Those from the pontificate of Pius XII are due to be opened to scholars next March , an event which has been keenly awaited by the Jewish community; many Jews and historians say Pius did not do enough to help those facing persecution by Nazi Germany. The Vatican maintains that Pius chose to work behind the scenes, concerned that public intervention would have worsened the situation for both Jews and Catholics in a wartime Europe dominated by Hitler. They found a corpus of 1.
From this, they determined which combinations of letters are common, and which never occur. The OCR software could then use those statistics to assign probabilities to different strings of letters. As a result, the software learned that nn is far more likely than iiii. With this refinement in place, the OCR was finally ready to read some texts on its own.
The team decided to feed it some documents from the Vatican Registers, a more than 18,page subset of the Secret Archives consisting of letters to European kings, rulings on legal matters, and other correspondence.
The initial results were mixed. In texts transcribed so far, a full one-third of the words contained one or more typos, places where the OCR guessed the wrong letter. If yov were tryinj to read those lnies in a bock, that would gct very aiiiioying. Still, the software got 96 percent of all handwritten letters correct.
Like all artificial intelligence, the software will improve over time, as it digests more text. Even more exciting, the general strategy of In Codice Ratio—jigsaw segmentation, plus crowdsourced training of the software—could easily be adapted to read texts in other languages. This could potentially do for handwritten documents what Google Books did for printed matter: open up letters, journals, diaries, and other papers to researchers around the world, making it far easier to both read these documents and search for relevant material.
That said, relying on artificial intelligence does have limitations, says Rega Wood, a historian of philosophy and paleographer expert on ancient handwriting at Indiana University. Still, until recently, the VSA might as well have been secret to most of the world—locked away and largely inaccessible. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Peter was crucified upside down making it a special and iconic must-see sight. The modern Bramante Staircase, a double helix in design was constructed in and is a beautiful replica of the original, named after architect Donato Bramante.
Another usually off-limits room is the Niccoline Chapel, only accessible on certain tours in the Apostolic Palace. With frescoes lining the small room from floor to ceiling by Fra Angelico. Related article: What should you wear to the Vatican City? The Secret Archives of the Vatican Millions of documents spanning across 12 centuries is what waits behind the doors of the Vatican Apostolic Archive.
Find out more here! However, in recent years the Vatican has become a bit more open with its secrets. In , the Vatican Secret Archives put on a public exhibition of some of its most important documents in celebration of its th birthday. In , Sergio Pagano, the prefect of the Secret Archives, revealed why there has been reluctance to open all the archives. Which brings us to what could be the most controversial documents in the Secret Archives—ones that relate to the ongoing sexual abuse scandal within the Church.
Though people can sue individual dioceses for their information, the Church itself is equivalent to a sovereign nation and can do what it pleases. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.
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