Archaeology Seminar: Custom Acquisition and Workflow Integration in Cultural Heritage Applications

Dr Tim Weyrich (UCL Graphics) will be talking in the Archaeological Computing Research Group Lab (Room 3043 B65a) at Avenue Campus on Thursday 26^th April 3-5pm. All welcome. Please RSVP graeme.earl@soton.ac.uk

“Custom Acquisition and Workflow Integration in Cultural Heritage Applications”

Digital acquisition of objects, be it photographic documentation, document scanning or 3-D scanning of objects, is often considered a solved problem, and most people take it for granted that such technology is directly beneficial to cultural heritage applications. This widely shared impression is contrasted by the situation in many archives, museums and excavations: no single scanning technology is suitable for a wide-enough range of objects, and commercial software packages require expert users and substantial manual interaction to obtain high-quality models from raw scan data. At the example of three application domains, we will study how, by carefully analysing existing workflows, custom scanning and processing solutions can be made amenable for every-day operation in a non-technical environment. I will report on our experiences with fresco reconstruction at the Akrotiri Excavation, Santorini, on the reconstruction of fire-damaged parchment with London Metropolitan Archives, and on the analysis of Egyptian papyri with the Petrie Museum in London.

Short Bio:

Tim Weyrich is a Senior Lecturer in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Furthermore, he is co-founder and Associate Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Prior to coming to UCL in 2008, Tim was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow of Princeton University, working in the Princeton Computer Graphics Group, a post he took after having received his PhD from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2006. His research interests are appearance modelling, point-based graphics, 3D reconstruction, cultural heritage acquisition and digital humanities.