Google to bring Dead Sea Scrolls online

These are the types of things that made me fall in love with Google in the 00's. It makes me happy that Google is continuing its quest to make all historical documents available to everyone.

Now, I know cynics can argue that "This is just Google driving more search traffic!" or "This is Google putting a ton of money into a PR campaign!" In fact, I would be one of those cynics if I didn't believe this is just residue from a kinder, more lofty-goaled Google that was led by Larry and Sergey.

I want the old Google back.

This is typical of the sort of free-loading piracy that Google promotes.

Have they even tried to contact the authors? Don't they and their families deserve some of the royalties?

Has Sonny Bono been told?

I think print.google.com can be an amazing tool for fostering research on ancient texts without compromising the preservation and security of such rare ancient documents. I hope this is the first of many rare texts to be made public and accessible.

This is actually fairly historic considering all of the controversy that arose over the translation of the original sea scrolls. Basically almost all of the translators were members of the Catholic church, so when they discovered that the scrolls undermined their faith they just sat on them for 20+ years so no one else was allowed to read them. (With the except of John Marco Allegro, the one non-Catholic who published his work immediately and then went on to use them in his next book as evidence that Jesus was actually a psilocybin mushroom.)

I hope I'm not the only one that thinks it's hilarious that this news about Google is being reported by Yahoo.

Where's the official Google announcement?

I was hoping they'd be using advanced imaging for text not visible to the naked eye, and was excited to see this paragraph: "The refined images were shot with a high-tech infrared camera NASA uses for space imaging. It helped uncover sections of the scrolls that have faded over the centuries and became indecipherable"

The (still!) ongoing translation of the dead sea scroll fragments could really benefit from some computational techniques. They're trying to do something akin to gene sequencing manually.