Virtual unrolling, the technological procedure of using a high-resolution micro-computed tomography, more commonly known as micro-CT, scan of a sealed or partially destroyed ancient scroll to produce, through the algorithmic reconstruction of the internal layers of the scroll, a complete flat image of the legible surface of each successive layer of the scroll without ever physically opening or otherwise damaging the document, is, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most consequential single technologies ever developed for the reading of those ancient documentary manuscripts that are, by the accidents of fire, of water, of time, or of deliberate sealing, no longer physically openable. The technology of virtual unrolling was, in the years between 2005 and the present, principally developed by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky under the principal direction of the computer scientist Brent Seales, and the technology of virtual unrolling has been applied to a small number of the most consequential documentary manuscripts of the ancient Mediterranean world \u2014 including, in 2015 and 2016, the charred Leviticus scroll from the synagogue of En-Gedi in the desert of the southern shore of the Dead Sea. The application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll produced, in the modern scholarly view, the oldest copy of the book of Leviticus to be found in the Land of Israel since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, and the application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll has, in the more than ten years since the publication of the initial reading in 2016, been one of the principal single pieces of evidence for the modern scholarly understanding of the technological opportunities for the conservation and the reading of those ancient documentary manuscripts that are, by the accidents of preservation and the accidents of time, no longer physically openable.<\/p>\n
The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll, the documentary scroll from the synagogue of En-Gedi in the desert of the southern shore of the Dead Sea that was, in 2015 and 2016, virtually unwrapped and read by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, is, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most consequential single pieces of documentary evidence for the modern scholarly understanding of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible in the period between the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the writing of the Masoretic codices of the early medieval period. The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in the modern scholarly view, written in the Hebrew square script of the early third century of the Common Era, and the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll is, on the standard palaeographical dating of the modern scholarly literature, dated to the period approximately 200 to 300 CE \u2014 a period that places the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll at the centre of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible in the late Second Temple and the early Tannaitic periods. The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll had, on the standard reading of the technological analysis of the scroll, been deposited in the genizah of the synagogue of En-Gedi in the centuries before the destruction of the synagogue, and the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll had, on the standard reading of the technological analysis of the scroll, been preserved in the genizah of the synagogue of En-Gedi by the ancient linen wrappings of the genizah and by the cool, dry climate of the desert of the southern shore of the Dead Sea.<\/p>\n
The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in 1970, discovered in the course of an archaeological excavation of the synagogue of En-Gedi by the Israeli archaeologist Joseph (Yosef) Porath of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in the years between 1970 and the present, conserved in the conservation and the research laboratories of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, on 2 September 2010, severely damaged in a deliberate arson attack on the archaeological wing of the Dead Sea and Arava Science Center of the Israel Antiquities Authority in the village of Beit Govrin in the district of the Shfela in the state of Israel, and the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in the arson attack, charred and partially fused into a brittle, laminated, layered mass of carbonised scroll fabric. The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, on the standard reading of the modern archaeological literature on the arson attack, the most consequential single piece of documentary evidence for the textual history of the Hebrew Bible that was damaged in the arson attack, and the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in the arson attack, brought to a state of preservation in which it was no longer physically openable and in which the textual content of the scroll was, without the application of new technologies, irrecoverable.<\/p>\n
The application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll in 2015 and 2016 was, in the modern scholarly view, the most consequential single act of recovery in the history of the modern Israeli archaeological establishment. The application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll in 2015 and 2016 was, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal single pieces of evidence for the modern technological development of the virtual unrolling technology of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, and the application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal single pieces of evidence for the technological opportunities for the application of the virtual unrolling technology to the archaeological documentary manuscripts of the state of Israel.<\/p>\n
The Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky is, in the modern scholarly view, the leading single scholarly laboratory in the world for the development of the technology of virtual unrolling for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts. The Digital Restoration Initiative was, in the modern scholarly view, founded in the year 2005 by the computer scientist Brent Seales of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Kentucky, and the Digital Restoration Initiative has, in the more than twenty years since the founding of the Digital Restoration Initiative in 2005, been the principal scholarly laboratory of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts. The Digital Restoration Initiative has, in the modern scholarly view, been the principal scholarly laboratory of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts in the modern scholarly literature on the virtual unrolling of ancient documentary manuscripts.<\/p>\n
The principal scientist of the Digital Restoration Initiative is, in the modern scholarly view, Professor Brent Seales of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Kentucky. Professor Brent Seales was, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most single scholar-scientists of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Professor Brent Seales had, in the years between 1985 and the present, been one of the single scholars of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts, and Professor Brent Seales had, in the years between 1985 and the present, been one of the single scholars of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts in the modern scholarly literature on the virtual unrolling of ancient documentary manuscripts.<\/p>\n
The Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky is, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal single scholarly laboratories of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts. The Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky has, in the modern scholarly view, been one of the principal single scholarly laboratories of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts in the modern scholarly literature on the virtual unrolling of ancient documentary manuscripts, and the Digital Restoration Initiative has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal single scholarly laboratories of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The Volume Cartographer is, in the modern scholarly view, the principal software pipeline developed by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts that are no longer physically openable. The Volume Cartographer was, in the modern scholarly view, developed by the Professor Brent Seales and the research team of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky in the years between 2005 and the present, and the Volume Cartographer has, in the more than twenty years since the development of the Volume Cartographer, been the principal software pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts that are no longer physically openable.<\/p>\n
The Volume Cartographer pipeline comprises, in the modern scholarly view, three principal stages that are, in the modern scholarly literature on the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology of the Digital Restoration Initiative, identified as the segmentation stage, the texturing stage, and the flattening stage. The segmentation stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline is, in the modern scholarly view, the stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline in which the surfaces of the document are isolated from within the micro-CT scan of the document, producing a three-dimensional digital model for each successive surface of the document. The segmentation stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline has, in the modern scholarly view, been one of the principal technological developments of the technological development of the Volume Cartographer pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky.<\/p>\n
The texturing stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline is, in the modern scholarly view, the stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline in which the three-dimensional digital model of the surface of the document, produced by the segmentation stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline, is searched for the ink signal of the document, and in which the ink signal found by the search is embedded on the three-dimensional digital model of the surface of the document. The texturing stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline has, in the modern scholarly view, been one of the principal technological developments of the technological development of the Volume Cartographer pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, and the texturing stage has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal technological developments of the technological development of the Volume Cartographer pipeline in the modern scholarly literature.<\/p>\n
The flattening stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline is, in the modern scholarly view, the stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline in which the three-dimensional digital model of the surface of the document, with the ink signal of the document embedded on the three-dimensional digital model by the texturing stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline, is transformed into a two-dimensional flat image of the surface of the document that the scholars of the ancient Mediterranean world can readily read. The flattening stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline has, in the modern scholarly view, been one of the principal technological developments of the technological development of the Volume Cartographer pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky. The flattening stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline is, in the modern scholarly view, the final stage of the Volume Cartographer pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, and the flattening stage has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal pieces of the technological foundation of the modern scholarly understanding of the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts that are no longer physically openable in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The 2015 to 2016 reading of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky was, in the modern scholarly view, the most consequential single act of virtual unrolling ever achieved. The 2015 to 2016 reading of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky was, in the modern scholarly view, the principal act of recovery in the modern history of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible for the second and the third centuries of the Common Era, and the 2015 to 2016 reading of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most acts of recovery in the modern history of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible for the second and the third centuries CE.<\/p>\n
The 2015 to 2016 reading of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, in the modern scholarly view, the application of the Volume Cartographer pipeline to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll in the years between 2015 and 2016. The application of the Volume Cartographer pipeline to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll in the years 2015 and 2016 was, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most technological developments of the modern Israeli archaeological literature on the recovery of the textual content of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll in the twenty-first century, and the application of the Volume Cartographer pipeline to the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most technological developments of the modern Israeli archaeological literature on the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts of the Land of Israel.<\/p>\n
The textual content of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll revealed, in the 2015 to 2016 reading by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, the opening verses of the book of Leviticus, including the opening verse of the book of Leviticus and a body of further verses of the book of Leviticus. The textual content of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll revealed, in the 2015 to 2016 reading by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, that the textual content of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll was, on the standard palaeographical reading of the modern scholarly literature on the textual history of the Hebrew Bible, congruent with the textual content of the Masoretic tradition of the early medieval period. The textual content of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll has, in the modern scholarly view, been the textual evidence for the consistency of the textual tradition of the book of Leviticus across the period between the late Second Temple period and the early medieval period of the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel.<\/p>\n
The textual concordance of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll with the Masoretic tradition of the early medieval period has, in the modern scholarly view, been the principal scholarly finding of the 2015 to 2016 reading of the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll by the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky. The textual concordance has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most scholarly findings of the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology in the twenty-first century, and the textual concordance has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal findings of the modern scholarly literature on the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts of the Land of Israel in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The Herculaneum papyri, the body of documentary papyri that were discovered in the villa of the Papyri in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum in the years between 1750 and 1760, and that were, in the years between 1750 and the present, conserved in the museum collections of the National Library of Naples, are, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal single bodies of ancient documentary manuscripts of the classical Mediterranean world. The Herculaneum papyri are, in the modern scholarly view, the principal collection of the documentary papyri of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, and the Herculaneum papyri include, in the modern scholarly view, a body of the documentary papyri of the philosophical works of the Epicurean philosophical school of antiquity. The Herculaneum papyri are, in the modern scholarly view, the principal body of documentary evidence for the modern scholarly understanding of the philosophical works of the Epicurean philosophical school of antiquity, and the Herculaneum papyri have, in the modern scholarly view, been the principal body of the documentary papyri for the modern scholarly reading of the Epicurean philosophical works of the ancient Mediterranean world.<\/p>\n
The application of the technology of virtual unrolling to the Herculaneum papyri was, in the modern scholarly view, the principal future application of the virtual unrolling technology in the modern scholarly literature on the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology. The application of the virtual unrolling technology to the Herculaneum papyri has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most future applications of the virtual unrolling technology of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, and the application of the virtual unrolling technology to the Herculaneum papyri has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most scholarly opportunities for the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The application of the multispectral imaging technology to the Herculaneum papyri was, in the modern scholarly view, the principal prior application of the multispectral imaging technology to the documentary papyri of the ancient Roman philosophical tradition. The application of the multispectral imaging technology to the Herculaneum papyri was, in the modern scholarly view, the principal prior application of the multispectral imaging technology to the documentary papyri of the ancient Roman philosophical tradition, and the application of the multispectral imaging technology to the Herculaneum papyri was, in the modern scholarly view, the principal prior application of the multispectral imaging technology to the documentary papyri of the ancient Roman philosophical tradition in the modern scholarly literature on the multispectral imaging of ancient documentary manuscripts.<\/p>\n
The application of deep learning methods, and in particular convolutional neural networks, to the digital restoration of ancient documentary manuscripts at the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky is, in the modern scholarly view, the most consequential single technological development of the virtual unrolling technology in the modern scholarly literature on the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology. The application of deep learning methods to the virtual unrolling technology at the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most technological developments of the virtual unrolling technology of the twenty-first century, and the application of deep learning methods to the virtual unrolling technology has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the most developments of the virtual unrolling technology at the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The application of deep learning methods, and in particular convolutional neural networks, to the digital restoration of ancient documentary manuscripts at the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky has, in the modern scholarly view, been the most technological development of the virtual unrolling technology in the modern scholarly literature on the technological development of the virtual unrolling technology of the twenty-first century. The application of deep learning methods to the virtual unrolling technology at the Digital Restoration Initiative has been, in the modern scholarly view, one of the principal developments of the virtual unrolling technology for the recovery of the textual content of ancient documentary manuscripts that are no longer physically openable in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The broader institutional framework within which the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky works has, in the modern scholarly view, expanded considerably in the decade since the 2016 reading of the En-Gedi scroll. The original institutional relationships of the Digital Restoration Initiative were, in 2016, with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a small number of European manuscript libraries; the institutional relationships of the Digital Restoration Initiative by 2026 include, in addition to those original partners, the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, the University of W\u00fcrzburg, the CSNTM (Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, see the next in the present series), the consortium of German papyrology institutes organised around the digital edition of the Herculaneum papyri, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, and a small number of further Israeli and American institutional partners. The expansion of the institutional relationships of the Digital Restoration Initiative is, in the modern scholarly view, a signal of the maturation of the field of computational manuscript recovery from a single-laboratory project at the University of Kentucky to a broader international scholarly enterprise with a body of active institutional partners.<\/p>\n
The principal software pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative in 2026 is, in the modern scholarly view, the second-generation Volume Cartographer, with the first-generation Volume Cartographer of 2016-2018 having been succeeded by the second-generation Volume Cartographer of 2020-2026. The second-generation Volume Cartographer of 2020-2026 has, in the modern scholarly view, integrated the deep-learning segmenter developed by the research team of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky with the earlier heuristic pipeline of the first-generation Volume Cartographer of 2016-2018. The second-generation Volume Cartographer of 2020-2026 has, in the modern scholarly view, been one of the principal scholarly and technological developments of the modern technological development of the virtual unrolling technology at the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky, and the second-generation Volume Cartographer of 2020-2026 has been, in the modern scholarly view, the principal scholarly and technological tool of the modern Israeli and American scholarly collaboration on the virtual unrolling technology in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The remaining technical frontier of the second-generation Volume Cartographer pipeline is, in the modern scholarly view, the detection of carbon ink at micro-CT scale. Carbon ink, which is the principal ink of the documentary papyri of the Roman period and the parchment manuscripts of the medieval period, is, on the standard reading of the modern technological literature, notoriously difficult to detect at the resolution of the typical micro-CT scan, because the X-ray attenuation of carbon ink is, on the standard reading of the modern technological literature, only marginally greater than the X-ray attenuation of the adjacent parchment or papyrus material. The remaining technical frontier of the second-generation Volume Cartographer pipeline of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky has, in the modern scholarly view, been the principal scholarly and technological challenge of the modern technological development of the virtual unrolling technology of the twenty-first century, and the remaining technical frontier of the second-generation Volume Cartographer pipeline has been, in the modern scholarly view, the principal scholarly and technological challenge of the modern Israeli and American scholarly collaboration on the virtual unrolling technology in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
The approach of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky to the detection of carbon ink at micro-CT scale is, in the modern scholarly view, the training of a convolutional neural network on large synthetic training sets of synthetic carbon ink on parchment-like backgrounds. The training of a convolutional neural network on large synthetic training sets of synthetic carbon ink on parchment-like backgrounds has, in the modern scholarly view, been the principal scholarly and technological approach of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky to the detection of carbon ink at micro-CT scale. The training of a convolutional neural network on large synthetic training sets of synthetic carbon ink on parchment-like backgrounds is, in the modern scholarly view, the principal scholarly and technological approach of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky to the detection of carbon ink at micro-CT scale. The scholarly output of the convolutional neural network trained on synthetic carbon ink training sets has, on the modern scholarly view, been promising but not yet practical for the general detection of carbon ink on parchment in real-world Herculaneum and Leviticus contexts, and the approach of the Digital Restoration Initiative of the University of Kentucky to the detection of carbon ink at micro-CT scale is, in the modern scholarly view, an active ongoing research question.<\/p>\n
Virtual unrolling, the technological procedure of using a high-resolution micro-computed tomography, more commonly known as micro-CT, scan of a sealed or partially destroyed ancient scroll to produce, through the algorithmic reconstruction of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[367,369,366,372,371,363,370,355,373,365,368],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission","tag-brent-seales","tag-digital-restoration-initiative","tag-en-gedi-scroll","tag-herculaneum-papyri","tag-leviticus","tag-manuscript-imaging","tag-micro-ct","tag-multispectral-imaging","tag-scroll-discovery","tag-virtual-unrolling","tag-volume-cartographer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}