Three of my current interests — Greek, manuscript books, and technology — star together in this Wired article about the project of the Harver Center for Hellenic Studies to photograph and digitize the oldest copy of Homer’s Iliad. According to the article:
A high-resolution, 3D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.
The project includes a robotic arm which laser-scans the pages from about an inch away — the pages could crumble if flattened by use of a regular flatbed scanner — incredible resolution, and a CAD program. All being done at an ancient library in Venice where the book is housed. This is very cool.
This summer students of Greek will produce XML translations of the text (the handwritten text and archaic ligatures make OCR unworkable) at the Center for Hellenic Studies in DC, as part of the Homer Multitext Project. Oh, very, very cool.