News from 2025
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June 12, 2025 - Octopus Lights for Multispectral Imaging -
Another major contribution of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project to the multispectral imaging rodeo is a new way of illuminating manuscripts and other artifacts.
The Octopus lights take their name from the design structure of eight lights controlled by one head.
The feet can be customized and positioned separately, and several heads can be combined in one configuration.
- June 11, 2025 - Multispectral Imaging Networked Capture Controller - One major contribution of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project to the multispectral imaging (MSI) rodeo is a networked capture controller with open-source software to control cameras and lights. Alternative ways of controlling MSI capture rely on Windows software, and generally only work with one or limited configurations. The networked capture controller can be used over a network from any operating system. It has the ability to control all the lights and cameras used in the rodeo with the settings necessary for a level comparison. A description of the device and a link to the GitHub repository of the software is available here
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June 10, 2025 - Multispectral Imaging Component Rodeo -
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project is collaborating with Videntes, Rochester Cultural Heritage Imaging, Visualization, and Education, and others to test components useful for multispectral imaging.
We are testing equipment at a wide variety of price points, not so much to establish which is better but to evaluate the compromises that come at accessible prices.
The comparison, originally scheduled for Colorado with partners in Texas and Oklahoma, is called the multispectral imaging rodeo.
The rodeo will take place in Rochester, New York with a public day of demonstrations and presentations on Friday, June 27.
Participation is available in person and on Zoom.
Registration is required, a donation is optional.
Announcement
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June 9, 2025 - Update on Latin Moses -
Even though it has been almost a year since the last news post, the Jubilees Palimpsest Project has been very busy.
Hanneken has been in the sabbatical cave, working hard on a print and hypertext critical edition of Latin Moses, including Latin Jubilees and the Testament of Moses.
The new resources and features will be unveiled later, closer to the debut of the print edition.
The next few posts will be about efforts to make multispectral imaging, which worked wonders on Latin Moses, accessible for more projects.
News from 2024
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June 20, 2024 - TEI to Scholarly Edition -
The culimination of the original purpose of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project is the production of a scholarly edition of Latin Moses (including Testament of Moses).
We are using the Text Encoding Initiative to encode all information about the manuscript, text, translation, and analysis in a single file.
From that one file we are deriving a print edition, hypertext edition, and image viewing with annotations in Mirador.
The tools used to derive visualizations from a TEI source will be applicable to other scholarly editions.
The tools are available on GitHub.
- June 14, 2024 - Multispectral Imaging of Trivulziano Codex 1080 -
The Intradams summer school at the University of Milan concluded with completing Multispectal Imaging of the palimpsest pages of
MS 1080,
a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy written over erased documents from the fourteenth century.
Data is available online.
- June 3, 2024 - Teaching Notes on Multispectral Imaging and Digital Humanities - Notes and figures prepared for Intradams Summer School at the University of Milan may be of interest to others preparing pedagogic materials on Multispectral Imaging and Cultural Heritage Imaging. (LINK)
News from 2023
- December 17, 2023 - Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana F130sup - Ambrosiana F130sup is a single bound codex including the Greek Commentary on Luke (104 folios numbered 1-105). It also includes 32 folios numbered 106-137 that are not palimpsest and have smaller dimensions. It also some modern front matter on paper. To see the complete codex, select “Ambrosiana_F130sup” in Mirador. For only folios 1-105, select “Greek Commentary on Luke.”
- September 18, 2023 - Greek Commentary on Luke -
Calibrated color images of Ambrosiana F130sup are now available for viewing in Mirador. Multispectral pseudocolor enhancements will be added gradually.
- August 15, 2023 - The National Endowment for the Humanities
funded the Jubilees Palimpsest Project at St. Mary’s University to produce
a print and interactive online scholarly edition and translation of Latin Jubilees and the Testament of Moses (Latin Moses).
NEH Press Release
- July 20, 2023 - Raking Light is valuable when full RTI is not an option.
The octopus
raking light source has a single controller head and eight legs that attach to walls around the perimeter of a small room.
The raking light was successfully tested at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana to create raking light images of F130sup, the Greek Commentary on Luke.
- July 12, 2023 - New Image Data is available for all of Ambrosiana F130sup, an otherwise unknown Greek commentary on the Gospel of Luke.
A team from the University of Notre Dame joined Todd Hanneken (Jubilees Palimpsest Project) and Gregory Heyworth (Lazarus Project) to image all of F130 sup.
Only five pages were sampled in 2017.
Batch transformations are running on the raw data (CC BY-NC-SA).
A IIIF Presentation manifest for Mirador will be announced when available.
- July 6, 2023 - Jubilees Palimpsest Process
for multispectral imaging data supports batch processing, flattening, rotation, blur and divide, Principal Component Analysis, Minimum Noise Fraction, and Independent Component Analysis.
New implementation from the GitHub repository would require some comfort with Python.
The results can be evaluated in the Transform directory of imagesets such as
Ambrosiana F130sup 57r (2017 data).
News from 2020
- November 20, 2020 - Mirador 3.0 -
Mirador 3 is out of beta and the 3.0 version is now installed on
https://jubilees.stmarytx.edu/mirador/
and
https://palimpsest.stmarytx.edu/mirador/.
It is now much easier to find the information you want and hide the information you don’t.
There are also improvements for navigating layers for raking light and spectral enhancements.
The ability to add new annotations with Simple Annotation Server is temporarily unavailable.
For now, the highlight boxes for existing annotations may not appear on the correct area of the page.
In related news, the upgrade from http to https is now complete.
- July 3, 2020 - Encyclopedia Article on Spectral Imaging - The Project Director wrote an article to introduce Bible scholars to spectral imaging. The pre-publisher draft is available online (HTML).
- June 23, 2020 - New Relightable (RTI) Images Now Available -
New relightable RTI images are available for Ambrosiana C73inf in Accurate Color.
C73inf includes the Latin (Arian) Commentary on Luke and Latin Moses (Latin Jubilees and the Testament of Moses).
The new images use the Relight fitter and viewer, which offer improvements over the HSH WebRTI images posted in 2017.
Links to the images are available among the annotations in
Mirador.
More technical information, especially for IIIF support, is available
here.
News from 2019
- December 23, 2019 - Short Article on IIIF for Bible Scholars - The Project Director wrote a short article to introduce the International Image Interoperability Framework to scholars of biblical literature (LINK). The article will eventually appears in Brill’s Textual History of the Bible. Comments are welcome (EMAIL).
- August 5, 2019 - Hans Christian Andersen Paper Cutouts -
Highlights from the summer workshops include these beautiful cutouts
at the Royal Library of Denmark
made by the famous author for a girl who died when she was four years old.
A six-minute screen recording
(LINK)
walks through the features available in Mirador
(LINK),
including raking light, spectral enhancements, annotations, and links to WebRTI.
- August 2, 2019 - Conference Papers Online -
The full text and slides of the Project Director’s presentations
at the International Society of Biblical Literature (Rome)
and Digital Humanities 2019 (Utrecht) are now available online.
Respectively, they are
“Three Priorities for Digitally-Enabled Research and Teaching in Manuscripts of Biblical Literature”
(full text)
and
“Deep Digitization: Considerations and Tools for Imaging Cultural Heritage Beyond the Basics”
(full text).
- May 15, 2019 - Registration Open - Information and registration is now available for the Spectral RTI training workshops in London (LINK).
- May 6, 2019 - Summer Presentations - Todd Hanneken, the Director of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project, will be presenting at the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting in Rome (July 3), the Digital Humanities Conference in Utrecht (July 10), and the Catholic Biblical Association in North Canton (July 28). The paper titles are “Three Priorities for Digitally-Enabled Research and Teaching in Manuscripts of Biblical Literature” (abstract), “Deep Digitization: Considerations and Tools for Imaging Cultural Heritage Beyond the Basics” (abstract), and “Pneumatology in Early Christian Scribal Practices” (abstract), respectively.
- May 5, 2019 - Summer Workshops -
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project will be offering training workshops in Spectral RTI at the British Library June 12-13, University College London June 17-18, and the Royal Library of Denmark the week of June 24-28.
The workshops will feature Spectral RTI capture with Ken Boydston, President of MegaVision,
and processing with Todd Hanneken, Director of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project.
Stay tuned for registration information.
A preview of the skills covered can be gained from the
previous workshop
and documentation.
- February 2, 2019 - Results from Imaging Workshop in Austin -
Announcement
The results from the imaging session in Austin have been added to the workshop announcement. The imaged objects include a sixteenth-century Portuguese map of west Africa and several papyri and tablets. The data is available in IIIF (Mirador), WebRTI, and raw data for processing in the SpectralRTI_Toolkit.
News from 2018
- October 13, 2018 - Workshop at UT Austin January 16-17, 2019 -
Announcement
Todd Hanneken (Jubilees Palimpsest Project) and Ken Boydston (MegaVision) will be leading an intensive two-day workshop at the University of Texas at Austin. Participants will learn the complete process of capture and processing SpectralRTI. Registration is free but limited to those affiliated with the University of Texas. Others are welcome to contact the Project Director, Todd Hanneken about possibilities for a shorter public demonstration or alternative training sessions. - June 20, 2018 - Quick Start and Video Tutorials - Featured links and video tutorials have been added to the top of the front page of the project website. The long-form information remains below, but new visitors to the site should have an easier time finding the highlights that interest them. A five-minute video (narrated screen recording) gives a quick introduction to the most helpful resources in Mirador for viewing manuscripts and annotations. Additional videos introduce advanced functionality.
- May 31, 2018 - Spectral RTI Demonstration and Training - June 6-8, 2018
before and during the second annual Rochester Cultural Heritage Imaging Visualization and Education (R-CHIVE) Conference.
More information
- March 24, 2018 - Workshop at Notre Dame -
The Jubilees Palimpsest Project Workshop at the University of Notre Dame, May 15-17, 2018,
will feature James C. VanderKam, Annette Y. Reed, and Todd Hanneken
on digital tools for manuscript study, Latin Jubilees, and the significance of palimpsests for our understanding of the past.
The program also includes hands-on workshops with Mirador, WebRTI, and various digital palimpsests from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
The meeting is free and open to the public, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
(Announcement)
- January 20, 2018 - Mirador Viewer -
The main branch of Mirador now supports image layers and has become the preferred viewer for the project images, especially Latin Moses (Latin Jubilees and the Testament of Moses).
The side panel has three useful tabs.
The index tab shows the passage in Jubilees preserved on a page, the reconstructed page number of the original codex, and the page number assigned in modern times to the palimpsest codex.
The layers tab shows the color processing and light positions available, and allows switching or fading between layers.
The annotations tab shows the resources available, including WebRTI images, transcriptions, translations, and line-by-line transcriptions over the images (in progress).
The annotations toggle shows the annotations entered so far, and allows the user to add additional annotations.
The previous viewer, IIIF Navigator, lacks the ability to add annotations but remains available.
News from 2017
- November 25, 2017 - SBL Presentation - Project Director Todd Hanneken's presentation to the Society of Biblical Literature is available online as a transcript (HTML), static slides (PDF), and voice over slides (MP4 and YouTube).
- November 8, 2017 - Public Presentations - Project Director Todd Hanneken will be presenting on the Jubilees Palimpsest Project on November 9 at the University of Texas, Austin (announcement, slides) and on November 20 at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Boston (sbl-site.org online program book).
- August 17, 2017 - Sample pages from fourth-century Gothic Bible -
Twenty pages of Ambrosiana S36sup have been added to the repository.
Basic processed images are available now, and advanced images will be added over the coming weeks.
The sample pages are from Paul’s letters, and also include a liturgical calendar.
The translator is the Arian bishop Wulfila.
See further Wikipedia.org and the image repository (LINK).
- August 4, 2017 - Sample pages from an unidentified palimpsest -
Seven pages of Ambrosiana H190inf have been added to the repository.
The undertext has not yet been identified.
Advanced imaging makes at least some parts reasonably legible.
Who wants to be the first to identify the text?
(LINK)
- July 6, 2017 - Sample pages from Origen’s Hexapla - Five folios (ten pages) added to the repository with diffuse, raking light, and WebRTI lighting for color processes Accurate Color, Extended Spectrum, Knox Pseudocolor, Knox Sharpie, and Polglaze custom processing. Viewable in IIIF Navigator (LINK) and UCLA Mirador (LINK).
- May 2, 2017 - New Section on Viewing Options - describes the pros and cons of Mirador and the IIIF Navigator (LINK). Documentation forthcoming.
- April 28, 2017 - Unidentified Greek Commentary on the Gospel of Luke - Five pages were captured from the codex. Processed images are now available in the IIIF Repository (LINK). The shelfmark is Ambrosiana F130sup. The LDAB number is 128487. Scholarship on these pages is needed, especially if this image looks like Ζαχαριας to you.
- February 22, 2017 - Commentary on Luke, Transitioning to Mirador - Accurate Color and Extended Spectrum images are now available for the (Arian) Commentary on Luke.
The IIIF manifests are being optimized for compatibility with the UCLA branch of Mirador (LINK). The IIIF Navigator (LINK) may still work better for some resources until bugs are resolved. Three tips should help find the resources through Mirador:
- The fifth icon from the left on the image window offers a menu of different light positions and color enhancements.
- The dialogue bubble toggles notes, which include links to available WebRTI images, transcriptions, and translations (Latin Moses, not yet Commentary on Luke).
- If the notes over the reflective sphere are covered by the tray of thumbnails on the bottom, look for an icon of three little boxes to clear them away.
- February 15, 2017 - Capture Session Complete - The winter 2017 capture session is now complete. Over 7 TB of data were created, including all of the Jubilees Palimpsest (C73 inf, including Latin Moses, the Latin Commentary on Luke, and early modern handwritten notes), and samples from other palimpsests in the collection, including Origen’s Hexapla and Wulfila’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into Gothic. We hope to return to image more palimpsests.
Images of Latin Moses (Jubilees and the Testament of Moses) are now available, soon to be followed by others. The initial round of processing includes Accurate Color, Extended Spectrum color enhancement, some enhancements by Keith Knox, and light position control. Light control can be done either by selecting static raking images in the image cubes, or with dynamic relighting in WebRTI.
Latin Moses can be navigated through the reconstruction of the (now mostly lost) fifth-century codex (LINK), or the IIIF Navigator (LINK). The image collection, website, documentation, and scholarly content are all still at a very early stage of development, but we share the unfinished product in the spirit of openness.
- January 28, 2017 - Update - This week adds more pages and a new processing technique developed by Keith Knox. The term “Ruby” derives not from the gem or programming language, but from resemblance of the acronym for Royal Blue fluorescence divided BY transmissive. The images are available through the IIIF Navigator (LINK).
January 22, 2017 - First Images from Milan - The camera room is generating 32 GB of data for each page and the processing team is working hard to keep up. We have Accurate Color and Extended Spectrum color processing available for pages 45, 46, and 382 from the Commentary on Luke and pages 257, 258, 259, and 260 from Latin Moses (Jubilees and the Testament of Moses). You can also navigate from the top with the IIIF Navigator (LINK). Advanced PCA Pseudocolor processing will take more time (some preliminary work is available now). In the spirit of openness, we are posting images publicly as quickly as possible, but be aware that the site is at an early stage of development. Bugs and incompleteness should be expected. Also expect some slowness until caches fill. Volunteers able to help fill in gaps in the content and standards compliance are welcome to contact the project director (LINK).
News from 2016
- December 1, 2016 – IIIF Server – A new server with support for IIIF is online at jubilees.stmarytx.edu. This server will serve as the image repository for all project images. Data archives (of interest to advanced specialists) will remain on palimpsest.stmarytx.edu. Web pages will be available on both sites.
The IIIF image repository includes test objects from the startup phase and will grow rapidly during the imaging session in Milan starting January 9, 2017. The image repository can be accessed with any IIIF viewer. Mirador presently lacks support for multiple images per canvas. The IIIF Navigator offers the most complete portal to spectral image cubes, WebRTI, transcriptions, translations, and other resources. [Update 12/19/2016: The UCLA branch of Mirador supports image cubes as long as the image cube is first on the canvas. It does not yet support multiple resources per canvas.] - September 30, 2016 – Brill Digital Biblical Studies – A new series from Brill has debuted. The first volume, Ancient Worlds in Digital Culture, contains an essay by the project director, “New Technology for Imaging Unreadable Manuscripts and Other Artifacts: Integrated Spectral Reflectance Transformation Imaging (Spectral RTI).” A pre-publisher preview is available here and some pages on Google Books.
- August 9, 2016 – NEH Grant – The National Endowment for the Humanities Awarded $325,000 to the project for a three-year phase (2016–2019). This phase will implement Spectral RTI on the Jubilees Palimpsest and create a IIIF repository as a demonstration of the technologies. It will also provide free user-friendly processing software and training for third parties to adopt the technology. See full press release (LINK). Update: additional press releases from Congressman Joaquin Castro (LINK), St. Mary’s University (LINK), and the NEH (LINK).
- August 7, 2016 – The Future of Biblical Scholarship in a Digital Age – A video based on Hanneken’s presentation to the Catholic Biblical Association is now available on YouTube (LINK).
- July 28, 2016 – CBA Presentation – Project Director Todd Hanneken will present in a plenary panel to the Catholic Biblical Association, August 6, 2016, 7:00 pm, Santa Clara University (LINK).
- July 28, 2016 – New Website Design – Welcome to the new website design. If you’re looking for something and you know where it is on the old design you can still find it here (LINK).