verditelabs

6 ms·

1.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
I can't hear you over all this cool stuff I'm discovering
2.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We will gladly take your money. There's a link on our homepage to give us money. We list a lot of sponsors and appreciate all that we have been given. Most of that was given in 2023 and 2024 and most/all of it had been spent. As f
3.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and
4.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab
5.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
5/7 trolling; not bad
6.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. T
7.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scann
8.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
The core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship. This announcement was part of a larger conference bein
9.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/ We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian tex
10.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building
11.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scr
12.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well > Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave ma
13.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
It has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce t
14.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Can't stop Sean from segmenting
15.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
IIRC 99% of all of the existing scrolls are still in Italy's possession. I think the breakdown is something like ~350 are mostly in tact, another ~1000 are damaged but still "scroll like", and the remaining hundreds are shatt
16.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rende
17.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
That have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I've seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?
18.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. People have been trying to unroll and read the scrolls for 250 some odd years now. Had they not laid the groundwork for all that time we wouldn't be making the progress we are now
19.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 o
20.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist. Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If
21.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work var
22.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of t
23.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
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
24.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
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
25.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hi
26.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We - the core challenge team anyway - get no money from any government. We paid for the beam time from our donations and internal funding.
27.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is
28.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab get
29.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March. The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink
30.
by verditelabs 3mo ago
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 sid

More ›