Center For Visualization & Virtual Environments
Research Project:
Digital Preservation and Visualization of Historical Artifacts
Investigators:
W. Brent Seales
James Griffioen
Kevin Kiernan
Michael Brown.
Sponsor:
IBM, National Science Foundation, British National Museum, and
University of Kentucky W.T. Young Library
This work develops new digital libraries from aging and damaged portions of the Cottonian Collection at the British Library, tailored to the requirements of scholars in the humanities. The results of this project include state-of-the-art technical approaches, tools that incorporate these new approaches, and a widely distributed digital library of restored, previously inaccessible manuscripts. In particular, the technical focus encompasses the following important research areas:
* Development of new illumination techniques for damaged and aging manuscripts using novel lighting methods to make it possible to recover markings and information that would otherwise be invisible
* Creation of a semantic object model and framework that support domain or data-specific restoration and content-based search/access for digital collections
* Incorporation of novel processing techniques for digitally restoring, enhancing, and searching/annotating manuscripts that have suffered damage from fire, water, and aging
The goal of our research is to preserve and restore badly damaged manuscripts using custom lighting and new digital restoration techniques. By putting advanced and focused computer tools for restoration and manipulation into the hands of expert editors, we hope to facilitate access to high quality digitally restored manuscripts and to the lost treasures they still preserve.
For more information, see: http://www.eppt.org/digitalatheneum/