I-CHASS|TU 7/29 Part I

Another great session on Tuesday!  So good, in fact, that I am splitting it in two parts.

The morning kicked off with a fascinating presentation by Dr. Marilyn Lundberg on the Inscriptifact project. I do confess I had to visit wikipedia a couple of times for some quick references... Terms such as Ugaritic and Aramaic were new to me.

A joke told by Lundberg really resonated with me: their software manager “locked” the team of scholars in a room for three days until they came up with the basic concept of the database. Needless to say that the actual choice of fields, look of the interface took a lot longer. Sometimes a meeting of the minds between software engineers and Humanities scholars is "facilitated" by strategies like this.:)

Caption: Screenshot of Inscriptifact

The Inscriptifact portal (screenshot above) is an invaluable resource to anyone teaching or researching this area... In fact, Vernon Burton would later in the week talk about the disappearance of the distinction between research and teaching… the Inscriptifact portal is a living proof of just that. In Inscriptifact, images can be downloaded in full resolution. Furthermore, the way the portal was designed accommodates different ways of splitting time periods.

Dr. Wayne Pitard (Program for the Study of Religion UIUC) was next and presented the Spurlock Museum Cylinder Seal Project. He started by mentioning the precious help they received from NCSA, which enabled them to publish the results of their research on the Internet in a vastly superior format. The website is now partially open at http://inscriptifact.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ 

Pitard showed us some beautiful seals such as a Sumerian tablet with seal impression, ca. 2050 BC. He stressed that traditional publication of the seal is the impression but that it is so much better to have some idea of the actual seal! At the Spurlock Museum at the Univ. of Illinois a sophisticated panoramic 360-degree imaging setup is being used by students and faculty to photograph Cylinder Seals.

Caption: Dr. Wayne Pitard working with a student

I really appreciated the detail with which Pitard described what could be uncovered by the technology. He gave 4 examples and illustrated each with beautiful imagery (the seals are really breath-taking...):

- In one case, by seeing that the carving on the seal was getting dull forcing the artist to get a new drill, we can see the direction he was working… 

- In another case, you can see how the artist corrected the position of the legs on the cylinder seal by starting at one position and then spreading them more at a later iteration.

- One artist had obviously used the coloring of the stone in the design of a seal, ca 2500 BC by using a sunrise effect on the illustration.

- In one seal the dark imperfection of the stone had been used for the eye of a gazelle. And the artist does it again. Referring to the latter, Pitard stressed how an artist was using the irregularities in the shell of the seal to use “for his own satisfaction at 2500 BC. 

I really like clever interfaces so I felt especially drawn to the piece on RTI technology shown, where by simply moving the mouse around a black circle, the Historian can light the artifact from different angles. Amazing! I will try to find an image and include it here.  

Last but not least – and the morning day had just started – we had Michael Meredith from the University of Sheffield on a presentation entitled “From parchment to pixels: virtual vellum, Kiosque and Pegasus”. We knew we would get to interact with Virtual Vellum and Kiosque the following day during a workshop conducted by Meredith (read about it tomorrow) so were obviously eager to learn as much as possible about the applications. More on Pegasus too here. At the University of Sheffield, Meredith is working in a team headed by Peter Ainsworth at the Department of French and Humanities Research Institute. They are digitizing French medieval manuscripts in very high resolution - 6,000 images taking up 2 Terabytes of space – and developing sophisticated tools that compare text and illustrations across different manuscripts. In a very “Monty Python” type of presentation (Michael is not only very bright but extremely fun to be around- wait for pool table night tomorrow…) Michael led us through the process that resulted in Virtual Vellum.

My favorite image was the “Manuscripts’ torture chamber” where one of Meredith’s colleagues is seen manipulating one of the manuscripts with white gloves and extreme care. The wooden instruments holding the manuscript did look like medieval torture instruments… I was of course very happy to see references to Portugal namely to Roy Ferrant de Portingal (king Ferdinand of Portugal). 

Screenshot of the Virtual Vellum

We headed for coffee after this brilliant start of a morning. This is why I could not blog during the week – there was just too much to think about!

When we got back, Peter Bajcsy was ready to start his presentation on image analytics. I will blog Bajcsy’s presentation on Part II of I-CHASS Tuesday July 29!

By the way, a side note: I really want to thank Kevin Franklin for the way they planned the week. Starting with text analytics, then with image analytics was a good way to ease us in (though there’s nothing easy about text analytics don’t get me wrong…) into the rest of the week: advanced visualization, augmented reality and VR, and finally GPS and social networks. I think the progression of topics made a lot of sense to us all, from the comments I overheard during our coffee breaks.