How the Humanities can Help Transform ScienceAndrew Prescott

King’s College London

The most remarkable contribution to human progress to have emerged from the UCL campus happened before the College was even built. In 1808 Richard Trevithick ran the first fare-paying passenger train, Catch Me Who Can, as a fairground ride on the land where UCL now stands. The example of Trevithick challenges many of the ways we think about technology and innovation. Transformation and economic growth do not flow seamlessly from the appearance of new inventions. Industrialisation was a patchy, localised and haphazard process. Trevithick found it difficult to generate a wider public interest in his inventions, and the fairground ride was a desperate attempt to create interest - the advocacy of technology in this case required a humanistic strategy of performance. The example of Trevithick challenges our polarised view of science and arts.

These images show British Library, Royal MS 9 C.X: 14th century manuscript from St Albans Abbey of Pope Innocent IV’s commentaries on the Decretals of Gregory IX. This manuscript was badly damaged in a fire in 1731, which burnt many manuscripts in the Cotton and Royal Libraries. Many of the damaged manuscripts were conserved in the nineteenth century, but this manuscript was deliberately left unconserved to show the effects of the fire on the manuscripts.

Beowulf Manuscript: British Library Cotton MS Vitellius A. xv.

This manuscript was also badly damaged in the fire, but restored in 1845.

First page from an eleventh-century Psalter produced in England: British Library, Cotton MS. Vitellius E. xviii, f. 1

The fragments of this manuscript were rescued in a first campaign of work on the Cotton manuscripts in the 1820s. The issues associated with the exploration of manuscripts such as these pose many challenges which are of as much scientific as humanities interest.

Beginning of Mark in an insular gospels compiled about 700, which has close relationship in script and decoration to the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells: British Library, Cotton MS. Otho C. v

The fragments from this manuscript were also rescued in the 1820s. Advice on the conservation of the manuscript was given by Sir Humphry Davy, who was a Trustee of the British Museum.

Portrait of Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) by Thomas Phipps

Davy is celebrated as a pioneer of electrolysis, discoverer of elements such as sodium and potassium, first person to identify chlorine as an element, and inventor of the safety lamp (used to transport the Olympic flame!)

But he was also:-Pioneer in pigment analysis on paintings and sculptures-Shared laughing gas sessions with Coleridge-Editor and proofreader for Wordsworth and Southey

Figures such as Davy challenge our distinction between the scientist and the artist.

Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Between 1750 and 1765, 1,785 carbonised papyri were recovered from this villa, the remains of a library assembled by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara

During his visits to Italy, Davy conducted pioneering experiments in pigment analysis at such sites as the Baths of Titus, assisted by his friend the sculptor Canova.

In the face of growing industrialisation and commercialisation, Coleridge sought:‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’

What would Coleridge have made of impact, audit culture, key performance indicators, research excellence frameworks?

He would have loathed them as expressions of a mechanistic (Benthamite?) spirit which strikes Death

Coleridge wanted to ‘warm his mind with universal science’

‘I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine’.

My argument is that the use of innovative scientific techniques to investigate and explore the manuscripts, books, paintings, sound and artefacts which constitute the objects of humanistic research can help generate the new universal science of which Coleridge dreamed.

C.P. Snow and the Two Cultures

Recently rekindled by Eric Schmidt

A misplaced debate?

A plea for scientists to be better understood

But is the problem more that science has ceased to be driven by humanities problems?

Davy as inspired in his scientific researches by papyri, medieval manuscripts and pigments as by batteries, laughing gas and coal mines

The humanities offer challenges for new types of scientific exploration

In thinking back to the period of industrialisation, we can see a synergy between the arts and new technologies

Model of Newcomen Steam Engine at the University of Glasgow repaired by Watt in 1765. It was work on this model that led Watt to develop the separate steam condenser.

According to John Robison, the model was ‘at first a fine plaything to Mr Watt, and to myself, now a constant visitor at his workshop. But like everything which came into his hands, it soon became an object of most serious study’.

Robison: ‘Everything became science in his hands’

John Robison: All the young lads of our little place that were any way remarkable for scientific predilection were acquaintances of Mr Watt; and his parlour was a rendezvous for all of his description. Whenever any puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr Watt. He needed only to be prompted; everything became to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and we knew that he would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance, or had made something of it. No matter in what line – languages, antiquity, natural history, - nay, poetry, criticism, and works of taste; as to anything in the line of engineering, whether civil or military, he was at home, and a ready instructor.

JAMES WATT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Pipe Organ made by James Watt, 1762, now in People’s Palace Museum, Glasgow

“We imagined that Mr. Watt could do anything; and, though we all knew that he did not know one musical note from another, he was asked if he could build an organ wanted for a Masonic Lodge in Glasgow. He said ‘Yes,’ but he began by building a very small one for his friend, Dr. Black, which is now in my possession. In doing this a thousand things occurred to him which no organ-builder ever dreamed of—nice indicators of the strength of the blast, regulators of it, etc. He then began to study the philosophical theory of music.”

James Watt’s Portable Drawing Machine

James Watt’s workroom in his house at Heathfield Hall. Painting by Jonathan Pratt, 1889: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The busts relate to Watts’s attempt to make a sculpture copying

machine.

Watt’s sculpture copying machine recalls 3D printing. It is appropriate that moulds used by Watt to test the sculpture copying machine were scanned by a team led by Professor Stuart Robson and Dr Mona Hess from UCL, and used to recover a lost bust of Watt: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892

Examples of reagent damage in the manuscript of Cantar de Mio Cid, National Library of Spain. Chemical reagents were historically used to read faded inks, but they made the manuscript illegible. We have no adequate means of covering the lost text.

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, an early biblical palimpsest badly damaged by the application of chemical reagent.

The burnt Magna Carta in the British Library. Damaged not only by fire in 1731, but also by subsequent poor conservation. Do we have the imaging techniques to explore these manuscript survivals?

Manuscripts reused as book covers in the library of the University of Wales Trinity St David. Reconstructing these dismembered manuscripts, reading the concealed parts of these leaves: all these potentially pose exciting scientific challenges.

The potential application of these techniques is not restricted to ancient manuscripts. The Library of Congress used multi-spectral imaging to reveal how Thomas Jefferson changed ‘fellow subjects’ to ‘fellow citizens’ in a draft of the Declaration of Independence: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-161.html

Raman Spectroscopy has been used at the University of Cambridge, UCL, University of Glasgow and elsewhere to explore composition of inks in ancient manuscripts

Dry point annotation in the Hengwrt Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, National Library of Wales

New Techniques: Reflectance Transformation Imaging. Take a look at this video: https://vimeo.com/30213656

Early ultra violet machine for reading damaged manuscripts. Note that one of the founders of the Glasgow company which manufactured it was the famous scientist Lord Kelvin

The arts and humanities provide a rich visual and textual resources posing immensely complex scientific problems. The gulf between men like Davy and Watt, who were as immersed in aesthetic philosophical and cultural problems as they were in technical and engineering issues, and modern science is illustrated by the story of Lenna. Whereas Watt sought to reproduce statues, and Davy collaborated with Canova, modern image scientists use a cropped image from a Playboy centrefold to test their algorithms…

Can’t the arts and humanities at least provide better challenges than Lenna?

Wikipedia:

Lenna or Lena is the name given to a 512×512 pixel standard test image which has been in use since 1973, and was originally cropped from the centerfold of November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. It is a picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications.

The rest of the Lenna story: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/

What I presented at UCL was focused on my own primary interest of manuscripts and books, but there are many other areas of the humanities where there is rich potential for new types of collaboration and synthesis between the arts and the sciences, such as archaeology. This is an illumination dome for polynomial texture mapping, an innovative 3D imaging technique being used increasingly by archaeologists.

Marine archaeology is another area of great collaboration…

The various projects seeking to use ships logs and other historic records to reconstruct old weather to help study climate change are another example of a different sort of transformative collaboration between scientist and humanities scholar:

http://www.oldweather.org/

http://historicweather.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/

http://eira.llgc.org.uk/

My stress here on material survivals – manuscripts, books, artefacts – may seem at odds with the increasing preoccupation with data. But again there is potential here for greater collaboration between science and the humanities. Digital humanities specialists played a fundamental role in the development of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) which is vital to the way the web runs today, but we have failed to publicise this very much.

But I worry that the work many digital humanities specialists have done on the representation of knowledge and the development of knowledge has not fed through to the way in which the semantic web is starting to be deployed. Because of its reliance on Wikipedia and other public domain resources in its semantic networks, the representation of human civilization in Google’s Knowledge Graph is crude to the ;point of parody. The need for greater involvement of humanities scholars can be seen be flicking through just a few pages…

But we ended by looking at the Herculaneum scrolls again, bringing the wheel full circle to Davy. I described the work of Professor Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky which seeks to use custom-built CT scanners and new imaging techniques to image the interior of carbonised papyri.

We watched this video:

https://vimeo.com/22606936

A fuller account of Professor Seales’s project is available here:

https://vimeo.com/35691952