Slides from my talk at the 4Humanities London meeting, UCL, 18 September 2012

1. How the Humanities can
Help Transform Science
Andrew Prescott
King’s College London

2. 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.

4. 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.

5. Beowulf Manuscript: British
Library Cotton MS Vitellius A.
xv.
This manuscript was also
badly damaged in the fire, but
restored in 1845.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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’

16. JAMES WATT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
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.

17. 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.”

18. James Watt’s Portable Drawing Machine

19. 
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
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                                                                      

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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.

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

24. 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?

25. 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.

26. 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

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

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

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

30. 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

31. 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?

32. 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/l
ennapg/

33. 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.

34. Marine archaeology is another area of great collaboration…

35. 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/

36. 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.

37. 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…

42. 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