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

[Doug Harris]

Fascinating article.
An exerpt:
"The ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned down in 48 B.C., incinerating works by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles; today, out of more than 120 plays by Sophocles, only seven survive.z"
--
Too bad the IX I I system wasn't in use there, then.
dh

Prepared and sent with Chaos Software's Intellect mail client.
Intellect's contacts and appointments managers also are cool.

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Received: 5/11/2009 11:51:45 AM
Subject: Fwd:  The Next Age of Discovery (WSJ May 8)


> 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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