Armin Lange, Computer Aided Text-Reconstruction and Transcription: CATT-Manual, with an Introduction by Hermann Lichtenberger and an Appendix (on "Publishing the Results") by Timothy Doherty. T<"u>bingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993. Pp. xii + 160. ISBN 3-16-146149-5. ===== NOTE: This review has been commissioned by the Jewish Quarterly Review published by the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Because of the nature of the volume under review, which deals with a rapidly changing world, JQR has permitted electronic pre-publication release of this basic information to appropriate outlets such as IoudRev. Please reproduce this notice with any cross- posting of the review. The author reserves the right to modify the review for final publication in the JQR. ===== <0.1> The back cover of this slim and well illustrated volume is worth quoting in its entirety: "This manual presents a new way of reconstructing damaged manuscripts, inscriptions and early prints using recently developed image editing software. The method -- called Computer Aided Text-Reconsctuction and Transcription (CATT) -- has been developed on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but can be used for any damaged text." <0.2> The CATT approach has been developed by Armin Lange, at the time (the Introduction is dated March 1993) an advanced graduate student working on a dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the University of Munster and an associate of its Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum. Lange has used available software and hardware operating in a DOS (IBM compatible) computer environment, but the procedures he documents can be performed on any system with sophisticated image editing capabilities. <0.3> The book deserves to be reviewed as promptly as possible, since it deals with a timely and important subject, but in its details is out of date before it has even gone to press. The techniques it describes remain valuable for anyone working with similar materials of any language or date. The exact computer equipment, programs, and operation instructions are largely irrelevant. It would in most instances be disadvantageous to attempt to duplicate Lange's exact system, given the technological advances that have appeared in the meantime and will continue to appear. <1.1> Lange describes a "minimum configuration" consisting of an IBM (or compatible) 386 machine with 8 megabytes RAM and at least 200 megabytes hard disk storage. The graphics board and screen are SVGA, with 800 x 600 resolution and 256 colors shades. His "medium [since many larger systems could also be devised] configuration" is a 486 machine with 16 m RAM and a 500 m hard disk. Its SVGA graphics board and screen are capable of 1024 x 768 resolution, with 16.7 million color distinctions. Windows 3.1 is the interface of choice, running under MS-DOS 5.0 or higher. A scanner with a minimum of 300 dpi and 256 grayshades is recommended. <1.2> Several image processing programs are described in detail and with great clarity (including clear photographs of screens): FotoTouch 2.1 (based on Ansel 1.0, sold with Logitech's Scanman 256 hand scanner); PhotoStyler 1.1 (from Ulead, now purchased by Aldus, similar to Adobe's Photoshop for the Macintosh); PhotoStyler 2.0 (a major update of the preceding); Image Pals Album (included in PhotoStyler 2.0, but also separately available for organizing images and image excerpts); Picture Publisher 3.1 (from Micrografx). Concluding comments on file compression and conversion, editing and publishing the results round out this handbook. An index is also provided. <2.1> The primary value of this volume rests in its detailed verbal descriptions and photographic representations of various processes that can be applied to the manuscript or inscription (or other digitized material) under examination. A somewhat more technical discussion of these same matters, which in may ways complements Lange's work, may be found in the guest contribution by James Marchand to my OFFLINE 37 column (Religious Studies News 7.2, March 1992 = Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 21.2, April 1992) entitled "The Computer as Camera and Darkroom." Whereas Marchand writes for those who have some minimal background in photography and/or computing, and thus covers the ground more thoroughly, especially with regard to theoretical matters, Lange takes almost nothing for granted. In Lange's handbook, special terminology and concepts are carefully explained and little is left to the imagination -- you can see (but only in black and white; the actual color images on the computer screen are even more impressive!) what the results are of such procedures (applied to part or the whole image) as: changing brightness, contrast, colors highlighting, modulation of background, etc. changing size or shape magnification and selection of sub-sections negative and mirror images rotation (for alignment, etc.) joining fragments overlaying of fragments, letters, etc. reconstructing text gaps. <00.1> This book ought to be examined carefully -- or even cursorily! -- by anyone interested in (or skeptical of) computer enhanced exploration of digitized materials in general, or of such fragmentary and damaged written materials as the Dead Sea Scrolls (from which all examples are taken) in particular. It is a very redundant book insofar as each of the image manipulation programs described will do virtually identical things for many of the functions. And the programs it describes will no longer be the most powerful (or affordable) available as time goes on. But new or updated software will certainly continue to perform these same functions, and for that reason the book will continue to be valuable as a basic guide to the possible -- and sometimes to the previously highly improbable. As Jim Marchand notes at the end of his abovementioned contribution, "The next generation of scholars will have to become not only computer literate, but also image literate." Lange's book is another useful step in those directions. Robert A. Kraft University of Pennsylvania College Hall Box 36 Philadelphia PA 19104-6303 kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu //end//