About Us
Rochester Cultural Heritage Imaging, Visualization, and Education (R-CHIVE) began in 2016 as a collaboration of university researchers and students with the goal of extending the corpus of mankind’s cultural heritage.
The group began with a mission to leverage the long history of innovation in imaging and of excellence in the humanities in Rochester to recover inscriptions from manuscripts and maps that had been erased or otherwise damaged.
Today, the group retains the geographically-based name but has become an international community focused on cultural heritage imaging, more broadly.
All are welcome.
Collaborative Effort
Initially, participants were based at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York State, with some colleagues in Washington DC, Colorado, and Hawaii.
Since COVID-19, we have moved meetings online via Zoom and have been able to widen our conversation and to include colleagues based in Europe.
Colleagues from all geographies are invited to participate. Meetings aim to help broaden access, outreach, and generate an understanding surrounding current cultural heritage efforts.
Projects For Progress
R-CHIVE members have participated over the last two decades in a large number of projects that successfully recovered writings formerly thought lost, including Archimedes Palimpsest (the oldest known copies of the writings of Archimedes from the 10th century that were erased and overwritten in 1229 CE), the Temple Scroll (from the caves in Qumran), the erased and overwritten palimpsests at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Les Échéz d’Amours – a manuscript damaged by the Allied bombing raids upon Dresden in 1945, and the c. 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus Germanus.
R-CHIVE 