
Adobe Photoshop and 1700s Manuscripts: A New Approach to Digital Paleography - benbreen
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000187/000187.html
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igravious
Oh hey. Cool! My area. (digital humanities) Nice to see it hit the front page
of HN.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, the digital humanities (DH) is
humanities 2.0. It is an evolving area of research that uses computational
methods to explore and answer traditional humanities research questions. When
I say humanities, I'm assuming you know I'm simultaneously talking about arts,
as in the A in BA, MA, and so on :)

Digital humanities[1] is actually a re-branding of what is known as
_humanities computing_[2] which is arguably a more accurate term mirroring as
it does the term _scientific computing_[3].

DH covers things like digital archiving, using GIS in archaeology, using
computational linguistics in the service literary criticism, stylometrics,
applied ontology, digital metadata standards, and much much more.

A good journal to start with is Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:
[http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/](http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/) and the main
umbrella conference this year is in Jagiellonian university in Kraków, Poland
-- one of the oldest universities in the world, operational since 1364!
[http://dh2016.adho.org/](http://dh2016.adho.org/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/humanities_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/humanities_computing)
(redirects to DH)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_computing)
(redirects to computational science)

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tdumitrescu
Humanities scholars tend to stay very isolated within their fields. The
Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music has been using these exact techniques
since the 90s, and even published a "workbook" on it:
[http://www.diamm.ac.uk/publications/digital-restoration-
work...](http://www.diamm.ac.uk/publications/digital-restoration-workbook/)

~~~
igravious
A recent TED talk by Gregory Heyworth on using spectral imaging to reveal the
hidden (to our eyes) content of ancient manuscripts. I don't usually watch TED
talks any more but this one has a fair bit of meat and I found it genuinely
inspiring.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discoverin...](http://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discovering_the_secrets_of_ancient_texts)

What does it even mean to say that humanities scholars tend to stay very
isolated. How would you even measure that? And as compared to what?

~~~
tdumitrescu
I mean that, e.g., recent paleographical work which medieval music specialists
have done on the sources which interest them has been more or less invisible
to scholars of literature, history of science, etc., and vice versa. Even when
they overlap almost exactly, as in this case. By recent I mean the last 2-3
decades, not like this past year.

~~~
igravious
I get what you mean.

The point is that if this work is applicable to a wider audience then why not
get it in front of those eyeballs by publishing in a place where multiple
disciplines congregate? This is the point of the Humanist[0] mailing list, for
instance -- in the case of humanities computing applications.

[0] [http://dhhumanist.org/](http://dhhumanist.org/)

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rickdale
Photoshop is awesome for stuff like this, and its so simple. I had this
picture of my dad sitting on a tank in the middle of the middle east, but you
couldn't see him and it was really faded. I googled how to restore it in
photoshop, and it took me less than 5 minutes. All the sudden there is this
clear detailed face and you can see my dad is there smoking a cigarette as
usual. My dad died young almost 15 years ago and restoring that image meant a
lot to my uncle as well as the rest of my family. When I first got the picture
my mind was thinking, I wish I knew a professional that could restore it. But
all you really need is the software and google..

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metaphor
Maybe I'm too cynical, but my initial instincts suggest this paper is a direct
by-product of the academic "publish or perish" paradigm.

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sjwright
Is this an old article? They're using a version of Adobe Photoshop released in
2003. (Version 8; the current version is 16.1)

~~~
Jerry2
He's using PS CS2 which was released by Adobe for free [0]. For what he's
using PS for, CS2 is more than adequate. And you can't beat the price. He
could also use GIMP for all those steps as well.

[0] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-get-
photoshop-...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-get-photoshop-
for-free/)

~~~
zokier
No, CS2 has not been released for free. The activation-free downloads were
offered to support existing legitimate CS2 licensees.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2013/01/07/...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2013/01/07/download-
adobe-cs2-applications-for-free/)

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xufi
Awesome to see how PS can preserve stuff like this. I plan to do this for some
older texts I have around .

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nathancahill
Cute. The screenshots really make it.

