Communications of the ACM
Software Tool Aids Quest to Read Herculaneum Scrolls
Research team members examine a Herculaneum scroll in the library of the Institut de France.
Credit: University of Kentucky
In the 18th century, researchers attempting to read the writings of ancient, charred scrolls picked and pulled at the fragile artifacts, destroying many. Fast forward to 2015 and researchers are developing a superior method, one that never unrolls or even attempts to open the scrolls.
Leaving it intact almost exactly as it was 2,000 years ago, scanning methods and a new first-of-its-kind computer software tool are currently working to reveal text from a Herculaneum scroll. The scroll, carbonized by the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was preserved with hundreds of others in the only library from antiquity to survive.
The "Volume Cartographer" software tool, built by Brent Seales, professor and chair of the University of Kentucky Department of Computer Science, and his team, will allow researchers to map the surface of the scroll and then allow a user to pull out pages and scan for letters. Revolutionary in more ways than one, the software is made to be user-friendly for scholars.
"It's really about what we can enable scholars to do," says Seth Parker, project manager and video production coordinator for the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. "We want to create a pipeline that we can actually give to historians, classicists, the people who want to study these texts, and enable them to unlock their own artifacts."
The project requires top-notch research assistants. Seales employed a group of U.K. undergraduate students to work on the software, part of an international collaboration to read the scroll.
"The caliber of talented undergraduates at the University of Kentucky is outstanding," Seales says. "It has been tremendously exciting for me to see the innovative and mature contributions that our students are making to the project."
In May, the team experienced the scope of the project firsthand when they traveled to Paris, France, to collaborate with a world-renowned papyrologist, who is learning to use the software, and to present their work at Google Paris, where Seales was a visiting scientist in 2012.
"I think it's a great honor," says Nick Graczyk of the Google "Tech Talk." Graczyk began working on the project as a U.K. computer science undergraduate, and will soon join Microsoft as a software engineer.
The software tool has progressed rapidly, with the group overcoming many technological challenges they had never faced before.
"What we get from the scanning machine is just a big brick of data," says Michael Roup, recent computer science and mathematics graduate and U.K. Presidential Scholar. "And we have to find the pages inside of that."
To do that, the software utilizes a number of tactics, including particle chain region growing, segmentation and texture mapping.
How does it work? Imagine a newspaper rolled up. From the viewpoint of looking through the hole, layers of pages are visible. From that same viewpoint using a scan of the scroll, the software user can see hundreds of layers, only not as perfectly tubular as the newspaper.
Then the user draws a line on what they think to be a single layer in the scroll. The software follows that line through the width of the scroll to pull out a page. From there, the user can "texture" the page, a significant step as each scroll page is an uneven, 3-D surface. After texturing, the page flattens into a 2-D equivalent and from there the user can see if words are present on the page.
One interesting feature of the software is the "sand grain detector," which maps out "sand grain constellations" and uses grains like stars to orient the user in the scroll. Since the scroll is carbonized, the grains should never move.
"Before this project started we didn't even know those grains existed," Seales says. "Now it may turn out that sand grains are the unique signature."
Following the Tech Talk, the team joined Google employees at lunch and were congratulated on their presentation and work.
Sharing their work was not the only highlight of the students' excursion. They were also granted access to view up close a scroll in the Herculaneum collection, housed in the Bibliotheque Mazarine, the oldest public library in France, at the Institut de France.
The scroll, similar to others in the collection, resembled a lump of charcoal. But in person, the lines of the papyrus surface were clearly visible and so too were the tightly coiled layers of the scroll, much like the layers of a tree trunk.
"It was eye-opening," says Abigail Coleman, a computer science graduate student and former NASA intern. "Being able to see the scroll kind of gives you more purpose for your work."
Adjacent to the library were the meeting chambers of the French Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666 by King Louis XIV, where the students carefully perused the walls displaying busts of each academy officer, including Napoleon.
"I've always had a little bit of an interest in history so this is really a good project for me to work on," says Melissa Shankle, who analyzed the software from a user perspective. "It's been a great experience that I never thought I would do as a freshman."
Now back home in their Davis Marksbury Building lab, Seales and Parker, as well as Coleman and Roup, who are working on the project through the summer, will attempt to produce an entire page of text from the scroll by the start of fall. And they will continue to work with the papyrologist in Paris, who will begin running segmentations on the Herculaneum scroll.
"We are now poised for discovery — discovery not just of new technical methods and software development, but of texts that we might somehow rescue," Seales says. "It is an honor to be holding this possibility in our hands and to be doing it with so talented a team of students and collaborators."
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