
Too Fragile to Open, World’s Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized - benbreen
http://hyperallergic.com/228207/too-fragile-to-open-worlds-oldest-multicolor-printed-book-is-digitized/
======
GauntletWizard
The article gives absolutely no impression of the tech used to digitize it.
It's made clear in the article that they did actually open it for the
digitization (I was imagining a fanciful rig carefully sliding between pages
to scan them), but it's basically a puff piece for the actual gallery, which
is only linked at the end. Here's what you really want to see:
[http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/1](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/1)

My parents have some similar calligraphy watercolors; Korean in origin, though
using chinese characters. They're quite a sight to behold (though not nearly
as old), with fantastic use of minimalism and color to portray the life and
depth of trees and birds.

~~~
userbinator
I think they just opened it and took a picture of each page. According to the
EXIF data in the images it was taken with a Phase One IQ180 - a _very_ high-
end 80MP digital camera that costs $40k+:

[http://www.wired.com/2011/05/phase-one-
iq180/](http://www.wired.com/2011/05/phase-one-iq180/)

What I find annoying is that the viewer is yet another one of those JS-heavy
web apps... when this could be done much simpler using a static page image
gallery, or even better, a PDF. (Contrast it with the digital library at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006579)
to see what i mean.)

The direct links to the high-res images (not the full 80MP, but ~3.5MP) are
here:

[http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00001.jpg)

through

[http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00388.jpg)

------
madaxe_again
So... How did they digitise it if they couldn't open it? X-rays? Article
completely fails to answer its own title's mystique.

Edit: From the original article at Cambridge
([http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/oracle-bones-and-unseen-
beauty...](http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/oracle-bones-and-unseen-beauty-
wonders-priceless-chinese-collection-now-online)):

"Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University
Library, said: “This is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour
printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with
associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers. Although
reprinted many times, complete sets of early editions in the original binding
are extremely rare.

“The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was
digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it –
despite its undoubted importance to scholars.”

"

So not too fragile to open, just too fragile to allow _everybody who would
like to_ to open it.

------
aeschylus
[IIIF Protocol](iiif.io) at work.

It's finally getting easier to build browser-based, zooming viewers for these
resources since the protocol has emerged.

At Stanford I work on
[Mirador]([http://projectmirador.org/](http://projectmirador.org/)), another
interface to these resources (with a built-in tiling window manager). I hope
that one day all large images on the web will be deep-zoomable through IIIF by
default.

The internet archive is another institution with an underappreciated wealth of
perennially relevant content. They have hundreds of thousands of JP2s of
timeless artworks.

It will be a great boon when decent open source software exists for encoding
and decoding JP2.

Those asking about the meaning of symbols/translations might be interested in
the recent announcement of the [Open Annotation Protocol
Specification]([http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-
model/](http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/)) by the W3C.

------
x0x0
it's astounding to look at something so delicate put together by human hands
380 years ago

these flowers are particularly catching: [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/305](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/305)

~~~
dublinben
It's even more astounding that this library is asserting copyright on a nearly
400 year old document.[0] This material is unquestionably in the public
domain.

[0][http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00305.jpg)

~~~
kwhitefoot
It is but the photographs might not be. In the US a straightforward
photographic copy is not regarded as a work of art and hence is not
copyrightable (see [http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/copyright-
issues.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/copyright-issues.html)), I'm not
so sure the case law is so clear elsewhere. If you could somehow take your own
pictures of it then you could certainly dedicate those to the public domain.

~~~
antsar
Is it still a "straightforward photographic copy" now that they've added the
ruler for scale though? Perhaps that makes it copyrightable.

------
david-given
Is a translation available? I'd rather like to know what the poems say.

(Also, I know someone who'd really like a nice facsimile edition. Er, other
than me. Those birds are amazing.)

~~~
zariskij
If you meant the poems in the manual, those would be pretty hard to
translate...

~~~
coldpie
I think he meant in the manual, yes. For example page 12[1]. I don't have a
good understanding of Chinese, ancient or otherwise; why would they be
difficult to translate?

[1] [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/12](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-
FH-00910-00083-00098/12)

