Technology debuted at Congress makes the invisible visible
The Congress of the Humanities and Social Science showcased a historic use of technology last weekend, and it’s being used to discover more about history itself.
Standing in a dark room with a five-by-seven inch historic page that has been magnified into a crystal-clear image on a screen twice the size of a person, it became apparent that the words were different from what they first appeared.
Murray McGillivray is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, and at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences an audience got to take a look at a study he’s undertaken that makes what might’ve been invisible in ancient book, now visible.
The process is called multispectral imaging, and it shines incredibly bright LED lights at the manuscript’s illustrations in various colours. They range from red and blue, to invisible spectra like ultraviolet and infrared, and essentially allow you to see underneath the topmost layer of paintings. In the case of the manuscript’s written parts, the illumination also allowed for incredible high-resolution images of the fading, minuscule writing.
“The pigments of the ink used react in different ways, depending on the type of light used,” said McGillivray. In cases like the poem used, where the drawings were altered and changed over time, the process can allow you to see what the original painter drew, before others altered and sometimes “ruined,” the pictures, according to McGillivray.
“You essentially can see underneath the paint,” said McGillivray. He said that, in some cases, the newer drawings were much more crude than the original pieces, calling the additions akin to “pimping your Honda Civic, or something like that for the era.”
Beyond the multispectral imaging technique that used multiple colours to see underneath pictures, McGillivray’s study also used incredibly bright lights to illuminate the poem’s text.
Text that was earlier fading and difficult to read on the tiny page could now be magnified to a 35- million- pixel screen that turns the page into a gigantic 10 by 15 feet, using a massive floorto-ceiling screen at the U of C’s digital library.
“You can walk right up to it, and nothing is pixelated,” said McGillivray, describing the 35-million-pixel screen.
The result was breathtaking. Suddenly, it became obvious that what looked like a scratch on the side of a page was actually a hand signal that was pointing to what the author believe was an important section of the poem.
McGillivray said that there were 15 instances where it was found that passages of text suddenly meant totally different things.
Although McGillivray says those new meanings are difficult to describe, due to literary complexity, one of the cases was where they found that the use of the word “talking” was actually “tulking,” a Middle English word that changes the passage from a regular line to a line that jokes about the subject’s manhood.
In the case of the multispectral imaging technology, which allowed McGillivray to see underneath the layers of paintings, he says it’s in its infancy, but future uses of it could be revelatory for historians.
“I’m working on a grand proposal to use this on manuscripts that have been damaged by burning,” said McGillivray. Extraordinarily, early tests of multispectral imaging have shown good results on visualizing the writing on fire-damaged documents.
“I’m hoping that we can do trial imaging this summer to see whether some of those can actually be read for the first time in 300 years.”
But beyond his own plans, there are boundless uses for this kind of imaging technology.
“People are working on all kinds of documents that would otherwise be illegible; a good example is the diaries of the African explorer David Livingstone,” said McGillivray.
The explorer became separated from European civilization in the 1800s for around three years, and wrote his diaries in plant juices that have by now faded away. Multispectral imaging could let historians see what he was saying, for the first time in decades.
The possibilities for the technology are boundless, but its first wide-scale use debuted right here in Calgary.