was thought not to have a voice at all.
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The Mayor of Bamako,
who witnessed the event,
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called the burning of the manuscripts
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"a crime against world cultural heritage."
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And he was right:
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or he would have been, if it weren't
for the fact that he was also lying.
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In fact, just before,
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African scholars had collected
a random assortment of old books
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and left them out
for the terrorists to burn.
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Today, the collection
lies hidden in Bamako,
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the capital of Mali,
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moldering in the high humidity.
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What was rescued by ruse
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is now once again in jeopardy,
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this time by climate.
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But Africa, and the far-flung
corners of the world,
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are not the only places,
or even the main places
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in which manuscripts that could change
the history of world culture
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are in jeopardy.
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Several years ago, I conducted
a survey of European research libraries
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and discovered that,
at the barest minimum,
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there are 60,000 manuscripts
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pre-1500
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that are illegible because
of water damage,
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fading, mold, and chemical reagents.
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The real number is likely double that,
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and that doesn't even count
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Renaissance manuscripts
and modern manuscripts
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and cultural heritage objects
such as maps.
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What if there were a technology
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that could recover these lost
and unknown works?
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Imagine worldwide how a trove
of hundreds of thousands
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of previously unknown texts
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could radically transform
our knowledge of the past.
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Imagine what unknown classics
we would discover
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which would rewrite the canons
of literature, history,
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philosophy, music,
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or, more provocatively, that could
rewrite our cultural identities,
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building new bridges between
people and culture.
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These are the questions
that transformed me
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from a medieval scholar,
a reader of texts,
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into a textual scientist.
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What an unsatisfying word "reader" is.
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For me, it conjures up
images of passivity,
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of someone sitting idly in an armchair
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waiting for knowledge to come to him
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in a neat little parcel.
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How much better to be
a participant in the past,
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an adventurer in an undiscovered country,
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searching for the hidden text.
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As an academic, I was a mere reader.
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I read and taught the same classics
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that people had been reading
and teaching for hundreds of years --
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Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch --
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and with every scholarly article
that I published
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I added to human knowledge
in ever-diminishing slivers of insight.
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What I wanted to be
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was an archaeologist of the past,
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a discoverer of literature,
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an Indiana Jones without the whip,
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or actually with the whip.
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And I wanted it not just for myself
but I wanted it for my students as well.
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And so six years ago, I changed
the direction of my career.
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At the time, I was working
on "The Chess of Love,"
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the last important long poem
of the European Middle Ages
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never to have been edited,
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and it wasn't edited because
it existed in only one manuscript
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which was so badly damaged
during the firebombing of Dresden
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in World War II
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that generations of scholars
had pronounced it lost.
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For five years, I had been working
with an ultraviolet lamp
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trying to recover traces of the writing
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and I'd gone about as far
as technology at the time
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could actually take me.
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And so I did what many people do.
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I went online,
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and there I learned about
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how multispectral imaging had been used
to recover two lost treatises
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of the famed Greek
mathematician Archimedes
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from a 13th-century palimpsest.
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A palimpsest is a manuscript
which has been erased and overwritten.
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And so, out of the blue,
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I decided to write
to the lead imaging scientist
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on the Archimedes palimpsest project,
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Professor Roger Easton,
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with a plan and a plea.
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And to my surprise,
he actually wrote back.
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With his help, I was able
to win a grant from the U.S. government
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to build a transportable,
multispectral imaging lab,
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and with this lab, I transformed
what was a charred and faded mess
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into a new medieval classic.
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So how does multispectral imaging
actually work?
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Well, the idea behind
multispectral imaging
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is something that anyone who is familiar
with infrared night vision goggles
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will immediately appreciate,
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that what we can see in the visible
spectrum of light
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is only a tiny fraction
of what's actually there.
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The same is true with invisible writing.
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Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light
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between the ultraviolet and the infrared,
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and these are shown down
onto the manuscript from above
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from banks of LEDs,
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and another multispectral light source
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which comes up through
the individual leaves of the manuscript.
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Up to 35 images per sequence
per leaf are imaged this way
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using a high-powered digital camera
equipped with a lens
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which is made out of quartz.
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There are about five
of these in the world.
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And once we capture these images,
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we feed them through
statistical algorithms
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to further enhance and clarify them,
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using software which was originally
designed for satellite images
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and used by people
like geospatial scientists
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and the CIA.
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The results can be spectacular.
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You may already have heard
of what's been done
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for the Dead Sea Scrolls,
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which are slowly gelatinizing.
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Using infrared, we've been able
to read even the darkest corners
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of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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You may not be aware, however,
of other Biblical texts
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that are in jeopardy.
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Here, for example, is a leaf
from a manuscript
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that we imaged,
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which is perhaps the most valuable
Christian Bible in the world.
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The Codex ?? is the oldest translation
of the Gospels into Latin,
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and it dates from the first half
of the fourth century.
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This is the closest we can come
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to the Bible at the time
of the foundation of Christendom
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under Emperor Constantine,
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and at the time also
of the Council of Nicaea,
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when the basic creed of Christianity
was being agreed upon.
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This manuscript, unfortunately,
has been very badly damaged,
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and it's damaged because for centuries
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it had been used and handled
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in swearing in ceremonies in the Church.
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In fact, that purple splotch
that you see in the upper left hand corner
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is Aspergillus, which is a fungus
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which originates in the unwashed hands
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of a person with tuberculosis.
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Our imaging has enabled me
to make the first transcription
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of this manuscript in 250 years.
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Having a lab that can travel
to collections where it's needed, however,
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is only part of the solution.
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The technology is expensive
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and very rare,
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and the imaging and image
processing skills are esoteric.
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That means that mounting recoveries
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is beyond the reach of most researchers
and all but the wealthiest institutions.
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That's why I founded the Lazarus Project,
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a non-for-profit initiative
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to bring multispectral imaging
to individual researchers
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and smaller institutions
at little or no cost whatsoever.
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Over the past five years,
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our team of imaging scientists,
scholars, and students,
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has travelled to seven different countries
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and have recovered some of the world's
most valuable damaged manuscripts,
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included the Vercelli Book,
which is the oldest book of English,
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the Black Book of Carmarthen,
the oldest book of Welsh,
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and some of the most valuable
earliest Gospels
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located in what is now
the former Soviet Georgia.
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So, spectral imaging
can recover lost texts.
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More subtly, though, it can recover
a second story behind every object,
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the story of how, when, and by whom
a text was created,
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and sometimes what the author
was thinking at the time he wrote.
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Take, for example, a draft
of the Declaration of Independence
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written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand,
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which some colleagues of mind
imaged a few years ago
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at the Library of Congress.
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Curators had noticed
that one word throughout
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had been scratched out and overwritten.
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The word overwritten was "citizens."
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Perhaps you can guess
what the word underneath was.
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"Subjects."
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There, ladies and gentlemen,
is American democracy
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evolving under the hand
of Thomas Jefferson.
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Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map,
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which we imaged
at Yale's Beinecke Library.
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This was the map that Columbus
likely consulted before he traveled
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to the New World and which gave him
his idea of what Asia looked like
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and where Japan was located.
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The problem with this map
is that its inks and pigments
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had so degraded over time
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that this large, nearly seven foot map,
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made the world look like
a giant desert.
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Until now, we had very little idea,
detailed idea, that is,
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of what Columbus knew of the world
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and how world cultures were represented.
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The main legend of the map
was entirely illegible under normal light.
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Ultraviolet did very little for it.
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Multispectral gave us everything.
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In Asia, we learned of monsters
with ears so long
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that they could cover
the creature's entire body.
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In Africa, about a snake
who could cause the ground to smoke.
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Like starlight, which can convey
images of the way the Universe
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looked in the distant past,
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so multispectral light can take us back
to the first stuttering moments
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of an object's creation.
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Through this lens, we witness
the mistakes, the changes of mind,
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the naivetes, the uncensored thoughts,
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the imperfections of the human imagination
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that allow these hallowed objects
and their authors
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to become more real,
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that make history closer to us.
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What about the future?
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There's so much of the past,
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and so few people with the skills
to rescue it
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before these objects disappear forever.
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That's why I have begun to teach
this new hybrid discipline
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that I call "textual science."
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Textual science is a marriage
of the traditional skills
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of a literary scholar --
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the ability to read old languages
and old handwriting,
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the knowledge of how texts are made
in order to be able to place
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and date them --
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with new techniques like imaging science,
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the chemistry of inks and pigments,
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computer-aided optical
character recognition.
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Last year, a student in my class,
a freshman,
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with a background in Latin and Greek,
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was image-processing a palimpsest
that we had photographed
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at a famous library in Rome.
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As he worked, tiny Greek writing
began to appear from behind the text.
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Everyone gathered around,
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and he read a line from a lost work
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of the Greek comic dramatist Menander.
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This was the first time
in well over a thousand years
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that those words
had been pronounced aloud.
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In that moment, he became a scholar.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
that is the future of the past.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)