Digital Transcription of the Archimedes Palimpsest [Applications Corner]

This paper deals with the application of multispectral imaging techniques and character recognition methods based on a of identified characters to digitized data from the Archimedes palimpsest in a unified image analysis and classification framework. The process presented in this article assisted scholars in their transcription of the palimpsest, which is one of the most important documents in the history of science. Among them, Reviel Netz, the principal scholar in translating the Archimedes text, has commented very positively on the value of the character recognition tool. In addition, the digital transcription workflow has been applied to a tenth century Hebrew colophon and even outside the digital transcription of documents.