'Forschung für alle'Recovering Lost Writing

20 October 2022

Photo: UHH

In a video series recently launched by Universität Hamburg, researchers from the university explain what they are working on and how society at large can benefit from what they do. In the latest episode, Ivan Shevchuk and Kyle Ann Huskin of CSMC show why lost writing isn’t necessarily lost forever.

With the help of multispectral imaging, Ivan Shevchuk and Kyle Ann Huskin of the CSMC's Mobile Lab can reconstruct writing that is no longer legible to the naked eye – for example due to weathering or the deliberate damage to written artefacts. In the video ‘How Can You Recover Lost Writing?’, which has just been published on the website of Universität Hamburg, they explain how they proceed and what kind of manuscripts and materials they have to deal with.

The video is the fourth part of a series in which researchers from different fields at Universität Hamburg present their research in a few minutes, explaining in particular the possible applications of their work beyond academia. The first three episodes are about the research of our colleagues at the other Clusters of Excellence at Universität Hamburg: CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter, Quantum Universe, and Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS).

If you want to know more about multispectral imaging, read our interview with Kyle Ann Huskin in which she talks about their work on Torah fragments that were stolen from the Harburg synagogue during the Reichsprogrammnacht.