TECHNOLOGY WATCH: The Wall Street Journal has a good survey article of recent developments in the digitization of ancient and medieval manuscripts. It's difficult to excerpt, but well worth reading in full:

The Next Age of Discovery

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.

In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

[...]

For the work of Father Columba Stewart (the Benedictine monk), see here. For the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (the garbage dump) see here and here. For the Timbuktu archives, see here. For projects to digitize the manuscripts of the St. Catherine's Monastery, see here and here. For the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, see here. For the Archimedes palimpsest see here, here, and here.

The article also has a nice slide show. The article concludes:

"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

UPDATE (24 May): For more on the University of Kentucky project (which involves carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum, not Pompeii) go here.