[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections

[arca_libraria]

If corrections were done through scraping, would we necessarily be able to see them on the scans?

I think we should be able to see it, but as far as I remember there has been a thorough search on the original

I know this isn’t a very helpful answer, but I’m going to share it anyway My research means that I have worked with a lot of manuscripts in the flesh, and so I am familiar with working with them up-close as well as digitally. In short: sometimes you can see scraping-erasures and sometimes you can’t, and that applies whether you are looking at the real MS or digital images. Scraping-erasures can be much easier to see when you are looking at the actual manuscript, so it’s normal to see corrections in a real MS that are not visible in the digital images of the same manuscript. On the other hand, scraping can be hard to see if it’s just one letter - if a whole word has been removed and overwritten then that tends to leave a more visible mark. 

Scraping erasures show up really well on goat and sheep parchments in comparison to calf parchment.

In the paragraph above I said that you can often see erasures in the real MS that are not visible in the digital images, but for very small erasures one of the main advantages of digital images is that you can zoom in a lot and go character-by-character to look for weird ink as well as spots of unusual texture that would otherwise be hard to see in the lighting conditions of most reading rooms.

Beyond using our human eyes and the visible light spectrum on either a real manuscript or digital images, some spectroscopic and raked-light techniques can make erasures easier to see. You could potentially manipulate the existing digital images of the VMS MatLab or Python to over-enhance various artefacts - but I assume this has been done?