Tuesday, August 3, 2010

More palimpsest


Today I met with Dr. Easton and he gave me an overview of his adventures as a document restorer as well as some of the process they use to read overwritten texts. While he had mentioned so during his talk to everyone in the fish bowl, I never imagined that each individual pixel of an image had to be categorized the way he pointed out today. Most simply put, he has to tell the computer what to do so it can go in and highlight the right pixels, in order to display the under-text. Dr. Easton was not only nice enough to give me a book on the Archimedes palimpsest but he even showed me some of Beethoven's original work! He has so much data; I counted three different 750 gig external drives... I am still extremely interested in this field, its amazing to me that Dr. Easton and his coworkers have been able to see so many important documents. A few hours after that meeting I went with the rest of the RS interns to a debriefing for our data collect from last week, and that ended another day here at RIT.