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The art of writing is thousands of years old, and,
amazingly, some texts have even lasted that long. Whether etched on paper or stone, the bits that
survive give us lots of insight into ancient worlds and their cultures,
but not before going through some hoops. You see, some of these scripts are divided across
thousands of tiny fragments, which are tricky to read,
even by skilled researchers. So, experts spent more time
figuring out what something says rather than understanding what it really means.
But computer vision is starting to change that. Reading fragments of documents to decipher
individual letters and words is pretty challenging.
So, the main goal for historians is to leave that tedious task to the machines.
Computer vision can process images of text with algorithms and
artificial intelligence to automatically extract the text from those pictures,
producing a clean digital text that experts can easily study and share with others.
While computer vision has been around in many forms,
today's most powerful techniques tend to rely on deep learning.
Deep learning involves a unique algorithm called a neural network,
named for its “network” of interconnected nodes, which are called “neurons.”
The neurons, in this case, are simple mathematical functions.
They're arranged in a sequence of layers, so that when data are fed into them,
the data are processed from one layer to the next to make a prediction or classification.
As the name implies, neural networks are sort of analogous to our brain structure,
albeit very simplified. So, modern networks
have multiple layers of neurons, which scientists describe as “deep.”
And they become helpful at certain tasks by learning
from different data examples, hence the term “deep learning.”
Now the idea is that scientists repeatedly show the network pairs of inputs and outputs.
The inputs are data the algorithm needs to process,
like a digital image of a text fragment. Outputs are the desired outcome or what
the text from the picture is supposed to say. So just to simplify, researchers might show the
network an image of the letter “R” and let it make a prediction
about which letter it is. It might guess correctly, or it
might guess wrongly and classify it as a “Q.” When the algorithm classifies something wrong,
that's when the “learning” comes in. It involves using the difference between
the desired outcome and the algorithm’s guess
to tweak the network’s parameters. So it can then make a more accurate
prediction the next time around. By showing thousands of these kinds
of examples, again and again, the parameters of the network
configure themselves to get better and better
at figuring out what the images say. With enough data, networks can eventually
correctly identify letters and words they have never even seen before, which is how
we check how accurate they really are. Neural networks are a pretty general tool,
so it can do more things beyond just reading images.
They can be trained to identify which parts of an image actually contain the text
in the first place, make an attempt to fill in missing text, and even digitally
reconstruct whole documents that are too fragile to physically touch.
Most of these applications currently involve using lots of training data of
correctly labeled images with the correct output, and the more, the better.
But the correct output, in this case, usually comes from humans who read
the text in the first place. So, in this kind of learning,
machines might come to basically copy the examples humans give them.
And, as you probably know, we sometimes make biased or flawed judgements,
so machines can come to inherit the same kinds of biases.
Thankfully, in the case of text, the output we want tends to be pretty unambiguous.
So, for now, it still takes lots of initial human work to create
enough data examples for these algorithms to “learn” how to do their jobs.
But once you go through that initial effort, scientists can train models
that work quickly and efficiently on ancient documents.
So far, computer vision has been used to read printed Latin letters,
like the kind used for English, for decades, but new techniques are expanding
to different historical languages and writing styles from all over the world.
Researchers have created models that can read stylized versions of Latin script
from old German, Tamil, Devanagari, the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez,
Korean, and Japanese, just to name a few. And, as we mentioned, these algorithms can
do more than just read text. One 2021 study used computer
vision to digitally piece together torn papyrus fragments from the Dead Sea.
Another 2021 study made old documents with faded text easier to read,
while a different study from 2019 helped guess missing ancient Greek words
in broken stone tablets based on existing examples.
These algorithms might also be able to help with the actual “history” part too.
A 2021 study used neural networks to try and identify if an ancient Hebrew scroll
from the Dead Sea was written by a single person based on features of the handwriting.
And researchers found that it wasn’t just a single person that wrote it;
it was multiple scribes that were careful enough to have similar handwriting to each other!
We are still in the early days for this kind of work, but it’s beginning to look like the
future of archeology could be a little more “Tony Stark” than “Indiana Jones.”
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[♪ OUTRO]