Adobe Photoshop and 1700s Manuscripts: A New Approach to Digital Paleography | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Photoshop and 1700s Manuscripts: A New Approach to Digital Paleography

digitalhumanities.org

33 pointsbenbreen12 comments

Oh hey. Cool! My area. (digital humanities) Nice to see it hit the front page of HN.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, the digital humanities (DH) is humanities 2.0. It is an evolving area of research that uses computational methods to explore and answer traditional humanities research questions. When I say humanities, I'm assuming you know I'm simultaneously talking about arts, as in the A in BA, MA, and so on :)

Digital humanities[1] is actually a re-branding of what is known as _humanities computing_[2] which is arguably a more accurate term mirroring as it does the term _scientific computing_[3].

DH covers things like digital archiving, using GIS in archaeology, using computational linguistics in the service literary criticism, stylometrics, applied ontology, digital metadata standards, and much much more.

A good journal to start with is Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ and the main umbrella conference this year is in Jagiellonian university in Kraków, Poland -- one of the oldest universities in the world, operational since 1364! http://dh2016.adho.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/humanities_computing (redirects to DH)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_computing (redirects to computational science)

Humanities scholars tend to stay very isolated within their fields. The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music has been using these exact techniques since the 90s, and even published a "workbook" on it: http://www.diamm.ac.uk/publications/digital-restoration-work...

A recent TED talk by Gregory Heyworth on using spectral imaging to reveal the hidden (to our eyes) content of ancient manuscripts. I don't usually watch TED talks any more but this one has a fair bit of meat and I found it genuinely inspiring.

http://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discoverin...

What does it even mean to say that humanities scholars tend to stay very isolated. How would you even measure that? And as compared to what?

I mean that, e.g., recent paleographical work which medieval music specialists have done on the sources which interest them has been more or less invisible to scholars of literature, history of science, etc., and vice versa. Even when they overlap almost exactly, as in this case. By recent I mean the last 2-3 decades, not like this past year.

I get what you mean.

The point is that if this work is applicable to a wider audience then why not get it in front of those eyeballs by publishing in a place where multiple disciplines congregate? This is the point of the Humanist[0] mailing list, for instance -- in the case of humanities computing applications.

[0] http://dhhumanist.org/

Photoshop is awesome for stuff like this, and its so simple. I had this picture of my dad sitting on a tank in the middle of the middle east, but you couldn't see him and it was really faded. I googled how to restore it in photoshop, and it took me less than 5 minutes. All the sudden there is this clear detailed face and you can see my dad is there smoking a cigarette as usual. My dad died young almost 15 years ago and restoring that image meant a lot to my uncle as well as the rest of my family. When I first got the picture my mind was thinking, I wish I knew a professional that could restore it. But all you really need is the software and google..

Maybe I'm too cynical, but my initial instincts suggest this paper is a direct by-product of the academic "publish or perish" paradigm.

Is this an old article? They're using a version of Adobe Photoshop released in 2003. (Version 8; the current version is 16.1)

He's using PS CS2 which was released by Adobe for free [0]. For what he's using PS for, CS2 is more than adequate. And you can't beat the price. He could also use GIMP for all those steps as well.

[0] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-get-photoshop-...

No, CS2 has not been released for free. The activation-free downloads were offered to support existing legitimate CS2 licensees.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2013/01/07/...

Awesome to see how PS can preserve stuff like this. I plan to do this for some older texts I have around .

Cute. The screenshots really make it.

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