Cultural Heritage Destruction: Documenting Parchment Degradation via Multispectral Imaging
Alejandro Giacometti, Lindsay MacDonald (UCL) and Alberto Campagnolo (University of the Arts)
Friday June 22nd at 16:30, in Room G37, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
ALL WELCOME
Digital surrogates of documents have become an indispensable tool for scholars and archives. Digital surrogates provide an easily accessible, non-degrading resource for research and study. Additionally, a variety of imaging technologies have been utilised to examine the characteristics of the originals, such as X-ray imaging, imaging in the infrared spectrum, and multi-spectral imaging. These provide additional information about the physical characteristics and condition of the document. However, current digitisation efforts have been concentrated on documents in their current state. This seminar aims to investigate the process of document degradation using multispectral imaging.
A series of treatments has been applied to degrade samples from a deaccessioned manuscript using both physical and chemical agents. Each sample has been photographed before and after the treatment by a multispectral imaging system to record the effect of the treatments on both the writing and the parchment. The seminar presents the initial imaging of the samples, details on their treatment agents and how they affect the writing and parchment, the final imaging, and some image processing analysis.
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.
For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk,
Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2012.html
