| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
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Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)
We meet each Monday on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also live-stream our events via Zoom. For updates and Zoom links, please sign up for our listserv; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On January 27, 2025 at 5:15, W. Brent Seales will present: “On Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls”
The Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and then excavated in the eighteenth century, are original classical texts from the shelves of the only library to have survived from antiquity, but the intact scrolls have presented an enigmatic challenge: preserved by the fury of Vesuvius, they were nevertheless lost. The 250-year history of science and technology applied to the challenge of opening and then reading the scrolls has heretofore created only a fragmentary, damaged window into their literary and philosophical secrets, and in 1999, with more than 400 scrolls still unopened, attempts at physical unwrapping were permanently halted.
This talk tells the story of the virtual unwrapping of the Herculaneum scrolls, some of the most difficult and iconic material in the world. Virtual unwrapping offers a restoration pathway enabling us to read texts from objects that are too damaged even to be opened. Using a non-invasive approach, we have now shown how to recover the scrolls' contents, rendering them “unlost.” The path we have forged uses large-scale computing, high energy physics, artificial intelligence, and the collective power of a global scientific community inspired by prizes, collaborative generosity, and the common goal of shared glory: reading the texts of the Herculaneum scrolls for the first time in 2,000 years.
W. Brent Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He is founder of the Heritage Science research lab (EduceLab) at the University of Kentucky, which applies techniques in machine learning and data science to the digital restoration of damaged materials, and founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, an international contest formed around the goal of the virtual unwrapping of Herculaneum scrolls. He continues to work with challenging, damaged material (Herculaneum Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls), with notable successes in the scroll from En-Gedi (Leviticus), the Morgan MS M.910 (The Acts of the Apostles), and PHerc.Paris.3 and 4 (Philodemus / Epicureanism).
The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.
The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.
Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
