Research Overview

Gregory Heyworth is a medievalist and founder of the discipline of textual science, a combination of the traditional scholarly skills of paleography, codicology and bibliography, with material-, imaging-, and data-science. With secondary appointments in History and Computer Science, Heyworth's research lies primarily in the recovery of damaged manuscripts and cultural heritage objects using spectral imaging and machine learning, as well as in the editing of texts, the history of the book and of cartography, and classical influence upon insular and continental romance and satire of the Middle Ages. More colloquially, he is interested in finding ways to read books no one has read before, and in teaching others to do the same.

As director of the Lazarus Project, he and his students have worked to recover manuscripts, maps, and paintings in collections around the world and to make them available to scholars and the public. Current initiatives include the Vercelli Schoolroom Project, the Dresden Baroque Music Project, the 1492 Martin Behaim Globe in Nuremberg, the Laja Alta Bronze Age Cave Paintings in Jimena de la Frontera, Spain, and the Icons of Svanetia in Mestia, Georgia.