In 2013 and 2014, we traveled to the Archivio Capitolare in Vercelli, Italy to image several important historical texts, including the Vercelli Book and the Vercelli mappamundi in side-by-side rooms.

The Vercelli book contains one of the most important and oldest collections of Old English. The 13th century mappamundi survives as one of only a few contemporary maps.

The Vercelli map had suffered serious fading aggravated in a 1970s era attempt to restore it. We took a two-fold approach to its imaging, utilizing both multispectral and trasmissive lights. At nearly a meter square, we were obliged to image in a series of tiles that we later stitched in processing. The combination of the transmissive and UV block filter proved particularly effective, restoring most of the map to complete legibility.

Current undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Rochester are working on processing these images. Graduate student Helen Davies is currently designing and implementing a digital display for the Vercelli mappamundi to produce a multispectral digital facsimile that will allow visitors to navigate not only multispectral layers, and transcribed and multilinguallly translated text, but also a GIS georectified alternative version. She will separate out the physical, urban, mythical, and temporal geographies of the document, which can then be viewed separately or in conjunction with other layers.

This new digital display will provide new access to the text through recovered images, transcriptions, and translations of the text. Problems of scale and relationships between the broad and narrow foci, geographic and encyclopedic, both real and imaginary, gain prominence in the plans for the digital display as she explores concepts of space and place.
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