Using a robotic arm to scan the Iliad

Roland Piquepaille writes: "According to Wired News, computer scientists from the University of Kentucky (UKY) recently went to Venice, Italy, to scan 'Venetus A,' the 10th century manuscript of Homer's Iliad. They've used a 39-mexapixel Hasselblad camera to take pictures of the famous manuscript and a laser mounted on a robotic arm to create 3-D images of the 645-page parchment book. As the text is handwritten, it's not easily readable by ordinary people. But Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies plans to produce XML transcriptions of the text and to put them online. Here is a link to the first page of Homer's Iliad and to additional details about this project fo a digital Iliad."