Revealing Hidden Text With Spectral Imaging

University Communications Author

11/18/2014 Added

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University of Nebraska-Lincoln English professor Adrian Wisnicki uses spectral imaging to reveal hidden text in historic documents.

Read more about this and other University of Nebraska-Lincoln research in the 2013-2014 UNL Research Report. See Illuminating Livingstone’s Legend: http://research.unl.edu/annualreport/2014/illuminating-livingstones-legend/

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[00:00:01.210]Renowned 19th century explorer David Livingston kept journals about his
[00:00:05.671]experiences traveling in Africa.
[00:00:07.881]It's very important cultural information.
[00:00:10.481]When he ran out of supplies, he used news print and ink made from clothing dye.
[00:00:15.802]Now technology is bringing Livingston's words into focus.
[00:00:19.872]Spectral imaging has allowed me to read some manuscripts that might not otherwise
[00:00:24.221]be legible.
[00:00:26.011]Adrian Wisnicki is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and
[00:00:30.541]a faculty fellow with UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
[00:00:36.041]He uses spectral imaging to expose journal entries that have faded over time.
[00:00:42.321]Newspaper text runs vertically here. Livingston's ink runs horizontally across
[00:00:47.471]the page.
[00:00:48.591]Spectral imaging uses wavelengths of light to illuminate nearly invisible text.
[00:00:54.581]A high resolution camera captures the images that can then be manipulated.
[00:00:59.731]This image here matches this image up here. But here you can see that the text
[00:01:03.952]is now almost fully visible.
[00:01:05.761]Wisnicki collaborates with scientists, computer programmers, archivists and
[00:01:10.521]others at institutions all over the world.
[00:01:13.842]He says that technology provides a new perspective.
[00:01:17.642]When I first stared getting processed images that revealed Livingston's texts,
[00:01:22.681]it was quite amazing because it felt like history was being made on the computer
[00:01:26.062]screen, because what had been invisible before was suddenly visible.
[00:01:29.562]Spectral imaging is now being used on a journal damaged by water. Wisnicki's
[00:01:34.721]research adds to the cultural and historical record preserved by Livingston
[00:01:40.061]and could also help in other areas.
[00:01:42.431]One of the ways that I'm keen to take the techonlogy further is to try to cover more
[00:01:47.681]environmental information about a given manuscript page so that you can learn
[00:01:51.421]about circumstances within a manuscript page might have been written or just
[00:01:55.231]been preserved over time.
[00:01:57.051]Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities fund the research. Wisnicki
[00:02:01.912]believes Linvingston, who kept such detailed records of his travels, would be
[00:02:06.781]happy his words are still being preserved.
[00:02:10.021]I think that he'd be excited to see that such efforts are being made to preserve
[00:02:13.812]his manuscripts and make them widely available, because that's exactly the
[00:02:17.011]kind of thing that he was interested in in writing about his experiences.
[00:02:21.621][music]

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Revealing Hidden Text With Spectral Imaging

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