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In the Conservation Lab at the Worcester Art Museum
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2012 E-newsletters
January 2012
Dear CHI Friends,
Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) is accelerating to light speed in the new year with a redesigned web site, new web pages, contributions to new books, a new reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) kit for sale, and much more. Read on to find out what we've been up to.
WELCOME TO THE NEW CHI WEB SITE!
Check out CHI's beautiful new web site at culturalheritageimaging.org! There's lots of interactive content and updates—for an overview of what's new, read CHI Director Carla Schroer's blog entry announcing the new and improved site features. In addition to the links to great new content in Carla's blog, don't miss the new rock art page—a perfect example of how the redesigned site leads you to all subject-relevant content.
A CHI WELL-LIGHTED PLACE FOR BOOKS
Visit CHI's new Publications page for links and other updates. Here are a few highlights:
Companions To Rock Art. August 2012 is the publication date for the latest title in Wiley-Blackwell's Companions to Anthropology Series, A Companion to Rock Art. The CHI team and their collaborators contributed a chapter to the section, “Rock Art As Digital Heritage: Advances in Photo Enhancement Technology and Digital Archiving.” The chapter is called “Robust, Scientifically Reliable Rock Art Documentation From Digital Photographs.”
Visualization In Research. CHI President Mark Mudge is contributing a chapter to a February 2012 book from Ashgate, Paradata and Transparency For Virtual Heritage. Mark's chapter is “Transparency For Empirical Data.” This new title is part of the Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series.
DIY RTI—TRAINING AND FIELD KITS NOW AVAILABLE
Get Into Training. CHI's training sessions are growing in popularity—the latest one sold out, but there's still time to get into the next one in San Francisco on April 24-27, 2012. Visit CHI's Training page for details about the types of classes offered and some of the distinguished alumni from around the world who are CHI graduates!
Get Into the Field, Lab or Workshop. Kick-start your digital cultural heritage projects with CHI's new RTI Highlight Capture Starter Kit. The CHI team has assembled everything you need to create your own interactive RTI media—just add a basic camera, tripod, and some accessories and you are good to go! Learn how to use the kit at one of CHI's training sessions, or download helpful documentation and media from CHI's Do It Yourself resource page. Let us know how your project goes—connect to us via social media and keep us in the loop!
BE PART OF CHI's SOCIAL NETWORK
Visit CHI on Facebook to stay in touch and get the latest news and updates. Don't forget to like us, comment on what's going on, and add us to your Facebook world, too! We hope you'll like, retweet, or share our news with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Cultural Heritage Imaging is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) company. Donations are tax-deductible.
2011 E-newsletters
Autumn 2011
Dear CHI Friends,
Summer 2011 has been a period of great change and accomplishments for Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI). In a single year, we have completed half of the training for our two-and-one-half year federally funded museum professionals program.
Institutions and individuals we have trained are moving along with their reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) projects and have begun posting the results on the web, including the Worcester Art Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
CHI welcomes a great new collaborator and is saying good-bye to another supporter whose efforts we really appreciated and built on. Please read on for updates and links to our latest news.
IMLS-Funded RTI Training 50 Percent Complete
In September, the CHI team trained art conservation professionals at Queens University, Ontario, Canada, in RTI techniques. Researchers there had already been experimenting with RTI on reverse glass paintings as documented in this CHI blog entry. The Queens training is the fifth program undertaken for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)'s “21st Century Museum Professionals Program.” The IMLS grant funds RTI training for all North American graduate programs in conservation, as well as several regional training sessions open to museum professionals.
Earlier in the year, CHI trained the NYU Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center—in addition to CHI's photo blog posting and Flickr gallery about the four-day event, NYU has posted a great article describing the experience. Additional training programs occurred at the Harvard Art Museums Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, the Worcester Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). SFMOMA added workshop photos to Facebook.
RTI in Action
Seeing Red. The Worcester Art Museum jumped right into the classics after acing CHI's RTI training back in 2008, and is using the advanced imaging techniques to study surface details on a Greek Attic red-figure vase in their collection. Read about what they found in their CHI blog entry.
The Fine Arts Museums of SF also used RTI for some high-end imaging of a red-figure object and posted a blog entry about the amazing results.
Main Squeeze. The Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) also put their 2009 CHI RTI training to good use and made RTI images of 400 ancient “squeezes”—wet paper pulp pressed into ancient inscriptions, such as those found on stone walls in the Near East. The squeezes make mirror image impressions of the writing that can be taken away from where the inscriptions reside and studied. Read more about the Squeeze Imaging Project and CHI's RTI contribution, which has been implemented by the MCI's Imaging Studio.
Farewell and Bonjour
Best Wishes. CHI bids a fond adieu to Dr. Elizabeth Peña, our hard-working former Executive Director. Elizabeth has accepted a position as Interim Director of Museum Studies at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA. Goodbye, good luck, and thank you Dr. Peña—CHI could not have made our IMLS-funded RTI training project happen without you!
A Big Hello! Corey Toler-Franklin, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale collaborating with CHI on the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Collaborative Algorithmic Rendering Engine (CARE) Project. Corey will contribute details for the “digital lab notebook,” or process history aspects of this project. To learn more about Corey, visit www.coreytoler.com.
Get CHI Updates On Facebook
Visit CHI on Facebook to stay in touch and get the latest news and updates. Don't forget to like us, comment on what's going on, and add us to your Facebook world too!
Cultural Heritage Imaging is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) company. Donations are tax-deductible.
April 2011
Dear CHI Friends,
Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) is focused on making reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) training available to everyone. We've recently conducted RTI training sessions for conservation staff at two renowned institutions in New York City. Applications are available now for museum professionals wishing to receive RTI training sponsored by a new federal grant program. CHI also plans to offer additional training opportunities this summer.
CHI Training in the Big Apple
Metropolitan Museum of Art conservators learned RTI techniques recently, as described in a CHI blog entry about the four-day experience. Later this spring, students at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center also participated in a four-day RTI training program funded by CHI's grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). See the students and the CHI team in action in this photo blog posting and Flickr gallery.
Apply For Free RTI Training
CHI is accepting applications now from museum professionals who would like to take the tranining program that staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NYU students recently used to learn about RTI and how it can help their work. Visit the “Imaging Technology Pathways for Museum Professionals” (IMLS) project page to learn more about this “21st Century Museum Professionals Program,” which is funded by the IMLS. Review CHI's grant application page to download an application and find out where the RTI training will take place.
More RTI Training June 7–10
Check CHI's Training page for more info on the next RTI training in San Francisco. Apply now for this exciting four-day program which offers engaging lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on sessions where small groups work together on RTI projects.
Get Involved With CHI On Facebook
Visit CHI on Facebook to stay in touch and get the latest news and updates. Don't forget to like us, comment on what's going on, and add us to your Facebook world too!
Cultural Heritage Imaging is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) company. Donations are tax-deductible.
February 2011
Dear CHI Friends,
The Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) team is already making the most of 2011! We've released a great new FREE technology tool, trained museum staff at one of the world's most prestigious institutions, appeared in leading cultural heritage publications, and taken steps to share our knowledge at upcoming conferences and events.
FREE Viewer Available For Download
CHI is proud to announce the first public release of our new reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) viewer! Work on this viewer has been funded in part by a generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The new RTIViewer was created by the incredibly talented team at the Visual Computing Laboratory of the Italian National Research Council's (CNR) Institute for Information Science and Technology (ISTI). CHI President Mark Mudge co-authored a paper about the new viewer with ISTI and CNR staff for the Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). Visit JOCCH to learn more about the paper, “Dynamic Shading Enhancement for RTI.”
Download RTIViewer 1.0.2 for Windows or Macintosh operating systems from CHI's RTIViewer page. On the same page, you can download a RTIViewer User Guide and sample files of ancient rock art and papyrus artifacts to use with the viewer. Please try it out and let us know what you think—we welcome your comments and support.
CHI Featured in New Online Archaeology Magazine
Check out a great article, “Cultural Heritage Imaging: Digital Pioneers in Archaeological Preservation,” in Electrum Magazine, a new online publication about archaeology and “why the past matters.” The Electrum article is a thorough overview of CHI's RTI research, starting with the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project in Switzerland and continuing right up to the present with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco using RTI to study Japanese woodblock prints in new ways.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Learns RTI With CHI
The CHI team recently traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to train conservators in RTI techniques by creating images of objects from the museum collections. CHI Executive Director Elizabeth Peña and CHI Imaging Director Marlin Lum posted a blog entry about the training experience that covers in lively detail what takes place during a four-day CHI RTI training session.
Reaching Out To New Audiences
CHI co-founders Mark Mudge and Carla Schroer embark on a journey that starts with the place where they met and concludes with top-flight presentations in the UK:
- New College of Florida Lecture Series 2010-2011 — Mark Mudge and Carla Schroer return to their collegial roots when they present “From Paleolithic Caves To the Museum of Modern Art: Documenting and Preserving Humanity's Cultural Legacy,” a lecture that takes place during the college's 50th anniversary celebration.
- Warwick Digital Labs — Graduate students in the Informatics and Virtual Reality program will learn about RTI during a CHI presentation on current research and future collaboration possibilities.
- University of Southampton Archaeological Computing Research Group (ACRG) and the University of Oxford — CHI conducts two one-day workshops for the ACRG, then participates in a two-day Oxford workshop as part of a collaborative Oxford-Southampton pilot project, “RTI System For Ancient Documentary Artefacts (RTISAD).” The second day of the Oxford event is a free public workshop, “RTISAD Oxford Workshop — Digital Transformations: New developments in cultural heritage imaging.”
