I’m always interested in stories about merging new technologies and old, analog and digital, human and computer teams. Here’s a good one: DARPA ran a contest last month, with a $50,000 prize, in which contestants were asked to use technologies to re-assemble shredded documents. The winning team, All Your Shreds Are Belong To Us, “used custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.” Here are some photos. The forum discussions look pretty interesting.
Yeah, I think that type of help could come in handy for re-assembling letters destroyed by iron-gall ink such as those in my photo above. And I’d like to know more about those mysterious “human assemblers” and their techniques!
Beth Heller Conservation LLC 
You must be logged in to post a comment.