1 00:00:11,288 --> 00:00:13,948 On January 26th, 2013, 2 00:00:13,948 --> 00:00:17,508 a band of al-Qaeda militants entered the ancient city of Timbuktu 3 00:00:17,508 --> 00:00:20,258 on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. 4 00:00:20,258 --> 00:00:25,768 There they set fire to a medieval library of 30,000 manuscripts 5 00:00:25,768 --> 00:00:29,048 written in Arabic and several African languages, 6 00:00:29,048 --> 00:00:33,038 and ranging in subjects from astronomy to geography, 7 00:00:33,038 --> 00:00:34,788 history to medicine, 8 00:00:34,788 --> 00:00:36,528 including one book which records 9 00:00:36,528 --> 00:00:40,958 perhaps the first treatment for male erectile dysfunction. 10 00:00:41,808 --> 00:00:43,718 Unknown in the West, 11 00:00:43,718 --> 00:00:47,048 this was the collected wisdom of an entire continent, 12 00:00:47,048 --> 00:00:52,038 the voice of Africa at a time when Africa was thought not to have a voice at all. 13 00:00:52,514 --> 00:00:55,224 The Mayor of Bamako, who witnessed the event, 14 00:00:55,224 --> 00:01:00,014 called the burning of the manuscripts a crime against world cultural heritage. 15 00:01:00,014 --> 00:01:02,283 And he was right, or he would have been, 16 00:01:02,283 --> 00:01:04,983 if it weren't for the fact that he was also lying. 17 00:01:05,740 --> 00:01:08,570 In fact, just before, 18 00:01:08,570 --> 00:01:12,540 African scholars had collected a random assortment of old books 19 00:01:12,540 --> 00:01:15,240 and left them out for the terrorists to burn. 20 00:01:15,240 --> 00:01:19,510 Today, the collection lies hidden in Bamako, the capital of Mali, 21 00:01:19,510 --> 00:01:22,190 moldering in the high humidity. 22 00:01:22,190 --> 00:01:25,770 What was rescued by ruse is now was once again in jeopardy, 23 00:01:25,770 --> 00:01:27,770 this time by climate. 24 00:01:27,770 --> 00:01:31,260 But Africa and the far-flung corners of the world are not the only places, 25 00:01:31,260 --> 00:01:32,500 or even the main places, 26 00:01:32,500 --> 00:01:36,980 in which manuscripts that could change the history of world culture 27 00:01:36,980 --> 00:01:38,985 are in jeopardy. 28 00:01:39,476 --> 00:01:40,356 Several years ago, 29 00:01:40,356 --> 00:01:44,046 I conducted a survey of European research libraries, 30 00:01:44,046 --> 00:01:46,306 and discovered that, at the barest minimum, 31 00:01:46,306 --> 00:01:52,776 there are 30,000, actually 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500 32 00:01:52,776 --> 00:01:54,556 that are illegible 33 00:01:54,556 --> 00:02:00,006 because of water damage, fading, mold, and chemical reagents. 34 00:02:00,422 --> 00:02:03,026 The real number is likely double that. 35 00:02:03,026 --> 00:02:06,516 That doesn't even count renaissance manuscripts, 36 00:02:06,516 --> 00:02:08,036 and modern manuscripts, 37 00:02:08,036 --> 00:02:11,586 and cultural heritage objects, such as maps. 38 00:02:13,004 --> 00:02:15,774 What if there were a technology 39 00:02:15,774 --> 00:02:20,375 that could recover these lost and unknown works? 40 00:02:21,269 --> 00:02:23,739 Imagine worldwide how a trove 41 00:02:23,739 --> 00:02:28,539 of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts 42 00:02:28,539 --> 00:02:31,739 could radically transform our knowledge of the past. 43 00:02:33,199 --> 00:02:37,539 Imagine what unknown classics we would discover 44 00:02:38,132 --> 00:02:42,629 which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music. 45 00:02:43,267 --> 00:02:46,767 Or more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, 46 00:02:46,767 --> 00:02:50,257 building new bridges between people and culture. 47 00:02:50,882 --> 00:02:53,522 These are the questions that transformed me 48 00:02:53,522 --> 00:02:56,254 from a medieval scholar, a reader of texts, 49 00:02:56,254 --> 00:02:58,481 into a textual scientist. 50 00:02:59,254 --> 00:03:01,764 What an unsatisfying word reader is? 51 00:03:01,764 --> 00:03:04,024 For me, it conjures up images of passivity, 52 00:03:04,024 --> 00:03:06,764 of someone sitting idly in an armchair, 53 00:03:06,764 --> 00:03:10,984 waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. 54 00:03:10,984 --> 00:03:14,504 How much better is to be a participant in the past, 55 00:03:14,504 --> 00:03:19,508 an adventurer in an undiscovered country, searching for the hidden text? 56 00:03:20,744 --> 00:03:23,744 As an academic, I was a mere reader. 57 00:03:24,231 --> 00:03:26,751 I read and taught the same classics 58 00:03:26,751 --> 00:03:29,751 that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years: 59 00:03:29,751 --> 00:03:32,751 Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch. 60 00:03:32,751 --> 00:03:35,001 With every scholarly article that I published, 61 00:03:35,001 --> 00:03:38,321 I added to human knowledge an ever-diminishing slivers of insight. 62 00:03:39,900 --> 00:03:43,970 What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past, 63 00:03:43,970 --> 00:03:45,795 a discoverer of literature, 64 00:03:45,795 --> 00:03:49,345 an Indiana Jones without the whip - or, actually, with the whip. 65 00:03:49,345 --> 00:03:50,355 (Laughter) 66 00:03:50,355 --> 00:03:54,045 And I wanted it not just for myself, but I wanted it for my students as well. 67 00:03:54,045 --> 00:03:57,975 So six years ago, I changed the direction of my career. 68 00:03:57,975 --> 00:04:00,995 At the time, I was working on "The Chess of Love", 69 00:04:00,995 --> 00:04:03,795 the last important long poem of the European Middle Ages, 70 00:04:03,795 --> 00:04:05,525 never to have been edited. 71 00:04:05,525 --> 00:04:08,525 It wasn't edited because it existed in only one manuscript, 72 00:04:08,525 --> 00:04:10,275 which was so badly damaged 73 00:04:10,290 --> 00:04:13,125 during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II 74 00:04:13,125 --> 00:04:16,265 that generations of scholars had pronounced it lost. 75 00:04:16,422 --> 00:04:19,785 For five years, I had been working with an ultraviolet lamp, 76 00:04:19,785 --> 00:04:22,265 trying to recover traces of that writing, 77 00:04:22,267 --> 00:04:25,025 and I'd gone about as far as the technology of that time 78 00:04:25,025 --> 00:04:26,245 could actually take me. 79 00:04:26,245 --> 00:04:28,045 So I did what many people do; 80 00:04:28,045 --> 00:04:31,065 I went online, and there I learned 81 00:04:31,238 --> 00:04:36,255 about how multi-spectral imaging had been used to recover 2 lost treatises 82 00:04:36,255 --> 00:04:40,805 of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes from a 13th-century palimpsest. 83 00:04:40,805 --> 00:04:44,265 A palimpsest is a manuscript which has been erased and overwritten. 84 00:04:45,530 --> 00:04:48,020 So, out of the blue, I decided to write 85 00:04:48,020 --> 00:04:52,020 to the lead imaging scientist on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, 86 00:04:52,020 --> 00:04:55,320 Professor Roger Easton, with a plan and a plea. 87 00:04:55,320 --> 00:04:57,770 To my surprise, he actually wrote back. 88 00:04:59,238 --> 00:05:02,948 With his help, I was able to win a grant from the US government 89 00:05:04,505 --> 00:05:08,515 to build a transportable multispectral imaging lab - 90 00:05:08,515 --> 00:05:10,815 yes, this is the dirty little secret 91 00:05:10,815 --> 00:05:13,025 of where your tax dollars are really going - 92 00:05:13,025 --> 00:05:17,805 and with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess 93 00:05:17,805 --> 00:05:20,235 into a new medieval classic. 94 00:05:20,739 --> 00:05:23,539 So, how does multispectral imaging actually work? 95 00:05:23,539 --> 00:05:25,749 The idea behind multispectral imaging 96 00:05:25,749 --> 00:05:27,589 is that something that anyone 97 00:05:27,589 --> 00:05:30,159 who is familiar with an infrared night-vision goggles 98 00:05:30,159 --> 00:05:31,519 will immediately appreciate, 99 00:05:31,519 --> 00:05:34,629 that what we can see invisible light, invisible spectrum of light, 100 00:05:34,629 --> 00:05:37,759 is only tiny fraction of what's actually there. 101 00:05:38,511 --> 00:05:40,731 The same is true with invisible writing. 102 00:05:42,499 --> 00:05:48,920 Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared. 103 00:05:50,059 --> 00:05:54,449 These are shown down onto the manuscript from above, from banks of LEDs, 104 00:05:54,449 --> 00:05:56,279 and another multispectral light source 105 00:05:56,279 --> 00:05:59,229 which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript. 106 00:05:59,229 --> 00:06:03,959 Up to 35 images per leaf are imaged this way, 107 00:06:03,959 --> 00:06:05,569 using a high-power digital camera 108 00:06:05,569 --> 00:06:08,499 equipped with a lens which is made out of quartz. 109 00:06:08,499 --> 00:06:10,789 There are about 5 of these in the world. 110 00:06:10,789 --> 00:06:12,849 Once we capture these images, 111 00:06:12,849 --> 00:06:15,039 we feed them through statistical algorithms 112 00:06:15,039 --> 00:06:17,269 to further enhance and clarify them, 113 00:06:17,269 --> 00:06:20,499 using software which is originally designed for satellite images, 114 00:06:20,499 --> 00:06:25,969 and used by people like geospatial scientists and the CIA. 115 00:06:25,969 --> 00:06:28,276 The results can be spectacular. 116 00:06:28,276 --> 00:06:30,306 Some of you may already have heard 117 00:06:30,306 --> 00:06:32,976 of what's been done for the Dead Sea Scrolls, 118 00:06:32,976 --> 00:06:35,246 which are slowly gelatinizing. 119 00:06:35,726 --> 00:06:37,596 Using infrared, we've been able to read 120 00:06:37,596 --> 00:06:41,246 even the darkest corners of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 121 00:06:41,961 --> 00:06:43,411 You may not be aware, however, 122 00:06:43,411 --> 00:06:45,961 of other Biblical texts that are in jeopardy. 123 00:06:46,459 --> 00:06:51,519 Here, for example, is a leaf from a manuscript that we imaged, 124 00:06:51,519 --> 00:06:56,518 which is perhaps the most valuable Christian Bible in the world. 125 00:06:57,332 --> 00:07:03,022 The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin, 126 00:07:03,022 --> 00:07:05,742 and it dates from the first half of 4th century. 127 00:07:07,723 --> 00:07:12,523 As you can see, this is the closest we can come to the Bible 128 00:07:12,523 --> 00:07:17,253 at the time of the foundation of Christendom under Emperor Constantine, 129 00:07:17,253 --> 00:07:19,813 and at the time of also the Council of Nicaea, 130 00:07:19,813 --> 00:07:23,073 when the basic creed of Christianity was being agreed upon. 131 00:07:23,468 --> 00:07:26,548 This manuscript, unfortunately, has been very badly damaged. 132 00:07:26,548 --> 00:07:31,258 It's damaged because for centuries it has been used and handled 133 00:07:31,258 --> 00:07:34,028 in swearing-in ceremonies in the church. 134 00:07:34,028 --> 00:07:37,678 In fact, that purple splotch that you see in the upper right-hand corner 135 00:07:38,365 --> 00:07:41,268 - upper left-hand corner. Right-hand corner? Yes. - 136 00:07:41,268 --> 00:07:43,508 ... is Aspergillus, 137 00:07:43,508 --> 00:07:49,748 which is a fungus which originates originally in the unwashed hands 138 00:07:49,748 --> 00:07:51,938 of a person with tuberculosis. 139 00:07:52,554 --> 00:07:54,614 Our imaging has enabled me 140 00:07:54,614 --> 00:07:58,724 to make the first transcription of this manuscript in 250 years. 141 00:07:59,749 --> 00:08:02,129 Having a lab that can travel to collections 142 00:08:02,129 --> 00:08:03,859 - to where it's needed, however - 143 00:08:03,859 --> 00:08:05,519 is only part of the solution. 144 00:08:05,519 --> 00:08:08,259 The technology is expensive and very rare, 145 00:08:08,588 --> 00:08:11,499 and the imaging and image processing skills are esoteric. 146 00:08:11,499 --> 00:08:14,749 That means that mounting recoveries is beyond the reach 147 00:08:14,749 --> 00:08:18,259 of most researchers and all but the wealthiest institutions. 148 00:08:18,259 --> 00:08:21,369 That's why I founded the Lazarus Project, 149 00:08:21,383 --> 00:08:23,779 a non-for-profit initiative 150 00:08:23,779 --> 00:08:25,919 to bring multispectral imaging 151 00:08:25,919 --> 00:08:29,919 to individual researchers and smaller institutions 152 00:08:29,919 --> 00:08:31,739 at little or no cost whatsoever. 153 00:08:32,494 --> 00:08:34,294 Over the past five years, 154 00:08:34,294 --> 00:08:38,024 our team of imaging scientists, scholars, and students 155 00:08:38,024 --> 00:08:40,244 has traveled to seven different countries 156 00:08:40,244 --> 00:08:41,534 and have recovered 157 00:08:41,534 --> 00:08:44,054 some of the world's most valuable damaged manuscripts, 158 00:08:44,054 --> 00:08:47,184 including the Vercelli Book, which is the oldest book of English, 159 00:08:47,184 --> 00:08:49,764 the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest book of Welsh, 160 00:08:49,764 --> 00:08:53,524 and some of the most valuable earliest Gospels, 161 00:08:53,524 --> 00:08:56,544 located in now what's the former Soviet Georgia. 162 00:08:57,749 --> 00:09:00,759 So spectral imaging can recover lost texts. 163 00:09:01,475 --> 00:09:06,505 More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object, 164 00:09:06,505 --> 00:09:11,275 the story of how, when, and by whom a text was created, 165 00:09:11,275 --> 00:09:14,955 and sometimes, what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. 166 00:09:15,727 --> 00:09:18,677 Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence, 167 00:09:18,677 --> 00:09:21,247 written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, 168 00:09:21,247 --> 00:09:23,727 which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago 169 00:09:23,727 --> 00:09:25,467 at the Library of Congress. 170 00:09:25,467 --> 00:09:26,757 Curators had noticed 171 00:09:26,757 --> 00:09:30,487 that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. 172 00:09:30,487 --> 00:09:33,247 The word overwritten was "citizens". 173 00:09:33,247 --> 00:09:36,267 Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was. 174 00:09:36,995 --> 00:09:38,236 "Subjects". 175 00:09:38,504 --> 00:09:41,304 There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy 176 00:09:41,304 --> 00:09:43,774 evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson. 177 00:09:44,247 --> 00:09:48,016 Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map, 178 00:09:48,247 --> 00:09:50,767 which we imaged at Yale's Beinecke Library. 179 00:09:50,767 --> 00:09:53,517 This was the map that Columbus likely consulted 180 00:09:53,517 --> 00:09:55,287 before he traveled to the New World, 181 00:09:55,287 --> 00:09:57,907 and which gave him his idea of what Asia looked like 182 00:09:57,907 --> 00:09:59,712 and where Japan was located. 183 00:10:01,218 --> 00:10:02,918 The problem with this map 184 00:10:02,920 --> 00:10:06,508 is that its inks and pigments had so degraded over time 185 00:10:06,508 --> 00:10:08,917 that this large, nearly 7-foot map 186 00:10:09,495 --> 00:10:12,495 made the world look like a giant desert. 187 00:10:12,495 --> 00:10:16,005 Until now, we had very little idea, detailed idea, that is, 188 00:10:16,005 --> 00:10:19,535 of what Columbus knew of the world and how world cultures were represented. 189 00:10:20,255 --> 00:10:24,245 The main legend of the map was entirely illegible under normal light. 190 00:10:24,245 --> 00:10:27,255 Ultraviolet did very little for it. 191 00:10:27,255 --> 00:10:29,725 Multispectral gave us everything. 192 00:10:30,225 --> 00:10:32,275 In Asia, we learned of monsters 193 00:10:32,275 --> 00:10:35,905 with ears so long that they could cover the creature's entire body. 194 00:10:36,491 --> 00:10:41,141 In Africa, about the snake who could cause the ground to smoke. 195 00:10:42,254 --> 00:10:44,244 Like starlight which can give today 196 00:10:44,244 --> 00:10:47,614 images of the way the universe looked in the distant past, 197 00:10:47,614 --> 00:10:50,034 so multispectral light can take us back 198 00:10:50,034 --> 00:10:53,504 to the first stuttering moments of an object's creation. 199 00:10:53,504 --> 00:10:57,504 Through this lens, we witnessed the mistakes, the changes of mind, 200 00:10:57,504 --> 00:11:00,554 the naivetes, young censored thoughts, 201 00:11:00,554 --> 00:11:02,744 the imperfections of the human imagination 202 00:11:02,744 --> 00:11:05,784 that allowed these hallowed objects and their authors 203 00:11:05,784 --> 00:11:10,175 to become more real, that make history closer to us. 204 00:11:13,744 --> 00:11:15,531 So what about the future? 205 00:11:15,531 --> 00:11:17,781 There's so much of the past 206 00:11:17,781 --> 00:11:21,051 and so few people with the skills to rescue it 207 00:11:21,051 --> 00:11:24,839 before these objects disappear forever. 208 00:11:25,541 --> 00:11:29,201 That's why I've begun to teach this new hybrid discipline 209 00:11:29,201 --> 00:11:30,981 that I call textual science, 210 00:11:30,981 --> 00:11:35,482 a mixture between kind of Indiana Jones meets CSI. 211 00:11:36,704 --> 00:11:39,004 Textual science is a marriage 212 00:11:39,004 --> 00:11:41,474 of the traditional skills of the literary scholar - 213 00:11:41,474 --> 00:11:44,144 the ability to read old languages and old handwriting, 214 00:11:44,144 --> 00:11:45,694 the knowledge how texts are made 215 00:11:45,694 --> 00:11:47,904 in order to be able to place and date them - 216 00:11:47,904 --> 00:11:50,324 with new techniques like imaging science, 217 00:11:50,324 --> 00:11:52,764 the chemistry of inks and pigments, 218 00:11:52,764 --> 00:11:55,504 computer-aided optical character recognition. 219 00:11:56,431 --> 00:11:59,031 Last year, a student in my class, 220 00:11:59,031 --> 00:12:01,741 a freshman with the background in Latin and Greek 221 00:12:01,741 --> 00:12:03,771 was image-processing a palimpsest 222 00:12:03,771 --> 00:12:07,741 that we had photographed at the famous library in Rome. 223 00:12:07,741 --> 00:12:12,751 As he worked, tiny Greek writing began to appear from behind the text. 224 00:12:13,713 --> 00:12:15,073 Everyone gathered around, 225 00:12:15,073 --> 00:12:20,513 and he read a line from a lost work of the Greek comic dramatist Menander. 226 00:12:21,239 --> 00:12:24,239 This was the first time in well over a thousand years 227 00:12:24,244 --> 00:12:27,289 that those words had been pronounced aloud. 228 00:12:27,959 --> 00:12:30,469 In that moment, he became a scholar. 229 00:12:31,388 --> 00:12:34,496 Ladies and gentlemen, that is the future of the past. 230 00:12:34,496 --> 00:12:35,516 Thank you very much. 231 00:12:35,516 --> 00:12:37,156 (Applause)