Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters

An international team of scholars has read an unopened letter from early modern Europe — without breaking its seal or damaging it in any way — using an automated computational flattening algorithm. The team, including MIT Libraries and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers and an MIT student and alumna, published their findings today in a Nature Communications article titled, “Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography.”

The senders of these letters had closed them using “letterlocking,” the historical process of folding and securing a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope. Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson Conservator at MIT Libraries, developed letterlocking as a field of study with Daniel Starza Smith, a lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College London, and the Unlocking History research team. Since the papers’ folds, tucks, and slits are themselves valuable evidence for historians and conservators, being able to examine the letters’ contents without irrevocably damaging them is a major advancement in the study of historic documents.

This breakthrough technique was the result of an international and interdisciplinary collaboration between conservators, historians, engineers, imaging experts, and other scholars. "The power of collaboration is that we can combine our different interests and tools to solve bigger problems," says Martin Demaine, artist-in-residence in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the research team.

The algorithm that makes the virtual unfolding possible was developed by Amanda Ghassaei SM ’17 and Holly Jackson, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and a participant in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), both working at the Center for Bits and Atoms. The virtual unfolding code is openly available on GitHub.

Read More: https://news.mit.edu/2021/researchers-virtually-open-sealed-historic-letters-0302