“Shortly after the Martellus map surfaced,” Van Duzer wrote by e-mail, “some photos were taken of it in ultraviolet light, and one of these in particular showed that northeastern Asia, where one hardly sees any text at all with the naked eye, is in fact dense with text.” It took decades for multispectral imaging technology to develop to the point where scholars would be able to read the legends. But the Martellus world map, which is six and a half feet wide and four feet tall, presented yet one more challenge. “Transporting it to a laboratory for the multispectral imaging,” Van Duzer said, “would have been detrimental from a conservation point of view, and difficult in terms of insurance.”

Fortunately, portable multispectral imaging tools have recently become more common, and Gregory Heyworth of the Lazarus Project has developed some that can be used with fragile artifacts.

Heyworth and the Lazarus Project team traveled to Yale to photograph the Martellus map. Years ago he began carrying his multispectral imaging tools in a golf bag in order to get around some airline restrictions regarding baggage. Not a golfer, he slips a green plastic putter and golf ball into the bag as a ruse, which smooths the way with airport officials but can also be the source of some embarrassment. While at Yale, a staffer there extracted the green putter with a quizzical look while Heyworth, chagrined, had to quickly explain.

Another participant in the project, Roger Easton of the Rochester Institute of Technology, talks about other, more technical, problems, pointing out that “since the map really is a painting rather than a manuscript, the contrast between the writing and background varies all over the place. . . . We often have to come up with some new methods to recover local sections of text, and these methods generally are not helpful for the next block of text nearby.”

While reflecting on his role in the work on the Martellus world map, Easton, an imaging scientist, takes the long view of the connection between the humanities and technology: “I feel as though I am an ally of the scribe who originally wrote the words. It is not a stretch to say that the scribe was an imaging scientist of his time. He was trying to preserve words by using the most advanced archival technology. These words were then ‘lost’ through no fault of his. We are trying to recover those words using modern descendants of the technology he used to write the original words.”

The recent types of multispectral technology developed by Megavision in California and at the Lazarus Project and used to more fully view the Martellus map have also been used in such groundbreaking projects in the digital humanities as the Archimedes palimpsest project and on the David Livingstone diaries.