Archimedes Palimpsest

Available

• About: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
• Raw data: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net/

Project manager

• Michael B. Toth

Description

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a thirteenth-century Greek prayer book written on parchment reused from much older scientific manuscripts, including works (some heretofore lost) of Archimedes, Hypereides, a commentary on Aristotle, and others. The digitization project, which ran from ten years from 1998-2008, applied the latest digital imaging techniques, including multispectral imaging, to recover as much of the concealed text and diagrams as possible.

Outcomes of the project included:

1. A public presentation of the project, the imaging story, descriptions and editions of the new texts, and a museum display in the Walters Art Gallery where the palimpsest is housed.
2. An open access, Creative Commons-licensed repository of the photographs, enhaced and filtered images, metadata and raw EpiDoc/TEI XML transcriptions of both surface and concealed texts on each page.
3. A presentation of the scientific manuscripts, published openly and free through Google Books.
4. Hard drives containing the approximately 1TB of raw image data, mailed to interested academics around the world.

Corpus

Contents of the corpus--both the TEI files and the associated images--are cataloged in the file contents.xml in the main data repository.