AHRC RTISAD project legacy – 18 months
Another six months have passed, and we have been as busy as ever using the RTISAD equipment and expertise.
Dissemination
In October Nicole Beale demonstrated Highlight Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) at the Insight from Innovation conference, a three day archaeological ceramics event hosted by the Ceramics Research Group. More details on this blog post.
In July Hembo Pagi and Eleonora Gandolfi gave a small presentation about ACRG at the Archaeology department in Perth, Australia. 3D work, photogrammetry and RTI projects were presented. More details on this blog post.
Also in July but on the other side of the world members of the ACRG took part in the Festival of British Archaeology, and included RTI demos in this. More details on this blog post.
We also arranged a study day jointly with the University Library in order to share best practice in digitisation. We hope that increasingly our imaging facilities will be used by projects across the University, in collaboration with the Library Digitisation Unit. James Miles attended the Medieval Seals – Recording and Visualisation at the Society of Antiquaries on 2 July and demonstrated a range of imaging approaches, including the RTISAD equipment. In September Segolene Tarte from Oxford talked about some of the RTISAD results at the Sheffield DH conference. Also in September Jacob Dahl and I both spoke at the New Visualization Systems within Cuneiform Studies seminar in Leuven.
A few student projects have continued to make use of RTI, most recently in terms of interaction. For example, there has been a n MSc project looking at interaction with a variety of data, including RTI, in collaboration with the NAS. Finally, in November James Miles, Gareth Beale and Hembo Pagi presented at a Royal Archaeological Institute meeting at the Society of Antiquaries of London (read blog post here). On the 3rd November Nicole Beale took the highlight and dome RTI kit to the Council of British Archaeology conference, to talk to delegates about the use of RTI for community groups working on archaeology projects.
Later this month, Gareth and Nicole Beale will be delivering a workshop to Gifted and Talented pupils from schools across Southampton as part of the Learn with US programme. They will be introducing computational photography and how it is used by archaeologists. Year 9 pupils will create RTIs and seeing how they can use the results to investigate archaeological objects. http://www.southampton.ac.uk/schoolsandcolleges/
In the first week of December, Nicole Beale will be demonstrating RTI at Fishbourne Collections Discovery Centre, in Fishbourne Roman Palace, as part of the CSI Conservation Roadshows being held across South East Museums. The roadshows are funded by Arts Council England and aim to train staff and volunteers from museums to employ practical conservation techniques for the care of objects.
Research
Our work as part of the Mellon grant at University of Oxford which built directly on the RTISAD project achieved lots of publicity in October. You can read about it on the sotonDH Digital Humanities blog.
During the first two weeks of September David Wheatley and Marta Diaz-Guardamino Uribe, jointly with Leonardo García Sanjuán (University of Seville) conducted fieldwork in Lora del Río, Seville (Spain). They used RTI extensively on the project, having had training from former RTISAD staff. More details on this blog post.
Eleni Kotoula and Hembo Pagi have started to undertake and evaluate multispectral RTI. There is a post by Hembo here with an example, and an analysis by Eleni here on a replica of a wall painting from the Tomb of Menna, Egypt. Eleni has also written about her ongoing work to develop new microscope RTI workflows. Read the blog here.
James Miles worked with Dr Rebecca Flemming in the hope of a future collaboration between ACRG and the department of Classics at the University of Cambridge. The work relates to the laser scanning of Roman anatomical votive terracottas and the idea is that RTI will form part of an integrated approach to imaging these objects. More details on this blog post.
James Miles and Peter Wheeler also spent a week working at the National Archives recording a number of different items using RTI. The work was a continuation of the DEDEFI project that Hembo Pagi. More details on this blog post.
In October we had the second AHRC Domestic Textiles workshop, this time hosted by the Ashmolean Museum We discussed methods for recording and digitally representing textiles. RTI will be one of the key methods. Eleni Kotoula has also continued her collaborative research in Greece and in her latest post she describes her work on recording numismatic conservation, this time with Maria Kyranoudi, conservator from the Archaeological museum of Amphipolis. Read the blog post here.
Links
End of project blog post
Six months blog post
One year blog post