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Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance genius. Not only did he paint masterpieces of art, but he was an obsessive scientist and inventor, dreaming up complex machines centuries ahead of his time, including parachutes, armored tanks, hang gliders, and robots. On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, with the help of biographer Walter Isaacson, NOVA investigates the secrets of Leonardo’s success. How did his scientific curiosity, from dissections of cadavers to studies of optics, shape his genius and help him create perhaps the most famous painting of all time, the &quot;Mona Lisa&quot;? (Premiered November 13, 2019)

Discover the science behind Leonardo da Vinci&#x27;s masterpieces—and Mona Lisa&#x27;s iconic smile.

Decoding da Vinci

In a new age of information, rapid innovation, and globalization, how can we prepare our children to compete? Once the envy of the world, American schools are now in trouble. Test scores show our kids lag far behind their peers from other industrialized countries, and as the divide between rich and poor grows wider, the goal of getting all kids ready for college and the workforce gets harder by the day. How can the latest research help us fix education in America? Can the science of learning—including new insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators—reveal how kids’ brains work and tell us which techniques are most likely to engage and inspire growing minds? What role should technology play in the classroom? Teachers, students, parents, and scientists take center stage as NOVA explores a new vision for the “School of the Future.”

How can the science of learning help us rethink the future of education for all children?

School of the Future

Rockets are becoming cheaper and more powerful than ever before thanks to stunning new technologies. As companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic make space more accessible, and NASA returns to crewed spaceflight, a new era of space exploration seems to be on the horizon. But will this seeming rocket Renaissance become more than just hype? NOVA explores the latest rocket technologies and the growing role private citizens may have in space. (Premiered February 13, 2019)

With new technologies, NASA and private companies are promising a new renaissance in space travel.

Rise of the Rockets

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At the Neolithic village of <a href="https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2016/05/3d-4d-digital-monitoring-sea-defences-skara-brae/">Skara Brae</a> off the northern coast of Scotland, serpentine green slopes overlay the remains of a community so complete that many of the houses feature stone beds, dressers, and cupboards—even though the village is older than both Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. The site, which was once home to some 50 people, overlooks the blustery Bay of Skaill. Over the millennia, wind and water have slowly eaten into the hills around the ruins, putting them at risk of eventual destruction.
 

 
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 For the last decade, the preservation organization Historic Environment Scotland (HES) has been visiting Skara Brae deveoping strategies to protect what’s sometimes known as the “Scottish Pompeii” from encroaching erosion. One of their most successful efforts has nothing to do with wood or stone and everything to do with light. Every two years, HES conservators bring laser scanners to the remote northern island to gather a 3D image of Skara Brae, including both its structures and the surrounding dunes and cliffs. Comparing the resulting data set to its predecessors has helped them identify to the millimeter how the landscape has changed.“To be able to monitor what’s going on is essential,” says Sophia Mirashrafi, who helps coordinate <a href="https://www.engineshed.scot/about-us/teams/digital-documentation-and-digital-innovation/the-rae-project/">HES’s digital projects</a> and get them ready for presentation to the public. “Scanning doesn’t stop the water from eroding the site, but it can be used to help inform decisions about how it can be protected.” She and her team also used the scans—known as point-cloud models—to create interactive virtual experiences that give the public up-close access to parts of the village.When we think about preserving cultural heritage, Mirashrafi says, we usually think about the physical: propping up carved stone, reconstructing rotted wood, uncovering precious metal. But, just as it’s being used at Skara Brae, laser scanning (also known as LIDAR) has become an essential tool at cultural sites around the world, from Notre Dame to Rapa Nui, in augmenting physical preservation, helping conservators make better decisions, and enriching experiences of the sites for both scientists and the public.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Aerial digital map of Skara Brae" class="richtext-image full-width" height="565" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/SkaraBraePlan_Pointcloud.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Historic Environment Scotland has used drones equipped with LIDAR scanners and photogrammetry to create aerial 3D models of the Skara Brae Neolithic site, which is older than Stonehenge. Image courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland <div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 At the most basic level, a point-cloud model is a collection of 3D coordinates that conservators, art historians, and researchers can use to “sample reality,” says architect and computer scientist Livio De Luca, who heads the vast team of <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/scientists-are-leading-notre-dame-s-restoration-and-probing-mysteries-laid-bare-its">scientists racing to preserve</a> Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after the catastrophic fire that destroyed its roof in April 2019. Laser sensors mounted on rotating heads collect data on more than 100 three-dimensional points per second over a 180-degrees axis by measuring the amount of time it takes for light to leave the sensor, bounce off a given spot on a structure or object, and return.Users move scanners of different resolutions (some for capturing fine details, other for larger landscapes) gradually around the site to produce a digital cloud of points. Each data set overlaps with the last, allowing them to combine those data sets in an algorithmic process called registration, and create a 360-degree “picture” of that site—kind of like doing a 3D jigsaw puzzle. Even though the lasers collect so much data so quickly, the process is still slow and painstaking. It took a team more than two weeks to scan Notre Dame, De Luca says, using some 400 scanning stations to capture as many data points as possible.After the initial puzzle is done, the next step is to turn the cloud of points into a “watertight mesh” using a computer program—converting them from a dense constellation to an interconnected surface. Conservators often combine this mesh with data from another digital data-gathering technique called photogrammetry, which can harvest information about a structure’s texture, color, and general shape from overlapping photos of that structure. LIDAR (which stands for Light Detection and Ranging) “gives you quantifiable accuracy,” says architect and computer engineer John Ristevski, CEO of the digital heritage nonprofit CyArk, whose mission revolves around scanning sites of historical and cultural interest around the world. “In contrast, photogrammetry provides great textures and beautiful geometry, but it’s not completely reliable. We want both.”
 

 
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 As the technology has improved, point-cloud models have come to play an essential role when heritage sites are damaged. Ristevski’s colleagues at CyArk finished scanning one of <a href="https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/bagan/">Bagan, Myanmar’s huge stone temples</a> just three months before a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the city in 2016. Using <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Y33-VvsbA">their scans</a>, CyArk was able to create detailed assessments of the damage and help with plans for restoration. Similarly, a Vassar professor, a 3D tourism company, and the company that makes the video game Assassin’s Creed had all <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBzKsTZ81Sw">scanned Notre Dame Cathedral</a> before its fire. “The point cloud represents the main source to rebuild something, using geometrical information in a precise and accurate way,” De Luca says. “If by other kinds of restoration we were able to approximate shapes in the past, now we’re able to reproduce shapes millimeter by millimeter.”Point-cloud modeling can also help conservators do experiments that would be impossible in real life. At Notre Dame, a new phase of reconstruction began this month to rebuild the stone ribs that once held up arches in the ceiling. Before this effort begins in earnest, members of the cathedral team will scan each individual stone, a process that will allow them to rebuild the ribs virtually—ensuring they do not compromise the rest of the structure before they are rebuilt in real life. “We’re able to more safely and, from a scientific point of view, more accurately test how they will behave in rebuilding,” De Luca says.For HES, point-cloud modeling has not just been essential in erosion monitoring; it has also become an important teaching tool. Using LIDAR scanners and drones capable of photogrammetry, the organization has been able to scan the tops of walls (known as “wall heads”), allowing conservators a much more complete view of the structure than ever possible before. “Scaffolding is very expensive, and it’s difficult to get people up there,” says Mirashrafi. Having access to point-cloud models of the upper parts of the buildings has allowed conservators and stone masons working on the many sites HES cares for to get up close to ceilings they couldn’t access otherwise and to better monitor the health of those wall heads—even using their virtual counterparts as teaching tools for masons-in-training.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Digital image of row of stone statues" class="richtext-image full-width" height="394" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Ahu_Nau_Nau2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Staffers from the digital heritage nonprofit CyArk traveled to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in early 2020. There, they taught workshops in point-cloud modeling, which will allow local resource managers and Indigenous groups to monitor the erosion of the island’s 500 moai, or enormous, ancient stone statues. Image Credit: CyArk<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 CyArk was founded by Iraqi-American Ben Kacyra as a way to fight the kind of cultural destruction that was typical of the Taliban and ISIS in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decades. But as modeling technology has become cheaper and more portable, the company’s mission has changed as well, Ristevski says, with less emphasis on secure data storage and individual projects and more on <a href="https://openheritage3d.org/">open access</a> and education.Since its founding, for example, CyArk has stored copies of each site it scans in a secure facility 200 feet underground—the same facility that, according to urban legend, stores Elvis Presley’s master tapes. “We still do that, but it’s a less interesting piece of our work,” Ristevski says. Two years ago, CyArk also began putting its data sets online under a Creative Commons license. “Things that are burrowed away somewhere is one avenue, but now it’s more about sharing and opening up data,” he says.Similarly, where CyArk once sought to digitize 500 cultural heritage sites under their own steam, Ristevski says what now excites him is the educational workshops the organization runs around the world. “We’ve seen a lot more adoption of this, especially in the last three or four years,” he says. In early 2020, for example, Ristevski and other CyArk staffers traveled to the South Pacific to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79DfInkneRA&amp;feature=emb_title">give a workshop</a> for monument staff and local Indigenous communities at Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. That site, much like Skara Brae, faces continual damage from wind and waves, so CyArk did a set of initial point-cloud models to act as a baseline, allowing for annual monitoring of how each of the island’s enormous stone statues is weathering. Helping local authorities monitor their own site makes it possible to scan all 500 sites on the island, he says, whereas CyArk might only have had time or resources for one or two.A technique like point-cloud modeling can also create an opportunity for sorting through and storing many types of information. Notre Dame is a perfect example. “Even if today we are building a lot of data around this physical aspect, we are also building a ‘knowledge cathedral’ at the same time,” De Luca says. For his team, that means building a “digital twin” of the cathedral, a real-time virtual clone of the physical object that records more than just the geometric dimensions of the cathedral before and after the fire. This digital twin also manages the myriad chemistry, physics, art history, archaeology, and engineering data generated by its many restoration projects—from managing the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/stabilizing-notre-dames-buttresses/">flying buttresses</a> to cataloguing each of the thousands of pieces of tangled, burnt wood that once made up the “forest” in the cathedral’s attic—and makes it available within a few minutes of its collection.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Digital model of 2 stone statues" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Rob1.width-800.png"/><figcaption>Point-cloud images of huge stone statues at Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Image Credit: CyArk<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Past Skara Brae, even farther north into the cold reaches of the Atlantic ocean, sits Mousa Broch, a 40-foot-tall Iron Age stone tower built around 300 BCE on a bluff overlooking the sea. Even for the few visitors that make it to the Shetland Islands, Mousa Broch is difficult to access, requiring a strenuous hike. But point-cloud modeling has allowed Mirashrafi’s team not just to gather essential records of the building for posterity but also to open the site (or a version of it) to the public.As part of their scanning efforts, they’ve translated the point-cloud version of Mousa Broch into a version most computers can handle, through a site called <a href="https://sketchfab.com/HistoricEnvironmentScotland">SketchFab</a> (which Mirashrafi calls the “YouTube of 3D models.”) “Sharing for education and interpretation is something we’re equally interested in,” she says. Flocks of storm petrels roost at Mousa Broch at night, so as an extra immersive touch, the team layered recordings of the seabirds over the model animation. The result: a <a href="https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/mousa-broch-shetland-88a87c90cde8477a87523caa511c1796">rich virtual experience</a> that was previously largely inaccessible.In this vein, Mirashrafi says she’s been especially impressed with point-cloud modeling’s potential for storytelling. Being able to digitally recreate a structure or item with such accuracy helps her team fight archaeology’s tendency to strip items of their cultural context. Though the digital can never replace the physical—“When you go out and scan a site, it doesn’t negate the necessity for historians and conservators”—a digital replica is a powerful tool, she says, whether it’s used to help recreate a site before a rock fall or to help the public experience a little bit of new history.Through point-cloud models, a lost or destroyed site can be reconstructed; an artifact can be put back virtually where it was originally found. “So often in museum contexts, it’s hand’s off, don’t touch, don’t talk, don’t question,” she says. “These kinds of virtual environments encourage manipulation and questioning,” in a richer way than you might see behind glass.
 

 
 

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Notre Dame Cathedral on fire in April 2019. Image credit: Wandrille de Préville, Wikimedia Commons

Laser-scanning technology can create exceptionally detailed 3D models of cultural sites, bringing them to life online—and helping experts restore them if disaster strikes.

3D models help preserve landmarks like Notre Dame

Could the cathedral&#x27;s beautiful stained glass collection survive the 2019 fire intact?
Discover the effects the fire had on Notre Dame&#x27;s stained glass, and how one scientist is meticulously cleaning and repairing it.
Saving Notre Dame&#x27;s Stained Glass MasterpiecesPublished: November 20, 2020Narrator: Inside Notre-Dame, scientists begin to gather data and investigate the damage to treasured statues, murals and windows. The cathedral’s most fragile wonder, it’s stained glass, dates back to the thirteenth century. Miraculously, they survive the fire intact.But the intense heat that melted the cathedral’s lead covered roof means that much of the glasswork is now covered in a layer of toxic lead powder. Removing it could damage the delicate glass and be harmful to restorers.Glass Scientist, Claudine Loisel uses a handheld digital microscope to investigate the levels of lead powder on the stained glass. She must then formulate a strategy to clean every single panel; a vast decontamination program.Claudine examines deposits from windows around the cathedral. The samples reveal vital clues about the spread of the lead contamination. The windows of the upper level, in the path of the lead cloud, have been most contaminated.The team takes out and transports these panels to this special laboratory where they experiment with ways to remove the lead. First, Claudine uses a precision vacuum cleaner to remove the hundred years of dust… and most of the lead powder along with it.Claudine Loisel: So this is a good way to protect the conservator. You can control the action, the pressure on the glass and also on the painting.Narrator: Then she uses water and cotton balls to remove the last of the lead.Claudine Loisel: Of course, you need scientific evidence that it’s working.Narrator: Claudine uses x-ray spectroscopy to determine exactly how many wipes it takes to bring the lead down to normal levels.Claudine Loisel: So, we can identify each chemical element we have in the material.Narrator: Too few wipes and the lead will remain. Too many wipes and restoration will take longer than necessary.Claudine Loisel: Ok, now the analysis is finished.Narrator: After five wipes, Claudine checks to see if the glass is decontaminated.Claudine Loisel: Ok, we have different chemical element, calcium, iron, and if we want to see the lead… there is no lead! After nine months, we can see a good solution, a good way to clean and to preserve the stained glass windows from Notre Dame.

Saving Notre Dame's Stained Glass Masterpieces

Could the cathedral&#x27;s beautiful stained glass collection survive the 2019 fire intact?

If the stone vaulting collapses, the weight of the buttresses will push in the 100-foot walls.
After the Notre Dame fire of 2019, a team of architects and engineers must design a way to stabilize the famous cathedral&#x27;s buttresses before its roof and entire structure collapses. 
Stabilizing Notre Dame&#x27;s Famous ButtressesPublished: November 20, 2020Narrator: The stricken cathedral is a giant house of cards. If the stone vaulting collapses, the weight of the buttresses will push in the 100 foot walls. And Notre-Dame will be no more.Philippe Villeneuve: (Merci à tous d’être là) Thank you for being here.Narrator: So Phillipe heads up a rapid response team; dozens of engineers, architects and scientists. Their task is to prevent a total collapse of the cathedral.Narrator: It’s not only a difficult job, it’s also hazardous. The crumbling stone vaults and twisted scaffolding make any visit inside to investigate the stability of the structure extremely dangerous.Carlo Blasi: (Et on peut voir d’ici l’intérieur….) And we can see from here the inside of…. [alarm sound]Lise Leroux: Go out. The scaffolding is moving. Scaffolding!Narrator: Motion sensors are installed in the melted jumble of scaffolding overhead. These can be triggered by gusts of wind, a warning before a possible full-scale collapse.Narrator: There are evacuations like this each week; necessary, but an impediment to the urgent work of stabilizing the structure.Narrator: To avert a catastrophic collapse, engineers could build a steel skeleton inside the nave to brace the walls. Then, even if the vaulting caves in, the walls of Notre-Dame would stay standing. But, it’s far too dangerous for workers to erect steelwork beneath the compromised structure.Philippe Villeneuve: (On ne peut pas aller sous les voûtes parce qu&#x27;on ne sait pas si elles vont tomber ou pas.) We can’t go under the vaults because we don’t know whether they will fall or not. Narrator: So, instead of bracing the walls from the inside, the team will build timber frames under the buttresses outside. Now, if the vaulting does fall in, the buttresses can’t push on the walls, and they won’t come tumbling down.Worker A: (C’est la liste des pieces entaillées pour le chantier.) Here’s the list of the beams we need to cut for the site.Worker B: (N’oblier pas d’essayer de tailler en premier ce qu’ils doivent assembler à côté.) Don’t forget, let’s cut the beams they need to assemble first…Philippe Villeneuve: (Il sont très difficiles parce que en fait aucun arc boutants est identique, donc aucun cintre et identique. Il sont sur mesure.) They are very difficult because no flying buttress is identical to another. They are made to measure.Narrator: Workers at this factory race to cut and assemble around 250 tons of timber, to create the massive supports Philippe’s team needs to prop up the vaults. It’s critical each support fits perfectly beneath each flying buttress to hold its weight. Narrator: But finally, five months later, all 28 flying buttresses are locked in place and the walls are safe.

Stabilizing Notre Dame's Famous Buttresses Hero

If the stone vaulting collapses, the weight of the buttresses will push in the 100-foot walls.

Stabilizing Notre Dame's Famous Buttresses

Due to the pandemic, millions are voting by mail in the 2020 presidential election.
Election officials have braced for an unprecedented wave of mail-in ballots. What safeguards are in place to track individual ballots as they travel to voters and back to the election office?
The Tech Behind Mail-In VotingPublished: October 28, 2020Donald Trump: I just want to thank you… and get out and vote.Joseph Biden: Show up and vote. You will determine the outcome of this election.Narrator: Due to the pandemic, voting by mail is huge right now.News clip: Election officials are bracing for an unprecedented wave of mail-in ballots.Narrator: In 2016, less than 34 million ballots were mailed in in total. This year, voters have requested over 90 million ballots to be submitted by mail, and a week before the election more than 45 million have already been returned. And for it all to succeed, there’s one basic requirement for a ballot.Whitney Quesenbery: It has to make it all the way through the mail in both directions. Narrator: From your local election office to you, the voter and back again. A vote by mail ballot that can’t be counted is really, to me, the ultimate election tragedy. We have to have an election system that supports people through the process of voting so that their ballots get counted. Which is where the Center for Civic Design comes in.Jessenia Eliza: They have worked exclusively with the USPS in trying to create the... I guess you can say the perfect election mail envelope.Quesenbery: The envelope is kind of a technical machine. It’s a machine you’ve designed to carry the ballot to and from the voter. Narrator: The US Postal Service will repeatedly scan and sort that envelope, which means...Eliza: You want to ensure that those mail pieces are easily visible, that they can be recognized, that everything is clearly printed.Narrator: Step 1: start with a rectangle. USPS sorting machines use the rectangular shape to orient the envelope.Quesenbery: And it assumes that it’s wider than it is tall. Anything that’s different is going to get spit out. The machines are going to say, “I don’t know what to do with this.” And it has to get hand processed. And that makes it take more time. Narrator: Then there’s what goes on that rectangle. It’s what the automated envelope reading machines are looking for. The upper right corner is reserved for postage and several vertical bars.Quesenbery: They call that the facing... Anna, what is it? The facing…Anna Haraseyko: Facing identification mark.Quesenbery: Thank you. That’s to help the machines know which is the front of the envelope.Narrator: There’s the return address, the delivery address, the election mail logo...Quesenbery: That’s the swoopy thing that says election mail with the stars behind it. Only election offices are allowed to use it. And all of those things need to be in specific areas and specific places. That’s a lot to put on a little tiny rectangle.Haraseyko: A lot of what we did was just sort of moving around blocks of text on the envelope to find that perfect sweet spot where the envelope was easy for the machines to read, but also easy for the voters to understand and also easy for the election officials to receive and get the information that they needed. Quesenbery: And then you need the magic thing, which is the intelligent mail barcode.Eliza: An intelligent mail barcode is actually an encoded string of digits.Narrator: This string of vertical bars is code for a 20-31 digit number that contains a wealth of information about each envelope.Eliza: The first element in that barcode is something called a barcode identifier.Narrator: For election mail, it’s usually two digits, and usually zero zero.Eliza: The piece that follows that is the service type ID or the STID. This is gonna identify the class of mail.Narrator: Ballots are sent as First-Class mail or USPS Marketing Mail.Eliza: And as of August 2018, it tells us whether or not that piece is a ballot.Quesenbery: So just by reading the barcode, they can tell that it’s something to do with an election.Eliza: And it ensures that as election mail is moving through the postal stream, those pieces are being treated with efficiency as they’re being processed. After the STID, you have the mailer ID or MID. Whoever owns that MID, will own any associated scan data every time that intelligent mail barcode is scanned. Narrator: For ballots, the mailer ID usually belongs to the local or state election office or the vendor helping to provide mail services to the jurisdiction or state.Eliza: After the MID is the unique serial number for every single voter. The last piece is the zip code or what we also call the routing code. And so when you string that all together, you’ve got your intelligent mail barcode. As that ballot is traveling through the mail, that intelligent mail barcode is being scanned. And this helps us ensure a ballot’s full chain of custody in the mail. So you can watch that piece as it’s moving and ensure that it’s getting to the place that it needs to get to.Narrator: Because the barcode is encoded, an individual voter can’t use it to follow their ballot. But the USPS and other tracking services can.Eliza: If there’s ever an instance where it seems like a ballot hasn’t been delivered or received by the election office, using that intelligent mail barcode can help the USPS track down where that specific envelope might be.Narrator: So once you drop your ballot in the mail, there are safeguards in place to make sure your vote gets where it needs to go.Eliza: The USPS is definitely an innovative institution, always thinking of methods in which to improve the services that they provide to customers, especially when it comes to election mail.Narrator: Most states allow voters to drop their mail-in ballots off at the local election office in person. In many states, if you order a mail-in ballot, you can still vote in person. The process varies from state to state, but may involve surrendering your ballot to the polling place or election center before voting in person.Despite the systems in place to get your ballot where it needs to go, issues may still arise, leading to your vote being rejected. These include:● problems with your signature● not filling out all required information on the envelope like the date, your address, or birthdate● and not mailing or dropping off your ballot on timeQuesenbery: Our work is about making sure that everybody who is eligible and wants to vote can vote. And maybe even going a step further and saying it’s about making sure that we encourage everyone who’s eligible to vote.Narrator: For more information on how to vote, visit vote.gov, eac.gov, howto.vote

Due to the pandemic, millions are voting by mail in the 2020 presidential election.

The Tech Behind Mail-In Voting

Watch how a printing press works.
The European printing revolution began in Germany in 1448 when goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg began casting letters in metal.
The Printing Press Revolutionized the Spread of InformationPublished: October 8, 2020Narrator: The printing revolution began in the German town of Mainz, in 1448, when Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith by trade, began casting the letters of the Latin alphabet in metal.Joost Depuydt: Gutenberg was looking for a way to produce multiple copies of the same text in a much faster way than scribes could copy texts in the manuscript period.Narrator: Gutenberg’s idea was to speed up the process of putting words on a page by replacing the scribe with a machine. The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass produce multiple copies in metal of each individual letter. And in this he had a hidden advantage, the nature of the Latin alphabet.Brody Neuenschwander: The letters of the Latin alphabet are really very simple shapes, and when you write them in the way they would have been written at the time printing was invented, all the letters are very clearly separate. This is a modular way of writing, and, in fact, if I want to make little blocks of metal with them, no problem, because I’m already, I’m already there, basically. The design has already happened. These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can be printed.

The Printing Press Revolutionized the Spread of Information Hero

The Printing Press Revolutionized the Spread of Information

Karim Jabbari still remembers how painful it was to walk down the street with his family as a child and see his neighbors turn away. “No one was willing to talk to us in public,” he says. Jabbari’s father was a political prisoner, an activist and “public enemy” of the dictatorship that then ruled Tunisia. His family was under strict police surveillance, and anyone seen talking to them was immediately suspect as well.
 

 
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 Ten-year-old Jabbari, lonely and missing his father, looked for other ways to fill his time. What he found was his father’s trove of 400-year-old religious texts, inherited from an ancestor who had been a renowned scholar of Islam. The books were written in an old form of North African calligraphy known as Maghrebi script. “It’s an art form that speaks to your soul, even if you don’t understand the message,” he says. “I saw the effort of these people spending so much time, writing a thousand pages by hand. I saw the long nights; I saw my father, his smile.”Before long, he was obsessed, copying what he saw in the books over and over until the arcs and lines settled into his muscles. That obsession only grew once he left his hometown of Kasserine to go to boarding school, and his new skill attracted friends—the one thing he’d never had.Today, Jabbari, now 42, is a <a href="https://www.karimjabbari.com/">full-time artist</a> based in Canada and the U.S., using murals, graffiti, and specialized technology to bring traditional Arabic calligraphy to an international audience. He worries that a craft that prizes meditative concentration and lengthy training will be lost in an era so focused on agility and speed. His work, he hopes, can serve as a kind of bridge, “a link between conservative traditional calligraphy and our augmented reality.”
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Light calligraphy at night" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/img-5506_orig.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Karim Jabbari uses long-exposure photography to capture words written with handheld lights. Image courtesy of Karim Jabbari<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Calligraphy—and calligraphers—have resisted new technologies for centuries. For starters, Arabic and its sibling, Persian, used non-Latin alphabets that made them difficult to adapt for use in printing technology developed in the West, says <a href="https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/">Behrooz Parhami</a>, an engineer who has studied how Arabic and Persian scripts have evolved alongside technology. Physical typefaces built for <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/">Persian and Arabic’s connected letters</a> are more fragile, prone to chipping and cracking. And if they aren’t perfectly made, white spaces appear between letters that shouldn’t be there.
 

 
 The scripts also included letters with elements stacked on top of neighboring letters, which was impossible to recreate using the separate blocks of moveable type. And they varied in height and width much more than Latin characters, meaning that the common printing practice of adjusting typefaces to make letters about the same size would render words illegible. That “would be disastrous,” Parhami says. “It would be very difficult to read.”It therefore makes sense that in Persia and the Arab world, words simply remained handwritten for centuries longer than in Europe, Parhami says. The printing press spread quickly across Western Europe in the 1460s and 70s, but it would be another 250 years before the Ottomans, who ruled much of the Muslim world, allowed the opening of a print shop. In Persia, it would be nearly 400 years before printing became commonplace. And in modern-day Turkey, authorities eventually resolved the typeface issue in the 1920s by changing that country’s script from Arabic-based to Latin-based.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Arabic calligraphy in books" class="richtext-image full-width" height="500" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/my_fathers_books.width-800.png"/><figcaption>Karim Jabbari&#x27;s father&#x27;s books. Image Courtesy of Karim Jabbari<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Still, Parhami attributes this delay not just to the technical challenges but also to the hallowed role of the written word in these societies. In the Arab world, calligraphy provided an intimate connection to God through handwritten copying of the Quran and other religious texts. In the region that now largely constitutes Iran, the related Persian script (which differs by four letters) grew especially elaborate, driven in part by a rich poetry tradition, making the idea of mechanization—and the changes to writing that would come with it—less appealing. Jabbari’s own connection to his ancestors’ books have helped him understand this tension, he says. Arabic calligraphy’s historic link with the Quran makes it a sacred form, he says. It was revered for centuries “and when the printers come, all of that is going to be dumped? That’s hard.”
 

 
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 Although he empathizes, he’s also frustrated to see that same resistance to change in modern Arabic calligraphy’s small, somewhat insular community, which has sometimes been reluctant to embrace innovations like modern fonts, computer-assisted publishing, and social media. Some traditional calligraphers have told him he doesn’t know the “real craft” because he was never able to find a mentor to formally teach him Maghrebi script.  “You can be a beautiful, amazing, well-known, traditional calligraphy artist, but your art isn’t speaking to the younger generations,” he says. Refusing to try new things or embrace new technology leaves young people out, he argues, and puts the entire tradition at risk. &quot;&#x27;Your art is dying with you,’ I said to them. I have nothing but respect for you, but I’m taking calligraphy to the streets.”<div>
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Although Jabbari also paints murals that incorporate written elements, “taking calligraphy to the streets” usually means light painting: a combination of long-exposure photography and perfectly calibrated movements of a handheld light that captures the loops and swirls of Maghrebi Arabic in thin air. In 2011, after Jabbari’s uncle was shot and killed along with 28 other young men during the beginning of the Arab Spring, he returned to Kasserine to do just such a performance piece. “I wanted to write his name in light painting, the same place where he died,” he says. After he finished honoring his uncle, he gave other families in the area the opportunity to do the same, allowing them to write their loved ones’ names in space—a fleeting memorial fixed on film.
 

 
 Light calligraphy is a challenging medium. “You need to know the limits of the camera, what space it’s covering,” he says. “You have all of that space to explore, so you end up using your body as reference: making a line at chest level, or one at hip level.” In practice, that looks something like a combination of dance, meditation, and craft. Jabbari has collaborated with dancers and musicians; he once performed in the background of a symphony orchestra in Abu Dhabi; and he builds yoga into his light calligraphy workshops. He recently hired two software developers to create a program that projects his movements in short near-real-time loops onto skyscrapers, a kind of ephemeral graffiti.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Light calligraphy indoors" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/KJ11.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Light calligraphy by Karim Jabbari. Image Credit: Husam AlSayed<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Since Jabbari arrived in Canada at 20 years old, calligraphy has become an important way for him to hold onto his culture and identity. “I strongly believe that if you don’t know your history, no one will respect you,” he says. “How can you explain to someone who you are, where you come from, if you don’t know that?”
 

 
 Calligraphy has taught him that “we are the sum of all the knowledge our ancestors transmitted to one another,” he says. That’s how the art of calligraphy has been passed down—from master to student, who then becomes the next master—and also what calligraphy was for: recording history and wisdom to be shared with the next generation.Jabbari hopes his work will inspire the traditionalists to try out something new and the modernists to remember the value of tradition, reminding them what writing can be: a form of escape, an adventure in memory. “The problem is, we’re not writing anymore,” he says. “It’s beautiful to evolve, but if you lose the connection with your roots, you get lost.”
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Calligraffiti on a wall" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/towards_the_light2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>In 2013, Karim Jabbari and a group of teenagers from his hometown of Kasserine, Tunisia, worked for over a month to transform a 750-foot-long prison wall into a massive &quot;calligraffiti&quot; mural as part of a project called Towards the Light. Image courtesy of Karim Jabbari<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 A few months after his performance at the site of his uncle’s death, Jabbari returned at the invitation of Tunisia’s newly formed government to the prison where his father was held toward the end of his 13-year sentence. Jabbari and a team of young men from the city, one of the country’s poorest, worked for 45 days covering its outer wall with an enormous calligraphy mural, the longest in North Africa. The piece, which quotes a verse by the Tunisian poet Chebbi, reminds readers that “life does not await those who are asleep.” It struck him as perfect for the moment when so many Arab societies were rejecting their dictators.During the Arab Spring, “I saw the birth of a new movement,” he says. In Tunisia, the revolution sparked a renewed interest in “calligraffiti,” which melds traditional calligraphy with a more modern, street-smart “graffiti” style. “This is something really beautiful,” he says. “These are people who are proud of their language. They know what it means to them, as part of their history and heritage, and they’re using it.”
 

 
 

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Light calligraphy in Australia. Image courtest of Karim Jabbari

Equipped with a light and a camera, Karim Jabbari hopes his work can serve as a link between conservative traditional calligraphy and our augmented reality.

A calligrapher writes with light to keep tradition alive

The proposal for a mammoth emoji—coming to an iPhone near you next month—doesn’t just give a brief natural history of the extinct pachyderm. It <a href="http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17420-mammoth-emoji.pdf">also includes</a> a chart comparing the incidence of the word “mammoth” in books to “elephant” and “tyrannosaurus” and imagines congratulatory messages that use a mammoth emoji to say an accomplishment is “huge.” The proposal for an <a href="http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18077-onion-emoji.pdf">onion emoji</a> (added in 2019) begins with the classic “ogres are like onions” monologue from the movie Shrek, suggesting the emoji could be used to describe a complex situation or person. The <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17261-bagel-emoji.pdf">bagel proposal</a> offers a long cultural history of the breakfast food, predicts spikes in use on Saturdays and Sundays, and suggests it could catch on as a shorthand for carb-loading athletes.
 

 
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 Though it may seem they’ve always been there, emoji started as a grassroots solution to what was in the 1980s and 1990s a relatively new problem: misunderstandings on the internet. In the ensuing decades, these symbols have evolved from simple tone markers to a full-strength industry and language of their own, a phenomenon worthy of business investment and academic research. Hollywood made a whole movie out of emoji (yes, the plural of emoji is…emoji). They turn up on all sorts of merchandise and stand in for slang. Why type out a comment calling a party or a song “straight fire” when you could pull up your emoji keyboard and just tap once?That the UNICODE consortium, which oversees emoji, has instituted a lengthy <a href="https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html">application process</a> for new emoji shows that it takes seriously the power of a miniaturized wooly mammoth or eggplant or mug of beer. The organization, which is behind much of the standardization of internet alphabets, insists its new emoji be multilayered, ready to be wielded on TikTok and Twitter, and over text. UNICODE has noticed what linguists see, too—that emoji have evolved from a handful of keystrokes into a powerful tool in our 2020 lexicon.
 

 
 <h3>:-) </h3>So-called “emoticons” first emerged as a way to head off misreadings of tone and intention in “cyberspace.” In the late 1980s, a professor at Carnegie Mellon named <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/">Scott Fahlman</a> suggested three keystrokes that would change the world: :-). He called the resulting smiling face a “joke marker,” meant to show forum users that a remark was meant in jest.The smiley and its brethren, made from either Latin or Japanese characters, were wildly successful at mitigating virtual conflict. They exploded in popularity, proliferating in such complicated ways—from shrugging ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to Homer Simpson ~(_8^(I) —that they outgrew their original purpose, becoming difficult to remember or understand. As both a solution and a marketing gimmick, a Japanese telecommunications company began incorporating emoticons into its devices’ texting capabilities, as characters matched to strings of numbers—the way much of text was processed on early cell phones. But these new “emoji” (which come from &quot;e,&quot; meaning picture; &quot;mo,&quot; meaning write; and &quot;ji,&quot; or character, in Japanese) weren’t readable on devices not coded to translate this number system.
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 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-29_at_2.38.01_AM.width-800.png"/><figcaption><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Eventually, responsibility for emoji was turned over to the <a href="https://home.unicode.org/">UNICODE consortium</a>, a group of tech giants and nation states originally formed in 1991 as a way of standardizing the encoding of alphabets on the internet. At the time, the way computers dealt with text was complicated and prone to errors. Depending on the program or computer model, letters, symbols, and punctuation were represented with different codes—sometimes even within the same language, leading to incompatibilities and occasional gobbledygook on screen. UNICODE offered a single standard way to encode on the back end to help the world’s computers show its many languages consistently and correctly. It made sense that the same thing could be done for emoji.Nowadays, UNICODE has exacting <a href="http://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors">specifications</a> for what becomes an emoji, since it will be hard-coded into our telecommunications. The subcommittee meets weekly, looking over new proposals, asking for improvements and clarifications, and then shepherding the new selection through the design process before implementation. They help answer questions like: Are people going to confuse the chipmunk with the squirrel? When you say “Hindu temple,” do you mean one that’s more similar to the temples of southern or northern India? Did anyone notice that the type of wheelchair we’re depicting is more like one found in a hospital, versus one daily wheelchair users would recognize as theirs?“When reviewing proposals, one thing I keep an eye out for is, what are they leaving out?” says <a href="https://www.httpcolonforwardslashforwardslashwwwdotjenniferdanieldot.biz/about">Jennifer Daniel</a>, the chair of UNICODE’s emoji subcommittee, an all-volunteer (mostly anonymous) group of engineers, designers, and linguists who oversee the organization&#x27;s exhaustive process for choosing new emoji. This year’s crop, for example, includes a new rope emoji. “It’s innocent; the proposal was banal,” she says, “but when you think about it and you see that knot next to a tree, you have a suicide. You have a lynching. And it’s already pretty easy to be angry online.” Daniel and her colleagues helped adjust the new emoji’s color and alignment. “You can put that new design next to the tree, and it doesn’t have the same orientation,” she says. “Having that kind of empathy is critical to the subcommittee.”
 

 
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 A new emoji should be demonstrably different from existing emoji, to avoid confusion and repetition; it should have staying power; and it should be “paradigmatic.” As the UNICODE application form puts it, the emoji “beer mug” represents not just a mug with exactly the shape you see on the screen, filled with beer of exactly that color, but rather beer in general.” That’s in part because of the way UNICODE works: Each platform designs its own, slightly different, image to go with the hard-coded number assigned to a character. So the idea must be conveyed regardless of details.And, perhaps most importantly, a new candidate emoji should have layers that give it the potential to be used in metaphor or symbolism. For example, “SHARK is not necessarily only the animal, but also used for a huckster, in jumping the shark, loan shark, etc.,” the UNICODE site notes.
 

 
 <h3>“Great weather”  </h3>These layers are important because of what emoji do for language some 30 years on. In the most basic cases, they can set a tone, stand in for social niceties that open and close messages, or fill silences that might otherwise feel awkward, says linguistic anthropologist <a href="https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/marcel-danesi/">Marcel Danesi</a>. But they serve more complicated social purposes, too.The key, says cognitive psychologist <a href="http://blogs.chatham.edu/mriordan/">Monica Riordan</a>, is that text—the basis of so much of our communications these days—is a “deprived medium,” one where we don’t have access to other signals like body language, vocal tone, or facial expressions. So, she asks, “how do we make it richer so we can convey meaning in ways that others can understand?”Riordan argues that one of our most important uses for emoji is lessening ambiguity. In a conversation where one person remarks on “great weather,” for example, the other person might not know if they’re enjoying sunny skies or breathing wildfire smoke. But adding the <a href="https://emojipedia.org/face-with-symbols-on-mouth/">swearing emoji</a> at the end clears that up, she says. “It tells me your intended meaning, allowing you to speak in ways that are non-literal.”Still, she adds, we shouldn’t assume that the emoji we use are just extensions of our own facial expressions. Our expressions are spontaneous, but we choose emoji deliberately— sometimes to convey emotions that don’t match what we really feel.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="3 new emoji faces and 2 hearts" class="richtext-image full-width" height="300" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-29_at_1.13.37_PM.width-800.png"/><figcaption>The 217 emoji coming to devices in 2021 include Face in Clouds, Face Exhaling, Face with Spiral Eyes, Mending Heart, and Heart on Fire. Image Credit: Emojipedia <div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Riordan <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X17704238">argues</a> that emoji do what social scientists call “emotion work,” the hidden labor we do to maintain our relationships. If her mother sends her a text message that annoys her, she says, “I don’t want her to know how annoyed I really am, so I might send her a thumbs up. That drives forward relationship maintenance.” If they were to have the same interaction in person, Riordan might not be able to hide her feelings, she says, but emoji make that easier. Sending a thumbs up instead of a more explicit response leaves her mother to draw her own conclusions about Riordan’s meaning. “She’s going to assume I’m agreeing with her, even though I’m not and I never said I was.”That ambiguity is “very, very useful for people,” says linguist <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/novi-djenar.html">Novi Djenar</a>, who has studied emoji use among <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=HYLPDwAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA107&amp;dq=emoji+linguistics&amp;ots=m8cdHgZMaE&amp;sig=_SYcDUtAvCM5_8CK0SA1WS-BESI#v=onepage&amp;q=emoji%20linguistics&amp;f=false">young people in Indonesia</a>. In the discussion forums Djenar studied, commenters used the ambiguity of emoji to avoid sounding too patronizing or vulnerable. And they even used emoji to navigate complex discussion threads on the forum, mirroring the icons used in messages they agreed with and switching to new emoji to show a change of opinion. Using the same symbols, Djenar says, “you get this really nice ‘cling cling,’ this little bell that says, ‘We’re together in this.’”And computational linguist <a href="https://cci.uncc.edu/directory/samira-shaikh">Samira Shaikh</a> has studied the ways emoji can strengthen <a href="http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2130/paper1.pdf">expressions of solidarity</a> on Twitter and other social media sites, especially during traumatic events like Hurricane Irma and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Shaikh and her team found that emoji helped reinforce messages of solidarity, creating themes (folded hands, hearts, flags) that tended to spread through the conversation about that event. “The pictures and vivid colors draw your attention if you’re scrolling past. Once your attention is drawn, you’re more likely to read through the whole message”—and to share or reply, Shaikh says.
 

 
 <h3>Cactuses and unicorns</h3>When she’s feeling playful, Daniel, who works on emoji-related issues at Google on top of her volunteer role at UNICODE, often turns to the tornado and poop emoji to refer to her kids. When she’s in a bad mood, the cactus is her go-to choice. “The internet has an insatiable appetite for taking things and giving them whole new meanings,” she says. “I can put it as my status message and everyone understands.”Danesi distinguishes the potential of the cactus and other similar “non-face” emoji from emoji that involve facial expressions as “icon versus symbol.” Face emoji form a kind of universal lexicon, he argues, with an emotional meaning almost anyone can understand. Non-face emoji, however, are “inherently negotiable, either situation-specific or culture-specific,” allowing a speaker to create an “idiolect,” a word or set of words whose use is decided by the user, he says. A good example would be Daniel’s cactus emoji—or, in Riordan’s case, unicorns. Riordan exchanges unicorn emoji with a friend with whom she once baked a spectacularly failed unicorn birthday cake. “It was a massive disaster, fun but terrible,” Riordan remembers. “As a result of that, sometimes my friend and I will text each other the unicorn emoji to talk about something with good intentions that blew up in our faces.”But she also points to larger, culture-wide negotiations over emoji meaning, like the connection of the dark-skin-tone fist emoji with the Black Lives Matter movement as a call to action, or the assignment of the eggplant and peach emoji to certain body parts. “The meaning of emoji reflects what’s happening at a greater societal level,” she says. In the case of the Black fist, the emoji itself has no inherent meaning. It’s the social and cultural context that add meaning or purpose. And in the case of the eggplant and peach, Riordan says, “We have a society in which it is not considered acceptable to have actual emoji of a penis, breasts, or a butt, so we’re forced to adopt other symbols for these things. In a sense, the use of the eggplant emoji is a reflection of the taboos of our society.”This movement of culture and meaning goes both ways. In keeping with recent updates allowing users to choose their emoji’s skintones, the 2020 UNICODE emoji set features several new gender-neutral and nonbinary emoji, including a “Mx. Claus” for Christmas and a person with a mustache wearing a bridal veil. And then there’s the man and gender-neutral person feeding a baby—where, until recently, the only option was a woman. That was <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19336r-people-feeding-baby-emoji.pdf">Daniel’s doing</a>. She’s behind many of the most-anticipated <a href="https://blog.emojipedia.org/117-new-emojis-in-final-list-for-2020/">emoji of 2020</a>, including “ninja,” “people hugging,” and “smiling face with tear,” but this one was especially close to her heart. “You don’t need a boob to feed a baby or to take care of a baby, and so this felt like a reasonable resolution,” she says.Djenar argues that the creation of that emoji both reflects and creates an evolving reality of gender roles in our society. “This is a very intimate interaction; what we observe has been happening socially spurs people to create more emoji,” she says. And those available emoji in turn open the way for what’s possible—like a father taking on parenting responsibilities.The ramifications of our new emoji language may be even greater than that. Danesi argues that our use of visual writing is having radical effects on our literacy and cognition. Until recently, our collective way of thinking has been inextricably linked with the printed word, he says—our arguments, meditations, discussions laid out sequentially, reflecting what’s sometimes called the alphabet principle. “Our mind, our eyes, got used to seeing knowledge literally laid out this way in front of us.”Today, that way of thinking and processing is still there, Danesi says, “but it’s not enough for us anymore.” Instead, we insert imagery, graphs, symbols. He sees this not as a loss of cognition but an expansion of it. “It doesn’t mean our attention span has gone down in any way whatsoever. But there are different emphases in the way we lay out knowledge, the way we create. Emoji are just a small symptom of this paradigm shift.”Danesi’s old teacher, Marshall McLuhan, once theorized when we changed from an oral culture to a writing culture, that led to a change in cognition and consciousness. To Danesi, emoji represent a similar step. “It’s not just a cute new way to embellish your writing,” he says. “We’re retrieving an old pictograph society”—one that can use an image of a flame to imply a whole constellation of changing language: that’s hot, that’s lit, that’s straight fire.
 

 
 

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Image Credit: Thomas James Caldwell, Flickr

We use emoji in texts and other messaging to set a tone, maintain relationships, and show solidarity. But are they also changing the way we think?

Topic: Tech & Engineering

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