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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

scrollprize.org

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Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#151

Post by tephra »

adrian_b wrote: post #44
clickety_clack wrote: post #16

When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”. How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.

Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation. For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library". The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correc…

There is a quote, I can't remember by whom, going something like "all translation is interpretation" (IIRC I heard it on a great courses course on the bible).

To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...

Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it "better" (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I'm saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#152

Post by verditelabs »

amluto wrote: post #145
verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it? Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able t…

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.

A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#154

Post by EvanAnderson »

verditelabs wrote: post #95
2ap wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of goo…

You brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#156

Post by Izmaki »

verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.

Hats off!

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#158

Post by thom »

cyberpunk wrote: post #148

> "we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect" - Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}

[dead]

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#159

Post by verditelabs »

thom wrote: post #157
verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.

To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#160

Post by inglor_cz »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #131
inglor_cz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any questions, just a comment. You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown. That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that. Science sho…

What contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?

I don't have any concrete tips.

We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.

BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.

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