We're a collaborative research team from across the University of Iowa campus, bringing together UI faculty and staff researchers in the departments of Art History, Classics, History, Religious Studies, and Engineering, the Center for the Book (UICB), the Stanley Museum of Art, the University Libraries, the Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging (IIBI), Small Animal Imaging Core (SAIC), and the Iowa Initiative for Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) to establish a previously non-existing broad collaboration in applying enhanced non-destructive digital imaging, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to study cultural artifacts.

Iowa has recently hosted two international conferences on closely related topics regarding manuscripts: the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer seminar and the 2020 “More Than Meets the Eye” Conference. Both events connected the Iowa community with prominent scholars worldwide, received widespread attention, hinted at notable gaps that Iowa’s expertise can fill, and thus set the stage for new research, new approaches, and, we anticipate, new discoveries.

Most recently, in July 2021, IISICCA was awarded a Jumpstarting Tomorrow grant through the Office of the Vice President for Research. Learn more about the Jumpstarting Tomorrow program here.

A single imaging campaign—either of a museum object or a unique manuscript—can provide data critical to its conservation and possible preservation via a simulacrum; this imaging and analysis can also reveal otherwise unrecoverable hidden information, such as material components or written texts, that constitute valuable new evidence about the object and its originating culture.

We are creating a uniquely interdisciplinary team at the University of Iowa, bringing together not only humanists, scientists, and engineers, but also conservationists, librarians, and museum curators, all of whom are using cutting-edge imaging science and AI to address challenging aspects of cultural heritage management. This commitment to mutual investigations by academics from several humanities disciplines—codicology, paleography, conservation science, history, art history, classics, religious studies—is unparalleled in the US, where humanities researchers generally do not participate in joint research that could and should be intrinsically interdisciplinary.

Paul Dilley

Professor, Departments of Classics and Religious Studies

Eric Ensley

Curator of Rare Books and Maps, Special Collections & Archives

Cory Gundlach

Curator of African Arts, Stanley Museum of Art

Eric Hoffman

Director, Advanced Pulmonary Physiomic Imaging Laboratory (APPIL)

Kyungmoo Lee

Research Engineer, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Daniel Maze

Professor, Department of Art & Art History

Laura Moser

Graduate Student, Interdisciplinary Studies

Elizabeth Riordan

Lead Outreach and Instruction Librarian in Special Collections

Giselle Simón

Head of Conservation & Collections Care, UI Libraries

Milan Sonka

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Katherine Tachau

Professor Emerita, Department of History

Thaddeus Wadas

Professor, Department of Radiology

Andreas Wahle

Research Engineer, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Susan Walsh

Technical Director, Small Animal Imaging Core (SAIC)

Honghai Zhang

Research Engineer, Electrical and Computer Engineering