Fwd: The Next Age of Discovery (WSJ May 8)

[Joel S. Berson]

 From an email list for book indexers:
>   For anyone who works with words, this is just too epochal to be overlooked:
>
>by Alexander Alter
>Wall Street Journal
>In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer
>scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the
>globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.  In the
>process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds,
>including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels,
>fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved
>technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were
>once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion,
>painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are
>studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging
>used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical
>technicians. . . .
>
>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124173896716198603.html

Joel

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