How to read an invisible classic | Gregory Heyworth | TEDxUM

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

What if there were a technology to recover these lost and unknown texts? Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unreadable and unknown works could change our knowledge of the past! What new classics would we discover that could rewrite the canons of literature, history, music, mathematics, philosophy, political science? Or more provocatively, how could they rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between cultures and people?

On January 26th, 2013,

a band of al-Qaeda militants
entered the ancient city of Timbuktu

on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.

There they set fire to a medieval library
of 30,000 manuscripts

written in Arabic
and several African languages,

and ranging in subjects
from astronomy to geography,

history to medicine,

including one book which records

perhaps the first treatment
for male erectile dysfunction.

Unknown in the West,

this was the collected wisdom
of an entire continent,

the voice of Africa at a time when Africa
was thought not to have a voice at all.

The Mayor of Bamako,
who witnessed the event,

called the burning of the manuscripts
a crime against world cultural heritage.

And he was right, or he would have been,

if it weren't for the fact
that he was also lying.

In fact, just before,

African scholars had collected
a random assortment of old books

and left them out
for the terrorists to burn.

Today, the collection lies hidden
in Bamako, the capital of Mali,

moldering in the high humidity.

What was rescued by ruse
is now was once again in jeopardy,

this time by climate.

But Africa and the far-flung corners
of the world are not the only places,

or even the main places,

in which manuscripts that could change
the history of world culture

are in jeopardy.

Several years ago,

I conducted a survey
of European research libraries,

and discovered that,
at the barest minimum,

there are 30,000,
actually 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500

that are illegible

because of water damage, fading,
mold, and chemical reagents.

The real number is likely double that.

That doesn't even count
renaissance manuscripts,

and modern manuscripts,

and cultural heritage objects,
such as maps.

What if there were a technology

that could recover
these lost and unknown works?

Imagine worldwide how a trove

of hundreds of thousands
of previously unknown texts

could radically transform
our knowledge of the past.

Imagine what unknown classics
we would discover

which would rewrite the canons
of literature, history, philosophy, music.

Or more provocatively, that could rewrite
our cultural identities,

building new bridges
between people and culture.

These are the questions
that transformed me

from a medieval scholar,
a reader of texts,

into a textual scientist.

What an unsatisfying word reader is?

For me, it conjures up
images of passivity,

of someone sitting idly in an armchair,

waiting for knowledge
to come to him in a neat little parcel.

How much better is to be
a participant in the past,

an adventurer in an undiscovered country,
searching for the hidden text?

As an academic, I was a mere reader.

I read and taught the same classics

that people had been reading and teaching
for hundreds of years:

Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch.

With every scholarly article
that I published,

I added to human knowledge
an ever-diminishing slivers of insight.

What I wanted to be
was an archaeologist of the past,

a discoverer of literature,

an Indiana Jones without the whip -
or, actually, with the whip.

(Laughter)

And I wanted it not just for myself,
but I wanted it for my students as well.

So six years ago, I changed
the direction of my career.

At the time, I was working
on "The Chess of Love",

the last important long poem
of the European Middle Ages,

never to have been edited.

It wasn't edited because it existed
in only one manuscript,

which was so badly damaged

during the firebombing of Dresden
in World War II

that generations of scholars
had pronounced it lost.

For five years, I had been working
with an ultraviolet lamp,

trying to recover traces of that writing,

and I'd gone about as far
as the technology of that time

could actually take me.

So I did what many people do;

I went online, and there I learned

about how multi-spectral imaging
had been used to recover 2 lost treatises

of the famed Greek mathematician
Archimedes from a 13th-century palimpsest.

A palimpsest is a manuscript
which has been erased and overwritten.

So, out of the blue, I decided to write

to the lead imaging scientist
on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project,

Professor Roger Easton,
with a plan and a plea.

To my surprise, he actually wrote back.

With his help, I was able to win
a grant from the US government

to build a transportable
multispectral imaging lab -

yes, this is the dirty little secret

of where your tax dollars
are really going -

and with this lab, I transformed
what was a charred and faded mess

into a new medieval classic.

So, how does multispectral imaging
actually work?

The idea behind multispectral imaging

is that something that anyone

who is familiar
with an infrared night-vision goggles

will immediately appreciate,

that what we can see invisible light,
invisible spectrum of light,

is only tiny fraction
of what's actually there.

The same is true with invisible writing.

Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light
between the ultraviolet and the infrared.

These are shown down onto the manuscript
from above, from banks of LEDs,

and another multispectral light source

which comes up through
the individual leaves of the manuscript.

Up to 35 images per leaf
are imaged this way,

using a high-power digital camera

equipped with a lens
which is made out of quartz.

There are about 5 of these in the world.

Once we capture these images,

we feed them
through statistical algorithms

to further enhance and clarify them,

using software which is originally
designed for satellite images,

and used by people
like geospatial scientists and the CIA.

The results can be spectacular.

Some of you may already have heard

of what's been done
for the Dead Sea Scrolls,

which are slowly gelatinizing.

Using infrared, we've been able to read

even the darkest corners
of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

You may not be aware, however,

of other Biblical texts
that are in jeopardy.

Here, for example, is a leaf
from a manuscript that we imaged,

which is perhaps the most valuable
Christian Bible in the world.

The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest
translation of the Gospels into Latin,

and it dates
from the first half of 4th century.

As you can see, this is the closest
we can come to the Bible

at the time of the foundation
of Christendom under Emperor Constantine,

and at the time
of also the Council of Nicaea,

when the basic creed of Christianity
was being agreed upon.

This manuscript, unfortunately,
has been very badly damaged.

It's damaged because for centuries
it has been used and handled

in swearing-in ceremonies in the church.

In fact, that purple splotch that you see
in the upper right-hand corner

- upper left-hand corner.
Right-hand corner? Yes. -

... is Aspergillus,

which is a fungus which originates
originally in the unwashed hands

of a person with tuberculosis.

Our imaging has enabled me

to make the first transcription
of this manuscript in 250 years.

Having a lab that can travel
to collections

- to where it's needed, however -

is only part of the solution.

The technology is expensive and very rare,

and the imaging
and image processing skills are esoteric.

That means that mounting recoveries
is beyond the reach

of most researchers
and all but the wealthiest institutions.

That's why I founded the Lazarus Project,

a non-for-profit initiative

to bring multispectral imaging

to individual researchers
and smaller institutions

at little or no cost whatsoever.

Over the past five years,

our team of imaging scientists,
scholars, and students

has traveled to seven different countries

and have recovered

some of the world's most valuable
damaged manuscripts,

including the Vercelli Book,
which is the oldest book of English,

the Black Book of Carmarthen,
the oldest book of Welsh,

and some of the most valuable
earliest Gospels,

located in now
what's the former Soviet Georgia.

So spectral imaging
can recover lost texts.

More subtly, though, it can recover
a second story behind every object,

the story of how, when,
and by whom a text was created,

and sometimes, what the author
was thinking at the time he wrote.

Take, for example, a draft
of the Declaration of Independence,

written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand,

which some colleagues of mine
imaged a few years ago

at the Library of Congress.

Curators had noticed

that one word throughout
had been scratched out and overwritten.

The word overwritten was "citizens".

Perhaps you can guess
what the word underneath was.

"Subjects".

There, ladies and gentlemen,
is American democracy

evolving under the hand
of Thomas Jefferson.

Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map,

which we imaged
at Yale's Beinecke Library.

This was the map
that Columbus likely consulted

before he traveled to the New World,

and which gave him his idea
of what Asia looked like

and where Japan was located.

The problem with this map

is that its inks and pigments
had so degraded over time

that this large, nearly 7-foot map

made the world look like a giant desert.

Until now, we had very little idea,
detailed idea, that is,

of what Columbus knew of the world
and how world cultures were represented.

The main legend of the map
was entirely illegible under normal light.

Ultraviolet did very little for it.

Multispectral gave us everything.

In Asia, we learned of monsters

with ears so long that they could cover
the creature's entire body.

In Africa, about the snake
who could cause the ground to smoke.

Like starlight which can give today

images of the way the universe
looked in the distant past,

so multispectral light can take us back

to the first stuttering moments
of an object's creation.

Through this lens, we witnessed
the mistakes, the changes of mind,

the naivetes, young censored thoughts,

the imperfections of the human imagination

that allowed these hallowed objects
and their authors

to become more real,
that make history closer to us.

So what about the future?

There's so much of the past

and so few people
with the skills to rescue it

before these objects disappear forever.

That's why I've begun to teach
this new hybrid discipline

that I call textual science,

a mixture between
kind of Indiana Jones meets CSI.

Textual science is a marriage

of the traditional skills
of the literary scholar -

the ability to read old languages
and old handwriting,

the knowledge how texts are made

in order to be able
to place and date them -

with new techniques like imaging science,

the chemistry of inks and pigments,

computer-aided optical
character recognition.

Last year, a student in my class,

a freshman with the background
in Latin and Greek

was image-processing a palimpsest

that we had photographed
at the famous library in Rome.

As he worked, tiny Greek writing
began to appear from behind the text.

Everyone gathered around,

and he read a line from a lost work
of the Greek comic dramatist Menander.

This was the first time
in well over a thousand years

that those words
had been pronounced aloud.

In that moment, he became a scholar.

Ladies and gentlemen,
that is the future of the past.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)