Tuesday, July 9, 2013

First Day of Actual Work

July 9
Day 2

Hello. Today I actually got to start working on some manuscripts today. After the morning meeting of the high council of interns we split off into our labs. Under the guidance of Liz I learned more about using ENVI. The work is tedious, mostly entering a lot of data into different boxes. But once you've done that and the image appears, the fun starts. I have to look at the manuscript and see if I can find any undertext. The way that is historical document imaging works is that using different lights and colors, you are able to see the undertext. The undertext is writing that was on the manuscript at one point, but was scraped off and new stuff was written on top. This happened mostly because the materials to make manuscripts was so expensive.    So when a scribe or monk wanted to write something, they would scrape the existing ink off of the manuscript and write whatever they wanted on the newly clean material. While this was eco-friendly (and goat friendly, since the material was often goat skin) This means that using different techniques we can see what was written originally, which can provide valuable information for scholars.
         Once I got my own computer I started working on a Georgian manuscript. It was kind of confusing figuring out where all the different things go and what order to go in, but once I got the hang of it it wasn't too hard. I even found some undertext! I'm very excited and hope I can enhance the image so I can see more.

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