It's not yet known who scrawled "Wm Shakespeare" across the title page of the legal treatise "Archaionomia," a collection of Saxon laws published during the reign of Elizabeth I of England. It may never be clear, said Gregory Heyworth, a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

But now, Heyworth and his students have used new technology to reveal the nearly lost scribbles on the old book. The work is part of The Lazarus Project, an effort to revive damaged texts using a technique called multispectral imaging. The researchers take very high-resolution photographs of old text, art or objects using 12 different wavelengths of light, ranging from ultraviolet to infrared, beyond the boundaries of the human eye. Next, they use software to combine these images into the clearest possible picture of the text.