Nick and Julie Frederick with Dr. Roger T. Macfarlane Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature
Thanks to the BYU multi-spectral images, scholars around the world have been able to access the Herculaneum scrolls without having to travel to Naples. Those images greatly facilitated scholarship by both their readability and availability. Because of the availability of the multi-spectral images, the necessity and benefit of having other related resources available in digital from became apparent.
When the Herculaneum scrolls were discovered in the 18th century, scribes were hired to painstakingly draw everything visible on each fragment. For some fragments, these drawings, or disegni, are all that remains because the original fragments have disintegrated. Until recently, the only way to access the Herculaneum Disegni was to enter the National Library of Naples and study in the Herculaneum office there during the few hours a day the office is open. The BYU multi-spectral images made the papyri more available, and so our project now endeavored to provide scanned images of the disegni that would make them as accessible as the BYU multi-spectral images.
After spending several days of training in Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee library in order to learn to use the scanning equipment and computer programs that would be necessary, we left for Naples and arrived the evening of 6 July 2004. The next morning went to the library to begin the project. We set up the equipment according to the training we had been given, but ran into two problems. On one of our scanning stations, the computer could not seem to recognize the scanner. After checking and re-checking the equipment, we finally located the problem. It was because of our training at the library in Provo that we had the familiarity and skills needed to fix that problem. The second problem was that the laptop on the other station could not run as many programs as needed for extended periods of time. This problem had not surfaced during training because we were never using it for more than an hour or two. We compensated for this problem by bypassing one of the programs. Instead of running the scanning software through Photoshop, we scanned directly from the software.
While we had set up and started scanning, our ORCA grant mentor, Dr. Macfarlane, discussed the project with the head librarian. It became obvious that the scope of the project was larger than we had expected. Prior to our departure, we had counted the number of scans we thought would be necessary from the authoritative catalogue of Herculaneum documents. Unfortunately, from that catalogue, there was no way to know that many of the disegni would require more than one scan to record all the information. When the scribes had made their drawings, they had used large sheets of paper which they folded in half to be more sturdy. The main drawing was on the front of the folded sheet, but very often they had recorded additional information on the other side of the fold. This meant that almost twice as many scans as we had anticipated would be needed to record the information. Unlike our equipment problems, this one had no solution. We adjusted our scanning settings from 400 dpi to 300 dpi which allowed us to scan a little bit faster, but that was all we could do. We had to accept that we would not be able to complete the project in one trip as we had hoped.
Another result of the extra images we needed to scan was that our file-naming system was not inadequate. Our original system was DN_PHerc#_fragment#_disegnator_year. To distinguish between the different sides, we changed our naming system to DN_Pherc#_fragment#_side specification_diseniator. DN stands for Disegno Napolitano, the standard name that distinguishes these apographs from those archived at Oxford. Pherc# is the number of the actual scroll that the drawings coincide with. Fragment# is the fragment piece of that scroll that the drawing is of. The side specifications were c1r, c2r, c1v, and c2v meaning front (recto) of page one, front of page two, back (verto) of page one, and back of page two respectively. The disegnator is the name of the person making the drawing. We found that we had to include first initial and the last name to distinguish between different disegnators because some were from the same family. We omitted the year because the scanning program Silverfast could only accommodate up to thirty-two characters in a name as well as because the year the drawing was not needed to distinguish any one drawing from any other. Any data not in the filenames can be extracted from the scans themselves or from the standard reference work by M. Gigante, Catologo dei Papiri Ercolanesi(Naples 1979), which records the name and date of each set of apographs drawn.
With all those problems handled, we started working on the project in earnest. Each day we arrived at the library at its opening and worked until the papyrology section closed. We worked closely with the director, Dott. Agnese Travaglione, and her staff at the Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi “Marcello Gigante”. It is rare for undergraduate students to actually be able to handle the types of documents that we were working with daily. It was amazing to be where the disegni and the scrolls were stored, to see the actual scrolls, to talk to some of the scholars there working on them, and to be directly involved in preserving the disegni.
In addition to the experience of working in one of the great libraries of Europe — the building was constructed as the Palazzo Reale of the Bourbon kings in the 18th century — we were also able to learn more by going to the actual sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii. While the experience of living in Naples for a month was invigorating, we especially liked the antiquities we saw. We had taken a class designed to teach about Heculaneum, both its history and the current scholarship working on it. Because of this we were quite familiar with the information about Mount Vesuvius and its results, but it was an entirely new level of understanding to be on the sites and see the ruins. To have been able to have personally seen the places and work with the documents we had studied was truly the crowning experience of our undergraduate work. A generous grant from Ira Fulton made it possible for us to make the trip and stay in Naples almost costfree for the month. Jim Abrams, another private donor, gave the funds to purchase the equipment we used. But the ORCA money allowed us to further our study by going to Rome and Florence, and to visit other sites we would not have been able to afford but which helped us appreciate the context of what we were doing. Though we were unable to complete the project in its entirety, we were able to make significant progress on it, and in so doing participate in research and learning that we would not have thought possible for undergraduates. We appreciate so much that the ORCA grant program afforded us with such a wonderful, rewarding, and unique experience.