The Asbury University Honors Program (AUHP) Colloquium Speaker Series will be presenting its next speaker in the Colloquium Speaker Series entitled: “How We Did It! Reading the Herculaneum Scrolls Without Opening Them.”
The speaker for the event, Dr. W. Brent Seales, is “the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held research positions at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, UNC-Chapel Hill, Google (Paris) and the Getty Conservation Institute,” according to the bio that he provided to AUHP.
The talk from Dr. Seales will be centered around the virtual unwrapping of the Herculaneum Scrolls. According to PBS, the Herculaneum Scrolls are an ancient library that “could reveal new insights about the ancient past, but no one has been able to read them.”
Dr. Seales’ invention of virtual unwrapping revealed text from a manuscript that could not be read by traditional means. These new innovations could prove to give us a deepening understanding of texts from the ancient world.
This event will take place Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, at 7 p.m. in the Shaw CLC Luce Auditorium. While the talk is open to all of campus, Honors students will have a special opportunity to attend a talkback with Dr. Seal in Windsor Manor immediately following the event.
Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin.
