Ok the title is a little tenuous but it sounds good and we all know archeology and Germans are a natural fit (both in Indiana Jones and scholarship). There seems to have been quite a bit of press lately on how the Germans are decoding and putting together literally hundreds of millions of tiny document shreds from the Stasi records. Apparently when unification occurred there was a last minute mass purging of Stasi documents which were shredded to bits. Now the Germans have rolled out a machine capable of analysing and re-assembling these shreds into probable manuscripts.

Then, in May 2007, the German government revealed the world’s most sophisticated pattern-recognition machine, the $8.5 million dollar (U.S.) E-Puzzler, which can digitally put back together even the most finely shredded papers.

Scanning up to 10,000 shreds at once, the machine links them together by their colour, typeface, outline, shape and texture – not unlike how the average human might try to piece together a puzzle. The machine then displays a digital image of the original document on a computer screen.

Now the biblical studies part… Isn’t the connection obvious? If this can be done with shredded Stasi records why not those drawers full of DSS fragments? If it was possible to analyze fragments for probable connections massive amounts of time could be gained in putting together fragment relationships. Maybe someone is doing this already?

via mirabilis

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 11:08 am by Paul Nikkel and is filed under biblical studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.