Overview
The Herculaneum Papyri, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and rediscovered in 1754, constitute the only library from the ancient Mediterranean world (except the library of Ashurbanipal and the Dead Sea Scrolls) that was found in circumstances that preserved it intact. It contains unique works of ancient Greek philosophy and Roman literature. Many of the 800 papyrus-rolls were opened physically (and thereby badly damaged), but around 270 scrolls or parts of them survive in their original condition, being too fragile to be opened.
Since 2005, computer scientist Brent Seales has toiled to discover a way to recover their texts without damaging them. His work entailed using CT technology to separate and flatten digitally the successive circumferences and “unroll” the papyrus digitally on screen. The next problem was how to recognize the ink. The latter problem was resolved in 2024 by Casey Craig’s recognition of ‘crackle’ and then the application of Machine Learning. Upon the initiative of Nat Friedman, who established the Vesuvius Challenge, and with contributions from many members of the international AI community, three contestants, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader, and Julian Schilliger, won the Grand Prize by producing legible images of Greek text of 16 columns from a roll that is preserved in Paris and was scanned with the Diamond Light Source at Oxford.
Another Grand Prize has been offered for 2024, focused on recovering the text from all four scrolls that are in Paris. This one-day conference is timed to bring together papyrologists and experts in Artificial Intelligence to review the progress that has been made, consider how to address the problems that remain, and to discuss future directions, including the potential for the use of AI in work on other collections of damaged manuscripts and in the humanities more widely. On the following day there will be a workshop to exchange ideas. Solutions to present problems and possible future directions may be clarified by a visit to the unique collections housed in the University of Michigan (807 Hatcher Library), which include Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic writings on papyrus, parchment, wood, lead, waxed tablets, and potsherds, Medieval Greek manuscripts on parchment and paper, and Islamic manuscripts on paper.
Speakers
Dr. David Blank, Professor of Classics and Philosophy; University of California, Los Angeles
David Blank is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Philosophy at UCLA. His work focuses on the philosophy of language and grammar in Greece and Rome, and he has published extensively on the Herculaneum papyri.
Dr. Mami Hayashida, Research Cyberinfrastructure Architect; University of Kentucky
Originally trained as a classical pianist, Mami Hayashida started working for the University Kentucky ITS Research Computing division in 2018 and has subsequently joined Dr. Brent Seales’s Digital Restoration Initiative research group part-time as an infrastructure/data engineer. During the first three years, she primarily helped improve the accuracy of ML models for detecting invisible ink on fragments through CNN filter visualizations and input and output data analyses. More recently, she has been working on input data processing and organization of the vast collection of data collected over the decades. She also assists CS faculty in guiding undergraduate student researchers. In addition to DRI, she works part-time for the FABRIC Testbed project as a software architect and serves as a system administrator for object storage clusters for research data at the university.
Dr. Richard Janko, Gerald F Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies and Professor of Classical Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; University of Michigan
Richard Janko was born in 1955 in Weston Underwood, England. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took part in Lord William Taylour’s excavations at Ayios Stephanos in Laconia and studied with Dr John Chadwick. His scholarship has focused on Bronze Age Greece, Homer, early Greek religion and philosophy, ancient literary criticism, and the reconstruction of ancient books on papyrus-rolls. His first book Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns established by a statistical study of language the relative chronology of the corpus of early Greek epic poetry. His controversial book Aristotle on Comedy argues that a summary of the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on comedy and humour survives in a tenth-century manuscript in Paris. This was followed by an annotated translation of the Poetics itself. He wrote the Cambridge commentary on Homer’s Iliad 13–16 in the series edited by Geoffrey Kirk. In 2008 he published the excavations at Ayios Stephanos, which clarify relations between Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. His reconstruction and edition of Philodemus’ On Poems Book 1 in 2000 won the Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association. In 2011 he published On Poems Books 3 and 4, which critiques Aristotle’s lost dialogue On Poets. His edition of On Poems Book 2, which rebuts the previously unknown euphonist critics Heracleodorus and Pausimachus, appeared in 2020. He is working on new editions of the Derveni papyrus and Aristotle’s Poetics. He is currently the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He previously taught at St. Andrews, Columbia University, UCLA and University College London. He has held visiting professorships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, the American Philosophical Society in 2009, and the Academy of Athens in 2017.
Dr. Jing Liu, Executive Director, Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society; University of Michigan
As the MIDAS Executive Director, I oversee the operations of the institute and the staff team. I also design programs and projects to enable groundbreaking research, build interdisciplinary teams, strengthen research skills, improve the rigor and reproducibility of research, and ensure the responsible use of data and AI, all for the purpose of maximizing the scientific impact of data science and AI. In addition, I build partnerships with academia, industry, government and community organizations, both for research collaboration and for maximizing the societal impact of data science and AI. Working with colleagues at data science institutes across universities, I seek to improve how academic researchers adopt the rapidly evolving data and AI methodologies, and support data- and AI-enabled decision making in the public and private sectors.
I also co-direct our two postdoctoral training programs, the Michigan Data Science Fellows Program; and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Schmidt Futures Program.
My research interest includes examining the data science and AI research infrastructure and research rigor and reproducibility, and using data and AI to support decision making.
Dr. Federica Nicolardi, Assistant Professor of Papyrology; University of Naples Federico II
Federica Nicolardi is Assistant Professor of Papyrology at the University of Naples Federico II and a member of the Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi ‘M. Gigante’. Her research primarily focuses on the Herculaneum papyri, with a special emphasis on critical editions and virtual restoration techniques. She is the PI of RECREATE – REConstructing papyrus scrolls and REcovering Ancient TExts with the aid of a new digital tool, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. She has been collaborating with Brent Seales’ project on ‘Digital Restoration of Herculaneum Papyri’ (University of Kentucky) and she is part of the Papyrology team of the Vesuvius Challenge (scrollprize.org).
Dr. Brent Seales, Stanley and Karen Pigman Heritage Science Chair; Director of Graduate Studies, Data Science; University of Kentucky
Brent Seales is the Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, where he has been teaching and mentoring students since 1991. He holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D. and M.S.), and the University of Southwestern Louisiana (B.S.). The focus of his research for the past 20 years has been on using advanced technology to restore and redeem cultural and historical artifacts from the ravages of time. The challenge of rescuing texts that may be central to Biblical scholarship and the formation of the ancient world is a primary passion.
As a result of his innovations, including the invention of “virtual unwrapping,” Dr. Seales has become renowned by collectors and curators across the globe, earning a reputation as “the guy who can read the unreadable:· In 2015, Seales and his research team used virtual unwrapping to reveal, for the first time ever, a complete text from a manuscript so damaged it would never be opened and read via traditional means. The text was identified as the oldest known Hebrew copy of the book of Leviticus (other than the Dead Sea Scrolls), carbon dated to the third century C.E. The reading of the text from within the damaged scroll received international recognition from Science Advances, The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Times of London, among others, and has been hailed as one of the most significant discoveries in biblical archaeology of the past decade.
Dr. Seales has been awarded competitive extramural funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Science Foundation, and the United Kingdom’s Arts & Humanities Research Council. He was a Google Visiting Scientist in Paris (2012-13), where he continued work on the “virtual unwrapping” of the Herculaneum scrolls. He most recently served as a Getty Conservation Institute Scholar (2019-20). where he developed data science and infrastructure approaches to the study of cultural heritage in all its forms. He is Pl on the EduceLab project, a first-of-its-kind world class heritage science lab to be built at the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Seth Parker, Project Lead, Digital Restoration Initiative; University of Kentucky
Seth oversees the day-to-day aspects of software development and works with students to plan and implement technical goals. Having been with the project since 2012, Seth was pivotal in the development of the virtual unwrapping software pipeline. While his interest in computer science pushes him to test the limits of technical achievement, his background in the humanities and media production brings with it a strong desire to restore the knowledge trapped inside ancient documents.
Schedule
10:00 am: Past Achievement
Richard Janko, Classical Studies, University of Michigan
The Herculaneum Papyri and their Unrolling from 1754: problems and methods
David Blank, UCLA [on history of unrolling]
Federica Nicolardi, University of Naples [on history of reconstructing rolls]
Michael McOsker, University of London [on contents of the library]
Scanning, Segmenting, Flattening, and Detecting Ink: getting to the Scroll Prize, 2023
Stephen Parsons, University of Kentucky
12:00 – 1:30 PM – *Lunch*
1:30 pm: Present Problems
Presider: Brent Seales, Computer Science, University of Kentucky
Detecting Ink and Reducing Noise via Machine Learning?
Youssef Nader (Computer Science, Berlin)
Luke Farritor (Palo Alto)
Segmentation: Problems and Solutions?
Julian Schilliger (Basel)
Seth Parker (University of Kentucky)
Segmentation: Problems and Solutions?
Julian Schilliger (Basel)
Seth Parker (University of Kentucky)
6:00 – 6:45 PM – *Reception*
7:30 PM – *Dinner for speakers and organizers*
10:30-12:30 am: Workshop on finding ink and segmentation in a sample column
Papyrologists & AI experts
9:30-10:15 am: Visit Papyrology Collection
807 Hatcher
Organizer
Dr. Richard Janko
Gerald F Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies and Professor of Classical Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; University of Michigan
Co-hosting Unit
Questions? Contact Us.
Message the MIDAS team: midas-contact@umich.edu