[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Well, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Richard Ovenden.
I am both Bodley's Librarian and head of gardens, libraries and museums here in the University of Oxford.
And it's my enormous pleasure to welcome you to this event, the second of our
celebratory conferences that we've had around the ARCHiOx project and this project,
the second phase of which comes to an end really today
with this conference has been a collaboration with our close friends and colleagues, Factum Foundation in Madrid.
And you will hear from and will see many of them, during the course of this event this afternoon.
And, all I can say is that that has been an absolutely
fantastic experience to work with such a talented and innovative group of colleagues,
working in the the same space, but with a very different set of skills that they bring to complement those which we have here in the library
and, I think, in the cultural heritage sector as a whole.
And of course, none of this would be possible without the immense generosity of the Helen Hamlyn Trust.
And I'd just like to say for the record, a huge vote of thanks and to express my very sincere gratitude to them for their confidence
in us, in the Bodleian and in the Factum Foundation to take this project forward and to develop,
a set of technologies, approaches and use cases which enable
us to really transform the way in which we're able to interrogate the objects in our collections for the sake of creating new knowledge.
And our thing today is seeing the unseen.
And that's exactly what we've been doing over the past couple of years.
And that's why we're excited to share the findings of the work that we've been doing,
both the technologies and the techniques which we've developed. Across our GLAM institutions here in Oxford, that's gardens, libraries and museums,
we have 32 million collection items,
and ARCHiOx is helping us give new ways of both extracting the data from those collections and understanding how those objects were created,
what they were made from, how, in some cases, when and where they were created.
But also, and I think particularly for me this has been the most exciting thing,
the human interactions with those collections after they were first created, after they were first formed.
How can we learn how humans have responded to, intervened in, and left their marks on
books, documents, artefacts, objects, all of those kinds of things.
ARCHiOx helps us understand that in ways which are truly new, I think, and I hope you'll, if you haven't seen it before,
you'll come away from this event with a new perspective on those issues.
The extraordinary findings from the first phase of the project, which were announced in this very room about two years ago.
included the discovery of the reading practices of an early medieval religious woman, Eadberg.
And these have been matched in phase two with the discovery of William Blake's first foray into engraving.
Given the close collaboration between the Bodleian and Oxford's four outstanding university museums,
we were keen to experiment in this second phase to test the utility for ARCHiOx with museum collections.
We were not disappointed, ladies and gentlemen, and you will see more about this
this afternoon. We reveal previously unseen marks of creation from Raphael, Michelangelo and Giulio Romano in the Ashmolean.
We explored the details on naturally made objects in the Natural History Museum, from meteorites to fossilised frogs,
and have experimented with the built heritage in making high fidelity records of the 15th century fan vaulting on the ceiling of the Divinity School,
the heart of the Bodleian. My own personal show and tell.
Recording aspects of ARCHiOx continue to be extraordinary, as we hope to demonstrate to you this afternoon. And together,
the Bodleian and Factum have been working to make using the technology as easy as possible within the environments of a library, archive or museum.
The team, led by specialists in our digital library operation here in the Bodleian,
in the Bodleian, have also been busy integrating ARCHiOx with the IIIF standard.
Indeed, building out that standard to accommodate it so that the data that ARCHiOx creates can be easily and interoperable,
shared from digital platforms which are IIIF compliant,
and that is now encompassing a huge array of the library and museum sector across the globe.
Of course. Our colleagues in the imaging studio, several floors below where we're sat have also had their own practices,
and indeed their spaces, transformed by ARCHiOx and the team themselves led, absolutely superbly by John Barrett, have
really grabbed hold of this opportunity with both hands and have
had the pleasure not only of refining the techniques and working with scholars to do that
to explore those use cases, but also increasingly to share it with other professionals in the library and museum sector.
And it's wonderful to have a number of our colleagues, here this afternoon.
Finally, allow me to read the horoscope of the project.
If you would. We have another phase of work planned to further extend and enhance the technology,
to refine the workflows at the institutional end of things,
and especially to build a community of practice as more institutions acquire
the technology and start to use it at an industrial scale to document their collections.
The Bodleian, working with our colleagues at Factum, want to create the space in which the instructions,
the approaches that we develop can be shared with
other institutions as they join the ARCHiOx community as they acquire
the hardware, the software, and indeed the desire to use the technology.
So that we can support each other in taking this extraordinary opportunity forward.
It's now.
Unfortunately, the university, in its great wisdom, has decided this afternoon will be its meeting of the University's governing Council.
And I must run probably literally from these words to that meeting.
But I will join you later in the afternoon. But as I do so, it's now my great pleasure to hand over to my partner in crime here,
Adam Lowe, the inspirational founder and leader of Factum Arte and Factum Foundation in Madrid.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Adam. Thank you very much.
So many people turning out for the second of the ARCHiOx summaries
about what we're doing. John, can I do that from here?
Got it. For the second of the show and tells and summaries of what's gone on in the last year and a half
here at the Bodleian and also in Madrid in Factum's studios.
So I always love the sort of serendipity of what happens on these kind of occasions.
And as I was walking in, Michael Rich was talking to someone I haven't seen for 2 or 3 years who's
studying graffiti in the Temple of Karnak, who's just moved to study graffiti in Abydos.
And is incredibly exciting about finding different languages on the surface of the walls in Abydos.
And really, I wanted to begin with a real thank you to Helen Hamdan's Trust for believing in us for so long.
And the image here is actually from this morning.
That's an exaggeration. It was from yesterday, but it's in the Greek tomb in the Ipogeo Cristallini where we're using a vertical,
the first proper use of the vertical Selene to record graffiti.
These are Greek tombs in Naples from the fourth century BC.
And this wall has never been recorded and it's absolutely covered in graffiti.
On the left you can see Ferdy Saumarez Smith, who leads Factum Foundation in London, in the polychrome chamber.
So this is the best Greek polychrome from the fourth century.
And the Medusa's head is what we're recording today.
So, I mean, what started as a dream to say we could build a scanner that has these properties.
So I'm not going to try and go through them. But this is one you can do on your phones, that you can read it later.
But basically the Selene scanner does a lot of things that enable us to focus on the materiality of objects.
And it's really this system that John has been trialling, developing, pioneering, using and sharing downstairs and communicating to
as Richard mentioned, a growing community of practice.
So really the idea is to spread this knowledge.
But I thought I'd just begin with a very quick thing and I'll do this one very fast.
But Factum started in 2001 and we started developing the technologies.
And these are a number of things. This one stops in 2021.
Of course, it goes on beyond there. But developing the hardware and the software has been central to what we're focussed on in Madrid.
And then applying that technology and making sure that it's used and focused to different targets and different end uses.
And it's really that, that I'm most proud of about what's happened here at ARCHiOx.
In the British Museum at the moment,
they have become part of the community of practice and have a Selene which is currently recording cuneiform tablets.
So, when they're flat like this, it's relatively easy for the Selene to record it.
But most cuneiform tablets have curvature and have information on the edges
so now we're working with them to try and see how we can extend, what it is.
But if you can see this, the greatest thing we've done is to
find a way through digital communication to make these objects physically available as if you're holding them,
as if you're changing the light, as if you're actually with the object and can handle it and look at it.
So digitality is no longer just taking a photograph.
It's actually making something physical so you can physically engage with it.
And I think the work on cuneiform is presenting lots of challenges that we are trying to solve.
Now, John Barrett, as Richard mentioned, has been recording in the, and John
this is ready to introduce you, not to steal your thunder. But that actually, this is a type of
fossil of a frog. So I'm going to do my show and tell.
These we'll pass around the room. Taking the data John recorded,
and outputting it with the qualities of the fossil and then removing the colour so you can see the fossil in different ways.
But I think this sense of handling an object is really the key to
what excites me about what Factum is doing with the Bodleian.
When we started talking last year,
Jo story and Jess Hodgkinson gave a talk about vellum. And out of that talk came a meeting with Alain Fouad George
who came to Madrid and said, would we focus on recording the vellum used for early Qur'ans.
And so John recorded this, which is a tiny detail showing the surface of the vellum.
And again, if you take the same image and look at it with raking light
you can appreciate the way the pigment's applied, the way the object, the physicality of the object, which is not possible really within conventional photography.
Developing the software to go with the hardware is critical.
And Carlos Bayod is going to talk later about this project,
which was recording some incredibly deformed books in Lakenhal, which are actually, I mean for me
I just love the books is the truth. They are the cloth samples made in Lakenhal of the famous black cloth that they were dying.
And these are the books to prove every yarn of cloth that came from Lakenhal, so they could say, no, this one's fake,
this is not Dutch black cloth. So all the books contain these little wedge shaped samples of black.
And no one could really use them because the books are in such bad condition.
But we wrote the software that after we'd scanned the pages, could flatten them and you'll hear more about that later.
I think Carlos will also introduce what can be done with the data in different types of outputs.
So making exact facsimiles is one.
And the data being recorded here enables us to do extraordinary facsimile work.
Building the community of practice means we have to go into other collections.
And so last year, the Helen Hamlyn Trust gave us the funds to
have two Selene scanners that we could place into different collections for short periods of time.
And it's proved incredibly positive. So right now, the Selene is in the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan in Madrid.
And it's recording a lot of the Islamic cloths and manuscripts and objects there.
And there's also one at the moment in the Bruschettini collection in Milan
which has been recording a wide range of objects. From this portolan chart, but to a whole lot of different fabrics especially.
And it's there, Mongol fabrics that are really opening the way to show what can be done with this system: starting to do
recordings and digital restorations of a whole range of different fabric.
But as I try and sort of focus the day, I want to basically say most of the work here is happening with the Selene.
The hardware and software and what you're going to hear about this afternoon from a whole
group of different people who've been using it with Raphael drawings with
the extraordinary copperplate that's been attributed to William Blake.
And other case studies. But also we're doing photogrammetry and high resolution recording of,
for example, the whole of the Divinity Schools and it's those that Richard was talking
so again, just to pass around. There's some of these.
Three and a half day period
where we recorded the whole of the Divinity School ceiling, which in March, is going to become, a VR display
so you'll be able to see it close up. But for me, I love the idea.
These are actually greatly reduced. So, the one Deb is handling is actually about 50 to 40cm across, so they're reduced down.
But the fact that with a 35 millimetre camera,
the right skills and the right software you can now produce physical objects is something that never ceases to amaze me.
So the ability, one of them is this head that's recorded
as a three dimensional form and explaining the importance of the ceiling can now take on a whole new character.
We can look at it in different ways. We can show it as a VR.
The way we're doing the VR. So this is actually, you'll see it on the screen,
normally you would be immersed in it, but it's using the
new Finnish headsets that were developed for pilots where you can be right close to the surface.
There are no hand controls. It's all eye tracking. You physically move around it.
Put the colour on. You can take the colour off. You can suddenly start to engage in a totally different way with the object you are looking at.
Anyways, you can experience the Tomb of Seti I, better,
differently, from the experience of the original object because you're gravity free, so you could be close to the walls at any point in the two.
So you can do in the VR what you would have to do
with scaffolding normally. The final thing I want to do, because we mentioned the
Natural History Museum and increasingly the recording of, or the merging of nature and culture.
So just again as I was coming in here talking to Jo story about vellum and, you know, I could go on for hours now,
talking about vellum and actually watching how it tells you that the data we're recording can tell you about animal diseases,
herding, a whole lot of subjects that wouldn't normally come into a conversation about recording cultural heritage.
I want to show this image because this is where we are right now.
On the left is a photogrammetry of a little bug, let's say a centimetre across.
And on the right is what we're experimenting with now, which is called Gaussian splatting.
So if I can show you this little video to end on. There are about,
how many, several billion specimens that are
in natural history museums around Europe that are past their shelf life and are increasingly brittle and falling to bits.
And from these specimens, you can tell so much information about evolution, about change, about
character of the insect
and what's happened to it. If you can record them in three dimensions.
It's an enormous task and it's very complicated, but Gaussian splatting,
and here you're watching a video. But if you were a researcher, you could control this.
It's a three dimensional image. It's not a three dimensional model as such.
And so you can see every hair, every detail.
And it's this kind of research that's really pushing the envelopes, that are not only showing how technology can transform the formation of knowledge,
but it can even break the professional barriers that have kept different knowledges apart.
And for us, it's really this that ARCHiOx is pushing and developing.
So, I know we have to keep on target and on track today, so I'm going to hand over to John.
Oh no, Judith, are you going to do this or do I? Sorry, Judith is going to do this.
Thank you Adam for setting the scene for us. So hello again
everyone. I'm Judith Siefring. I'm head of Digital Collections Discovery here at the Bodleian, so I'm working on the digital library side.
So for this first session, we're going to, sort of, take a deep dive into the research findings being enabled by this first phase,
second phase of ARCHiOx, and then we'll have a brief Q&A.
And then after that, we'll take a break around 2:45 for some tea and coffee out in Blackwell Hall.
So, first of our three speakers in this first section will be John.
So John Barrett is senior photographer for the Bodleian Libraries.
And since 2005, he's provided photographs of Bodleian originals for numerous publications.
His work involves the development of new methods of recording Special Collections material.
And he's the author of Imaging Guidelines for Digitisation of Rare and Special Materials, a document that was commissioned by the Bodleian.
And so he's very much been the lead for the Bodleian for ARCHiOx.
And I will hand over to him to talk us through some of the findings from phase two.
Thank you, Judith. Good afternoon everyone.
I'm delighted to be with you today and to be able to share some of the amazing recordings which we've made for this exciting project.
And it's a project which has involved making 3D recordings of our cultural heritage material.
Prior to ARCHiOx, very little attention had been paid to the three dimensional surface of our collections.
But through the recordings we've made for the project, we've come to realise that the materiality of manuscripts, books,
printing plates and artwork can tell us a huge amount about who made them,
how they were made, and about people's interactions with them since they were made.
ARCHiOx, the Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford began in January 2022.
The project has been funded through the generous support of the Helen Hamlyn Trust,
and the aim of the project has been to record originals from across Oxford University's
Institutions using technology created by the Factum Foundation.
This is what that technology looks like.
It's named the Selene and it's a 3D recording system, which was designed and developed by Factum's Head of Technology Jorge Cano.
All of the recordings, which I'll share during this first session of today's conference, have been made with this incredible tool.
The Selene uses a principle called photometric stereo to acquire both colour and 3D data through the capture and processing of just four photographs.
Here we can see the four photographs in the left column, each lit at intervals of 90 degrees.
Through analysing the position of the highlights and shadows, the four photographs can be processed in order to create additional 2D image files,
which encode the direction and height of the surface at each pixel.
The Bodleian was the first institution to use the Selene and through our collaboration with Factum Foundation, we have assisted in its development.
During this second phase of ARCHiOx, the recording system has not only been used at the Bodleian, but also at the Ashmolean Museum,
the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and to record material from the History of Science Museum.
At the end of 2022, I presented this recording of what was considered to be an early 18th century printing plate. Being small and heavily corroded,
the design was almost impossible to see.
But through making a recording of a three dimensional surface, I demonstrated how the design could be revealed.
The image on the right is called a shaded render. It's similar to making a plaster impression of the surface and then relighting it with a torch.
This introduces shadows and highlights to reveal the surface without the distraction of its colour.
I also showed the recording of the reverse of the same plates. Revealing markings which were impossible to see in the conventional image:
musical notes and words. After mirroring the image and adding a little of the colour to make it easier to read.
I showed how we could annotate over the markings in order to reveal the entire design.
Which we discovered was a musical score inspired by Psalm nine.
But today I can share that not only do we know what the score looks like, but also what it sounds like.
The piece which you've just heard is the first set of Psalms for Three Voices by William Child, dating to 1639.
And this recording has allowed researcher Chiara Betti to conclude that this small
printing plate may be the earliest surviving engraved music plate in the UK.
Just as with other research imaging techniques which have become commonplace over the last few decades,
photometric stereo is proving to be immensely powerful as a tool for discovery.
As well as being able to produce images capable of showing features which can't be easily seen or photographed,
it can also be used to make detailed measurements. We can interact with the images, relighting the renders from any direction or height.
We can capture large originals in their entirety, not just small samples.
And not only are these recordings highly effective and versatile,
they are also extremely quick to make. The capture and processing of an A5 size tile takes less than a minute.
The Selene is particularly useful in revealing the tool markings left by authors and artists throughout the centuries and across continents.
And in almost all cases, it's the tools which don't leave a visible trace that are most successfully captured rather than those which do.
Though a feather quill may leave a faint scratch on the surface of a page of parchment or paper,
the surface reveals very little of the text.
However, in this case, the ruled horizontal lines which were not present in the colour image can be seen clearly.
The previous example was a recording of the Bodleian's earliest map of the world, dating from the 11th century.
The volume was made in Milan, and is a version of a work by Bede, the English monk and Anglo-Saxon scholar.
Though the nib of a pen is difficult to capture in the surface
recording, the Selene is incredibly effective in recording markings made using a sharp tool, such as a stylus or divider.
Here we have a detail from an astronomical manuscript which is covered with preparatory stylus incisions.
It's just that they're very, very difficult to see. Until we make a render of the surface and exclude the colour.
Evidence of the use of sharp scribal tools has not only been found in European manuscripts.
Markings made with reed pens and iron styluses have been recorded from manuscripts from our South Asian collections too.
We can see an example of this in this recording of a Sinhalese palm leaf.
Where the outline of this deer has been both incised and then pricked as a result of copying.
But of course, the practice of writing with sharp tools dates back far further. Incised
text has been recorded from a variety of substrates for this project, from clay to wood and wax.
Such as the second century tablet, which had never been imaged in any way until earlier this year when the following recording was made.
A new 3D recording of one of several wax tablets.
Photometric stereo imaging allows us to view brushstrokes and pigment layers in ways that we've never been able to before.
We can see these as distinct layers on the surface of the page at a resolution of 4 million pixels per square inch.
The recording reveals the composition and condition of these pigments.
What we're looking at is a detail from a copy of an Egyptian manuscript compiled almost exactly a thousand years ago.
The example shown here being the waqwaq tree whose branches or fruits became the heads of men, women, and monstrous animals.
And finally we have tools used for writing and drawing on metal:
the burin and the etching stylus. These were the tools used for the production of hundreds of printing plates held in the Bodleian's collections.
The latter having been used in the production of this heavily oxidised copper plate.
It's strange shape suggests that it would have been used to print hand fans during the 18th century.
And this is what the recording of the surface has revealed. With the design revealed, I started to consider what the fan might have looked like.
Here we can see my initial prototype. And a final coloured version, allowing us to see the design as it might have appeared perhaps 280 years ago.
The recreation of the fan demonstrates how 3D recordings could be used in the production of facsimiles.
In 2022, the Factum Foundation made a facsimile of the Bodleian's Gough Map of Great Britain.
And since then, we have recorded dozens of other amazing maps and atlases from our collections.
Here is a tile from the recording of the Gough map, which reveals tiny indentations.
Which were used as a technique to copy the position of geographical features from a precursor map.
We've since discovered that this was a method used in the production of other important maps,
like this 16th century edition of the Al-Idrisi world map.
The render reveals pricking around the coastlines and in the corners of islands.
In this example, we have a page of manuscript by explorer and cartographer William Baffin.
And again, the same copying technique is evident in his Atlas of 1619.
The frontispiece of the same volume has been planned in great detail with prepatory stylus before adding ink to the page.
With the colour removed, this preparatory stage becomes clear.
You can see the same technique in his elevations.
Where stylus markings have served as a form of shorthand, in this case marking the position of trees.
We can also see how Baffin's final design sometimes deviates from his preparatory work.
Here we can see how the position of the word 'north' has been altered.
And on the left we can see a decoration absent in the final design.
But throughout centuries we've attempted not only to map the earth, but also the heavens.
The volume you see here is from the collections of the History of Science Museum.
At least some of the devices from this manuscript were likely to have been created in the 1550s.
The colour layer removed from the 3D recording, we can see how each and every line was meticulously incised.
The volume features seven instruments, including this astrolabe.
By isolating each component, it's been possible to produce an animation, giving us a sense of how the astrolabe might operate.
The animation we see here was produced by my colleague Dylan Schirmacher.
And we can see, while the rete turns, that we can blend from the colour to the 3D render.
Having made the previous recording, Stephen Johnston of the History of Science Museum invited me to record this brass astrolabe.
It was made in Germany in 1521 and includes three double sided plates.
We can see these change in this animation. These are positioned behind the moving parts and contain markings which specify latitude.
Just as with the recordings of the Bodleian's copper printing plates, the 3D renders reveal the markings on this astrolabe with exceptional clarity.
As we saw from the William Baffin Atlas, stylus incisions are extremely hard to spot but can be recorded very effectively with the Selene.
There are several reasons for making these markings, and through these recordings we can better understand their purpose.
During the previous ARCHiOx conference.
A series of recordings from this eighth century Acts of the Apostles were shared by Leicester University PhD candidate Jessica Hodgkinson.
The Selene recording of this lower margin revealed an inscription made in dry point.
Totally absent from the colour recording and impossible to see under conventional lighting.
What was clear and complete from the recording was the name Eadberg,
preceded by a cross. But as well as discovering incised text in the margins,
the Selene was also successful in revealing informal illustrations which captured the attention of the media.
Mysterious figures, whose outlines may have been drawn around a finger or thumb.
Jessica has continued to find evidence of dry point inscriptions while working
as Special Collections curatorial assistant at New College here in Oxford.
In June of this year, Jess and I recorded a folio from this small 16th century manuscript which was made for King Henry VIII.
Here we see a section of the lower margin.
And this is the recording of the surface of the same page.
Jessica's research suggests that the first letter appears to be a characteristically Tudor 'H'.
And towards the end of the dry point addition, the Roman numeral VIII can also be identified, followed by a final calligraphic flourish.
It's impossible to be certain that this inscription is the work of Henry VIII,
but given its position beneath an initial enclosing a crowned Tudor rose,
there is plenty of evidence which suggests that this could indeed be his signature discovered after five centuries.
And these kinds of markings have been revealed throughout the project.
Here we have an example from a 13th century manuscript from Abingdon.
It's a manuscript which researcher Luise Morawetz invited me to record.
And we had no idea that among the numerous dry points and inscriptions,
we would find a beast lurking in the lower flyleaf.
Stylus editions not only reveal readers interactions with manuscripts.
Sometimes the markings are evidence of processes in their production.
From this 11th century manuscript, we see how incised text served as a reminder for the addition of rubrication in a later scribal stint.
From the render, you might be able to make out the text in the left margin.
Which reads virginiia. And this has been adapted to virginitatis in red ink in the uppermost line.
In this 16th century Arabic volume, a stylus has been used for planning the page layout.
Perhaps these could be instructional markings informing another scribe of their intentions.
Or simply a technique used to ensure a neat presentation.
Here we have another example of how research imaging can assist in understanding
the processes involved in the manufacture of manuscripts and artworks.
This Moralised Bible was produced in Paris between 1226 and 1275.
The frontispiece shows God holding a divider creating heaven and earth.
Eight medallions from each page were created using the same tool.
By using a range of imaging techniques. Photometric stereo,
transmitted light, ultraviolet, infrared, and hyperspectral imaging.
We can, in a sense, turn back the clock and see how the manuscript was made.
So beginning with a blank sheet of parchment.
The first stage would have involved tracing a rough design around a model or earlier volume with a broad, rounded tool.
Basic under drawing would then have been added in a carbon based ink.
Improvements would then have been added. Followed by the burnished gold leaf.
3D recordings then help us determine the order in which the colour pigments were applied.
Firstly, red led. Dark azurite.
And a copper pigment was used for the turquoise of the crucifix.
A lighter azurite. Followed by an organic red,
most likely derived from insects. And finally a brown ink, completing the details in the faces.
The Bodleian's volume contains 1784 miniatures, each one measuring just 7.5cm in diameter.
Two sets of these three part manuscripts were produced, which must have taken an enormous amount of time and dedication.
As we've seen, the recordings made with the Selene are entirely complementary with existing imaging techniques.
In this example, we see a Coptic Gnostic text recorded as an albedo or colour image without shadow,
a photometric stereo render, a transmitted light image where the manuscript is illuminated from beneath, and an infrared recording.
These can be layered and blended to allow us to reveal the design more clearly.
There's no right or wrong approach. A composite of multiple layers may provide a researcher with valuable new information.
Working side by side of a researcher is mutually beneficial, as it ensures that the final render is made with the benefit of context.
To conclude this first presentation,
I'd like to take this opportunity to shed some light on some originals which have not received as much attention as many of our books and manuscripts.
Though they cover the walls of every corridor and reading room throughout our historic libraries,
in many cases, we know very little about them. And yet many of the Bodleian's portraits have an interesting story to tell.
Here we have a curious case of the back of a painting not matching the front.
The wooden panel bears a label stating that the portrait depicts Sir Thomas More, the 16th century statesman and martyr.
It's a portrait that was a particular interest to this man. Nowell
Myres, the Bodleian's librarian from 1948 to 1965.
Like his father, Myres was an archaeologist and historian and, perhaps in the spirit of uncovering the past,
he embraced x-ray imaging in order to examine portraits from the Bodleian's collection.
In 1955, Myres wrote to paintings conservator Horace Buttery to inform him that an x-ray
of the Thomas Moore portrait had revealed a perfectly preserved head of a lady.
He goes on to write, 'Sir Thomas More of course, is quite worthless and I think we must have him off and chercher la femme.'
Thankfully, before Buttery removed the overpainting, the portrait was photographed.
This poor quality black and white contact print is all that remains.
The photograph reveals that the overpainting is a copy of Hans Holbein's portrait from 1527.
So what did Myres and Buttery uncover? The original female portrait is not of significant quality,
but evidence from a partial inscription suggests that she may have been painted in the 16th century.
But is there evidence which remains on the surface from the overpainting?
As this animation plays,
we can see in the Selene recording a series of S-shaped forms extending from the sitter's left ear to the left side of her forehead.
And if we then fade to the 1950s photograph with the overpainting, we see that these are in fact the links of Thomas More's chain of office.
Perhaps Myres was delighted or perhaps he felt short changed. When overlaid in exactly the same position, we can compare the two portraits.
Whether or not we consider Myres to have been right to request the removal of the overpainting,
what is less ambiguous is that he should have ensured that it was properly recorded before being erased forever.
The Thomas More portrait could have been photographed in colour. Kodachrome was introduced 20 years earlier, in 1935.
However, nearly 70 years after the overpainting was removed, we can have a go at recreating it digitally.
Here the original frame has been reinstated and the colour has been added to the monochrome photograph, using Holbein's portrait as a guide.
This is perhaps how the Thomas Moore portrait would have appeared from the 17th century.
This small panel painting of Charles I bears a resemblance to the portrait painted by Anthony van Dyck in 1633.
Recording that we're looking at is not a conventional photograph. Instead, it's a combination of both a colour image and a render of the surface.
Though unconventional, the image provides far more information regarding the materiality of the painting.
And using a high resolution recording system is especially important when recording a small portrait like this one.
The Selene even allows us to record the colour and surface data through the domed glass.
Something which would be either challenging or impossible to do with a laser based system.
Here we see the colour image, render,
and finally the composite. At first
this 1897 portrait of Thomas Alcock might appear to be a pencil sketch, but it is in fact a collotype print.
As you might expect to see, we have no tool markings in the surface,
only the chain lines and laid lines embedded in the paper.
Being able to record light sensitive material like this print both quickly and without
subjecting it to bright lighting has ensured that it has not been damaged during capture.
And finally we have another portrait featuring an unidentified female sitter.
In this case, she was revealed in 1838 when an overpainted portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots was removed.
Before removing the overpainting, the portrait, as it appeared in the early 19th century, was copied not once
but twice. This is a recording which I made in 2022, prior to her much needed conservation treatment.
And this is how she appeared earlier this year when I recorded her again halfway through restoration and with the varnish having been removed.
Recorded at over a million pixels per square inch. The recording even allows us to see the woodgrain in the panel on which the painting was made.
We can see how the paints have cracked and flaked. We can exclude the colour and concentrate only on the surface.
And we can use other types of shaders like this Atlas shader, which reveals the surface using a spectrum of colour.
Not only have the recordings proved to be useful for the conservator in trying to untangle the painting's history,
they've also ensured that the painting is documented before, during, and after its treatment.
This demonstrates how photometric stereo imaging can be used both as a technique for discovery,
and also as an effective means of ensuring the preservation of our collections material.
And I'll be focusing on the theme of preservation in the next session.
Wonderful. Thank you, John. So for the second, part of this session, we're going to focus on some new research.
I'd like to introduce Mark Crosby, who is an associate professor in English and the director of the Digital Centre at Kansas State University.
He has published on William Blake and his circle, and most recently co-edited a collection on Blake's manuscripts.
Mark is currently preparing a catalogue of Blake's apprenticeship materials in the Bodleian Library and the Society of Antiquaries.
And Mark is going to talk to us about his findings on copper plates.
I should start by saying the last time I was in this building giving a talk on Blake, I went on for 75 minutes.
I will not tax your attention for that long! I've got 20 minutes.
So to start, before I dive into the copper plates, I'd like to present some historical context to begin with.
In 1809, the antiquarian, first director of the Society of Antiquaries, Richard Gough, bequethed his vast collection to the Bodleian Library.
Included in this collection
were the materials relating to his mammoth publication, Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, which was published between 1786 and 1796.
The publishing, this particular volume.
This particular volume contains engravings by James Basire.
The engravings were made along with the preparatory drawings in the 1770s,
between 1773 and 1779 / 1780, which coincided with William Blake's apprenticeship.
Now, before Blake became an apprentice to Richard Gough, he spent four years at Henry Pars' Drawing School on the strand.
Now the Drawing School was seen as the most pre-eminent drawing school in London at the time,
and it was considered a prerequisite to attending Saint Martin's Academy, which would be the precursor to the Royal Academy.
So if you wanted to attend Saint Martin's and then the Royal Academy, you would have to attend Pars' Drawing School.
Now, Blake demonstrated a precocious talent for drawing, so much so that his father,
a Hosier by trade, wanted to apprentice Blake to a painter of eminence.
However, the fees involved in the apprenticeship were so much that Blake instead requested to be apprenticed to an engraver.
Now, the first engraving master that Blake's father approached was a chap called William Wynne Ryland.
When Blake was introduced to William Wynne Ryland, Blake reportedly said to his father, I do not like that man's face.
He will live to be hanged.
Ten years later, William Wynne Ryland was convicted of forging East India Company bills and hanged by the neck at Tyburn.
Some say Blake is a prophet and a visionary. Maybe this is the evidence for such things.
Instead, Blake was apprenticed to James Basire on the 4th of August 1772 for the princely sum of £52.
The apprenticeship involved spending seven years living with the Basire household.
So he'd moved from his home in Poland Street to Basire's studio in Great Queen Street, just near Lincoln's Inn.
And here we have the documentation from the Stationers Records in London,
where you have William Blake signing away his life for seven years at the tender age of 14.
Now, there is plenty of evidence we have for Blake and what he was doing during his apprenticeship.
And some of this evidence is first hand, that is, people who knew Blake, who worked with Blake or friends with Blake during his life.
So we can infer that they got this evidence from Blake directly.
In particular, what happened in 1773 is that Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make a series of preparatory drawings of
the medieval royal tombs and effigies of wall paintings that then were to be engraved for Gough's publication.
And this is Basire's studio in Great Queen Street. And this is a representation of the engraving studio. Now as an apprentice
the first years would have involved some of the menial tasks like cleaning the studio, preparing the copper plates.
But clearly Blake was such a good draughtsman that Basire entrusted him, just one year into his apprenticeship,
to going make these preparatory drawings for this very significant publication
of Gough's. We also have evidence that Blake, by 1773, could engrave.
Now, what you're seeing here are the only two states of what we think of today
(and maybe this will have to be revised after this talk) of Blake's earliest engravings.
They are engravings after a figure from Michelangelo's The Death of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, from engraving by Francesco Salviati.
Now the one on your left contains an inscription that reads 'engraved when I was a beginner at Basire's'.
And then the later one, actually gives us the date 'engraved by W Blake, 1773, from an old Italian drawing'.
The state on the right is the later state,
the second state. So it's the state on the left, which is the first state which we can date to 1773.
Now, the fascinating thing about this, by one year into his apprenticeship,
Blake already had mastered the visual language of line engraving. That he could
cover a copper plate with the series of incised linear patterns to recreate form,
tone, and depth. In other words, by 1773, Blake could engrave.
Now when he went to Westminster Abbey, he spent between 1773 to possibly 1777 making a series of preparatory drawings.
To give you a sense of where he was during this period.
In 1774 he starts in the Confessor's chapel, this is just behind the high altar, making drawings of the royal effigies and tombs.
The following year, he moves onto the great Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, faces to the north
and starts sketching the tombs of, the recently revealed tombs of King Sebert, supposedly the original founder of Westminster Abbey,
as well as the medieval wall paintings that were there.
Now, these medieval wall paintings at the time were believed to have been executed by a contemporary of Giotto, a chap called Calvinatti.
He did an about turn to face the opposite direction, and did a series of preparatory sketches of the other royal tombs on the other side of the
Cosmati pavement, and then moved to Saint Edmund's Chapel to sketch the tombs there.
In total he did over 50 drawings. Now these drawings, are all signed J Basire, J Basire del.
The Latinate formula for delineating he is the author of them.
Now, this was commonplace practice for the master of the studio to sign any work coming out of the studio.
And what I've been doing with John over the last year and a half is looking at both the drawings and the copper plates.
Now, it's been accepted in Blake's scholarship that
many of these drawings are attributed to Blake because of the circumstantial evidence.
And the six copper plates of the portraits of kings and queens have also been accepted as attributed to Blake.
So part of the investigation that we've been conducting is whether or not the other copper plates after
Blake's preparatory drawings are also or could also be attributed to Blake.
So one of the first things we did, or I asked John to do, was to use the Selene technology to look at the six oval copper plate portraits,
to see if we could find the consistencies in terms of the depth of lines that were etched in there.
And what we found is across all six copper plate portraits,
there is a consistency of depth, roughly 18 microns deep, which is a quarter of the width of a human hair,
so very shallow. And that's consistent across all six copper plates, which would suggest the same hand was responsible for the etching of these.
Press play. And we focus on particular areas of, sort of densely hatched areas under the eyes, around the ears and, as I said,
all of these measurements prove to be very consistent, which again suggests that the same hand is responsible for them.
Again, all of the engravings that come from this studio are signed by him.
Now, there are question marks over the rest of the engravings, in large part because
the first volume of Sepulchral Monuments wasn't published until 1786, which is
seven years after Blake completes his apprenticeship, and there's also one engraving that bears the date 1783, which again would post date Blake's
involvement in this particular plate. However, we know from the Gough correspondence and his
manuscript autobiography here in the Bodleian that he started working on this project in 1771 or 1772,
and commissioned Basire to start the process of making the prepatory drawings and the engravings in 1773.
That's to say the engravings, some of the engravings were done much earlier than the publication date of the volume in 1786.
Now there are a couple of plates in particular that require our attention.
Um, what I was interested in doing is looking at the rectos and the versos of the copper plates. Now,
on many of the copper plates on the rectos you have the printed image.
And now on the versos, there were some extraordinary markings. On this plate in particular,
what we have is a series of practice work. Now for an engraver to learn how to engrave
they needed to use the engraving tools and a copper plate.
And what you're looking at now, is the verso of a copper plate filled with practice work.
Basire's studio was famous for its linear style.
A series, a visual language that uses linear patterns to recreate form and tone.
And this is an apprentice practising those patterns on a copper plate.
So what we have is a consistency in depth of line and spacing of line.
This demonstrates the apprentice engraver was practising putting pressure on a burin to gouge out these lines at a consistent depth,
and a consistent width. The consistent width gives you a consistent tone, and the consistent depth again indicates a consistent pressure
when creating these patterns. In addition to straight lines, we also have hatching,
one of the main aspects of a linear approach is the use of hatching to create, again, depth and tone.
And here we have rectilinear areas. The one on your left is
an apprentice practising how to create hatching repeating patterns.
There's also some swirls and what could be seen as sort of curved lines and potentially sort of vegetative,
shapes that correspond with some of the copper plates attributed to Blake that contain similar curved lines.
In other words, an apprentice practising these curved lines by using a Burin or an etching needle,
are evidence on the rectos of these copper plates.
Versos, sorry.
In the case of these vegetative lines, it sort of anticipates Blake's own use of interlinear vegetation, most famously in his illuminated books.
And here's an example from the Bodleian copy of Songs of Innocence which Blake produced exactly ten years after he finished his apprenticeship.
It's probably his most accessible work.
And if you're interested and need a Christmas Present, the Bodleian have a wonderful edition for sale right now in the bookstore.
So one of the things that the Selene technology has allowed us to do is to
get information, render the information in a way that is just impossible with the naked eye.
And so in addition to the squiggly lines and straight lines and hatching marks,
there's also a series of semicircles which could only have been made with a dry point compass.
And John has been able to detect the shadow impressions of where the compass
would have set as Blake started to experiment with these semicircles.
Why is that sort of significant? Well, we find in the finished engravings, a series of swirls that were used with drypoint compass
and Blake himself about four years after he completed his apprenticeship and went into business as a printmaker,
he uses a compass in architectural designs. And this is from 1784.
And Blake's use of a compass you can see at the top and bottom on the left hand side.
Compasses and circles also feature as visual motifs throughout Blake's works.
Most famously, this is called the Ancient of Days,
you may be familiar with this particular image. Where you have the Urizenic God figure circumscribed by
a globe of some sort, holding the dividers,
or most Blake scholars interpret this as the golden compass mentioned in Milton's Paradise Lost.
Compasses also feature regularly in his watercolour paintings. He did 537
watercolour illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts, several of which include these compasses
as well as the Illuminated Book, Jerusalem, his longest and most complex work in illuminated printing, includes a compass as well.
And most famously, this image you may be familiar with
if you've been to the British Library, you have this Paolozzi's fabulous sculpture.
This is in the Tate Britain at the moment. This is Newton using a compass to circumscribe an arc within a triangle.
On the back of another copper plate, we noticed some other incisions that were less structured, more spontaneous, and perhaps playful.
Now, what you're looking at here is a plate mark,
and what the apprentice engraver has done is decide to put some hatching in the first 'o' of London.
To give you an idea, the size of the 'o' is about 1.5mm.
So he's working at a sort of very minute scale in a very controlled way, using some form of magnification.
There's also this. This is a short shafted, heavily fletched arrow.
Was made with a type of burin called a scorper that has a flat end.
It's 18mm long, so while you can see it with the naked eye,
it's very difficult to see much of the details.
Why is that important for Blake? Well Blake loved an arrow.
He loved more than arrows. In his pictorial work as well as his poetic work,
arrows feature prominently as a motif. Indeed, it's a motif that sort of reappears again and again.
This is from Blake's illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost.
This is Satan meeting his son, otherwise known as death.
Armed both with arrows.
This is another illustration from Blake's Paradise Lost, where you have the son with his seven arrows defeating the rebel angels.
Sending them all to the fiery lake. In his Night Thoughts, we have the reappearance of the sun with his bow pulling arrows out of quivers,
and then death appears as well in the same set of illustrations, holding a short shafted, heavily fletched arrow.
Blake also engraved 43 of these illustrations, so he did 537 watercolours illustrating Young's poem,
of which then he engraved 43 that were published in a doomed attempt to enter into the large illustrated book market.
Sadly, the market fell through because Britain decided to go to war with Napoleon. Actually the other way around, Napoleon declared war on Britain.
And then it his poetry. There are too many examples to name, but I'm going to give you the most famous.
This is the preface to Milton, the hymn now known as Jerusalem, where we have the lines:
'Bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my arrows of desire.'
So if we're looking at a work by Blake here, this could be the first instance of Blake using this motif around the age of 15,
a motif that reappears both textually and visually throughout the rest of his life.
The other motif we found on this plate was almost impossible to see, largely because
the existence of what's called repoussage. Repoussage is a way that an engraver uses to correct mistakes or to amend a plate.
So if something needs amending, the copper plate is flipped over and they take a small ball point hammer and knock out the mistake.
So what we have here is a tiny face. Engraved, incised, into the back of the plate underneath the repoussage.
There we go. Now this is, the scale again is minute.
This is, from top to bottom, about 18mm.
What the engraver has done, he's hatched the eyes to give a sort of expressive character.
And it's a face. But it's a face that I sort of, I think is a doodle,
rather than a fully formed face. In other words, during the apprentice's long day
where he's doing these very repetitive actions of making these linear marks.
There are times that clearly he needs to entertain himself.
So he flips over the plates and he starts doodling.
In other words, this is personal and private art that for the last 250 years, we haven't been able to access.
The Selene technology now makes it possible to see this face
made by an apprentice 250 years ago. If this is Blake,
what you're looking at now is Blake's first portrait, albeit a crude portrait, but Blake's first portrait.
Thank you very much. Wonderful.
Thank you so much. Thank you to all our speakers also for running so beautifully to time.
So we have around ten minutes 10-15 minutes for a Q&A.
We have Niki at the back with a microphone so I can see one hand up here already.
Can I invite Angelamaria and Mark, to come up and sit with John for some questions?
Hi. Two quick questions for Adam, actually.
Can the software behind Selene be reverse engineered take a digital flat image and
bring out the implied three dimensionals actually within the image.
I can take this Adam if you like. Yes, it does already.
So what you're doing is you're capturing both a colour image without texture at all, and also the 3D without the colour.
So it does both things automatically at the same time.
And can that be printed? Yes, absolutely. Possibly a question for both of you.
Um, in the Tutankhamun exhibition, currently on in Cairo, do some of Adam's Factum Arte
works actually on show?
Proposal is to do a show in Gem that will look at the Hall of Beauties in its current condition from the tomb of Seti I,
and then explain why it looks like that and then take you out through the recoloured
Hall of Beauties that we made for the exhibition in Basel in 2017.
So there's a lot of information on Factum Foundation's website about that.
And that's, more questions
I was just picking up on you,very nice, phrase, using a dry point to think discreetly.
Yeah, which I really like, that's really helpful, that's very good.
Um, and I was also thinking about how the use of raking light is something that links everything and all of the,
examples that we've seen so far back from the, the eighth century manuscripts all the way through to, to to your thing.
and I was wondering if it's, it's I was thinking more about the raking light and because we're thinking a lot about that in terms of how,
monuments, things would have been envisaged in,
in churches or tombs with flickering light and how that would have acted as a real,dynamic force to the way,
the things on the wall were, were seen to move as the light moved around them and people moved with, with the lighting.
But I was also wondering if there's any sense in which perhaps of the paper rather than, the membrane, but then perhaps with that to whether,
you could use transmitted light so light from behind to,make these tiny, indentations more visible.
Is it just the raking light, or could we have light behind? I don't know if they've done any experiments with that.
No, no, not the to pick up the to be engraved lines is how I like calling them.
yes, you need rake, you need Selene and John if you want to get the best results.
But,in in the absence of John, you need
dark, you need the dark. You know, we think that the truth is in the light,
the truth is in the dark. You need a source of raking
light, a good torch. and these, you know, if you don't have Selene these marks, not everything,
so, for example, one of the real discoveries, I think, is to anatomical,
notations that we've seen and in a way, we could pick them up, you know, pick them in any way.
but the transmitted light, that is something different, it just highlights the, in the structure of the paper, I see,
watermarks and, the laid lines and and so on, but, um, but even transmitted light, if you're drawing these lines.
this is where Selene comes, very useful because,
you you can pick up all these elements with raking light if the drawing has, you know, drawn down on something else.
so, but for blind, blind side of dry point,
yes, absolutely, raking light. I thought this print was quite nice.
I hadn't seen this before, so this is Bandinelli. This is, yes, this is a design of Bandinelli.
And we see some some work happening here with a light at a low angle and a sort of flickering light, in the dark.
Yeah, there's no window here. So they're in the dark and they are using um, yes, a candle light and, and.
yeah, so I think when you, when you see an original with which has been, um, annotated with blind styluses,
you don't really get a sense of how difficult it is to see these markings.
obviously with the recordings that we've made, they're very, very visible.
but you wonder how the, the makers of, of this artwork and these manuscripts were able to be guided by them.
And I think this is the this is the key, um, that they were working from, from a low light, which perhaps it was, was moving as well.
I shouldn't ask a question, but I'm going to...Mark.
When they were doing the, copperplate, etchings and stuff.
Would that have been a similar light format? Would they've been doing it under candlelight or what?
They've been working on the daylight because you said about how tiny the actual markings were.
So. Yeah. I suppose the traditional, literature, on engraving in the 18th century was daylight.
Natural light and engraving desk were situated next to large windows.
when Blake moved to the south coast, the only time he left London was for a three year period,
in 1800, where he lived in a ship's cottage made of ship's timbers.
And his engraving studio was on the bottom floor next to a large window.
So the idea was that he could engrave using natural light. Having said that, um, there is there is some evidence that again,
this is slightly circumstantial evidence that Blake would engrave after his drawings
and the phrase used in this documentary evidence is especially in winter.
So the suggestion here is he, wouldn't use artificial light, candle lights to engrave as well.
One more question, if anyone's brave enough to ask?
Yes, do. John, this might be a bit leftfield.
Has this technology got a forensic application?
Yes, it probably does. I mean, I'll go into some forensic analysis, which is which has happened on more of a volumetric recording,
which was recorded using a different principle called photogrammetry.
So we'll focus on that in the next session. Um, but I'm sure there are absolutely applications.
I mean, we know that, for instance, the pressure of a pen through a page can be transferred to a page underneath.
I've recorded those markings before. So yes, there's all manner of different applications.
Thanks. Thank you.
I think we'll leave the session here. Um, we have a half hour break.
in Blackwell Hall. There's refreshments available in the cordoned off area, and then we'll be back to start again around sort of quater past three.
so I hope we'll see you all back here for more amazingness after the break.
But for now, can you join me in thanking all of our wonderful speakers.
So thank you everyone for coming back after coffee.
and now we're going into the second session, which will last until about sort of 4:20, when we'll have time for a Q&A.
So we've got three more talks, in this second session.
And to begin with, I will invite John back,to tell us more about findings in phase two.
Thank you Judith. In the first session, I shared a selection of recordings made using a principle called photometric stereo.
The Selene recording system, which uses this principle, is a perfect fit for recording the surface of library material, it being mostly flat.
Photometric stereo has numerous advantages over other 3D recording techniques.
It's incredibly fast and highly efficient, allowing us to record at very high resolutions,
but it's only capable of recording the surface of our collections, not the volume.
In order to record the volume, it's necessary to use a different technique, which I'll describe in this session.
What are the most important objectives for ARCHiOx has been to create recordings which
assist in preserving our collections by embracing both these 3D recording techniques.
We've been able to record everything from a tiny fossilised wasp to an entire historic building.
At the previous ARCHiOx conference, I shared this Selene recording of a Japanese scroll,
which demonstrated how a photometric stereo recording can highlight conservation concerns such as insect damage,
historic repairs, and flaking pigment.
This conventional image of a painting from our South Asian manuscripts may not appear to show features of concern to a conservator.
But the render of the surface reveals areas of creasing and pigment loss.
This demonstrates how photometric stereo renders can assist in condition mapping.
Making recordings of extremely fragile originals like this unfired clay letter seal from the 2nd century B.C. has ensured that they are protected.
Showing a facsimile in place of the original,
has allowed students to have a hands-on experience without the need to remove the original seal from its box.
And not only do we make a facsimile of the seal, but also the lost matrix, which was used to make it.
The designs from seven seals from the same collection were recorded using the Selene and combined.
A 3D print of the surface was then made onto a flexible material, which was wrapped around a cylindrical core.
The facsimile can be used, as the original would have been, leaving an impression of the emblem of a Persian Prince named Arshama.
Photographing seals can be challenging. Capturing a wax seal, like the 17th century example, would typically involve using a single raked light.
While this technique may reveal the design successfully,
it’s possible that the image may suffer from excessive contrast and un-even illumination across the surface.​
These problems can be mitigated by making a photometric stereo recording.
Which has the additional benefit of allowing the end-user to relight the recording from any direction.
As you can see, it's possible to change the viewing position.
However, as the recording was made from a single position above the seal, we cannot turn the seal over and view the other side.​
In this example, the 3D recording has been made using a technique called photogrammetry.
While Selene acquires 3D data through capturing images illuminated from different positions and with the camera in a static position.
Photogrammetry is a technique which works in the opposite way.
A photogrammetry recording is made by photographing the object from multiple angles under even illumination,
and combining the images into a three-dimensional model. In this example, the seal was photographed from 200 positions.
This 13th century seal features two portraits of Henry III.
The charter to which it was attached is a Confirmation of Magna Carta
Here we can see the skeleton of the model, a mesh containing half a million triangles.
Image files encoding colour, shadow and texture are then projected onto the mesh.
To create a photogrammetry recordings
ARCHiOx has used the PalaeoPi, a programmable turntable designed by Richard Allen, which synchronises rotation and capture.
This is a highly efficient and relatively inexpensive solution for the photogrammetry of small originals,​
like this 17th century embroidered Book of Psalms.
Recordings like this one have been published online and can be explored in the browser on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or even a smartphone.
We can rotate, we can zoom in, pan, relight the model as if holding the book in our hands.
There are currently 76 photo parametric models available, but available to view online, which showcase some of the most beautiful book bindings.
Here we have another 17th century embroidered book featuring a portrait of Charles II and his wife Catherine.
But photometric recordings take a lot of time to make, sometimes several hours.
They also produce large amounts of data in order to publish a photogrammetry model online.
It's necessary to diminish the resolution and complexity of the recording.
It's therefore very difficult to examine a small detail with as much clarity as you might like,
such as the tiny peacock perched on top of the oval from this binding.
Creating a high resolution recording of a detail
using the Selene takes just a few seconds, with the peacock recorded at over 4 million pixels per square inch
we can now examine each individual thread. As we've seen, both 3D recording methods have their own limitations and advantages.
In this example, a photogrammetry model is useful as it allows us to see each face of this function or scientific binding.
A French book dating from 1678.
A note written by bookseller E.P. Goldschmidt, states that this volume is a rare and extraordinary book printed at a small town in Normandy,
preserved in its original binding, which in fact comprises astronomical instruments without which no copy can be said to be complete.
Before being presented to the Bodleian, and in 1978 this book belonged to the Broxbourne Library, compiled by book collector Albert Ehrman.
Ehrman had a particular interest in bookbinding and named his library after his hometown in Hertfordshire.
The Broxbourne Collection comprises some of the most beautiful book-bindings in the Bodleian's
collections; here we have a tiny Portuguese book bound
in the early 19th century, the gold-tooled Morocco case feature the Arms of Portugal,
and while many of the book bindings which have been recorded for the project were chosen due to their aesthetic quality
the next small volume is an exception. This pocket sized book was recorded instead because of the intriguing story surrounding its provenance.
It was presented to the Bodleian in 1893, and catalogued by librarian E.W.B. Nicholson, as being found in Shelley's hand at his death.
The volume was displayed with the caption ‘Shelley’s Sophocles which he had with him when drowned.
Presented to the Bodleian Library, by Jane, Lady Shelley.
the end edge is supposed to show the mark of Shelley’s thumb’.​
Whether or not this story is true, there is good evidence to support the claim that this volume belonged to Percy Shelley.
The Bodleian holds a matching pocket-sized edition of Aeschylus containing annotations in Shelley’s hand.
Had the Sophocles volume not been discovered with Shelley’s body, perhaps it could have been among the volumes salvaged from his boat, the Ariel.
What is undeniable is the presence of a thumb-sized indentation on the upper edge of this small, water-damaged book.
In contrast, here we have one of the Bodleian's finest bindings an early 12th centaury Byzantine New Testament, bound in silver and ivory.
Reproducing the reflective nature of metallic surfaces is challenging in both conventional photography and in photogrammetry.
By selectively masking only the silver parts of the model and applying a metalness mask,
my colleague, Dylan Schirmacher, has produced a very convincing 3D model of the original.
And it's not just bindings that have been captured using photogrammetry.
We've also recorded objects like this celestial globe, which was made by John Senex in 1728. ​
Senex was a prominent cartographer, astrologer and geographer to Queen Ann.
Here Senex has mapped the stars according to the zodiac.
Photogrammetry has also been used to assist in trying to solve a mystery.
On the left we see a portrait bust of James Gibbs, the Architect of the Radcliffe Camera.
The bust is a little tricky to reach, being located in the mezzanine of the upper reading room,
from where it has been positioned, Gibbs has a wonderful view over the building which he designed.
The regions of the bust, which were accessible, were photographed 300 times, and the images aligned to create a 3D model of over 5 million polygons.
The request for the recording was made by the Bodleian’s former Exhibitions and Loans Conservator, Dana Josephson.​
And the reason for making this recording is not because there is any doubt about who the bust depicts, or who sculpted it.
We know this to be the work of John Rysbrack. In fact, this is one of a pair of busts commissioned in 1726. ​
The other bust, showing Gibbs in contemporary dress and a wig, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
It's the identity of the sitter from this bust which is open to question.
Now it also shares a home in the Radcliffe Camera. It is situated to the right of the doorway leading to the upper reading room.
And despite bearing an inscription stating that the bust depicts Gibbs if it were carved from life.
This would make it a very early specimen of a Greek Revival herm bust, which did not become popular in England until the 19th century.
For this reason, and given that we don't know who sculpted it, we cannot be sure that this is in fact, Gibbs.
What we do know is that the bust came to the library in 1927 and may once have been owned by the writer and art-historian Horace Walpole.
Earlier this year, Dana Josephson commissioned Professor Caroline Wilkinson,
Director of the Forensic Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University to analyse the recordings of both busts.​
Though the full report has yet to be received,
Professor Wilkinson's summary suggests that the number of differences between the faces cannot be explained by the difference in ages depicted.
She concluded that there was little evidence to support the assertion that the two pack, two busts depicts the same person.
Not too far away in the Bodleian’s Old Schools Quad we have a statue which is often mistaken by tourists to be William Shakespeare.​
In fact, it depicts William Herbert, the 16th and 17th century Earl of Pembroke.
The statue originally stood in the outer court of Wilton House.
This recording is a work in progress, and the model we see here was made by photographing the statue from 1200 different positions.
But this is a comparatively modest effort compared to another recording, which was made last month.
I'd been asked by colleagues to make a high resolution photograph of the entire ceiling of this room, the 15th century Divinity School.
Given that the ceiling is at its highest point over 8 meters tall, another objective was to create a physical facsimile of a few of the bosses,
so that visitors could have the opportunity to see these incredible carvings up-close.​
Though ambitious, Adam Lowe suggested that the whole ceiling should be recorded in 3D.​
Given the scale and complexity of the challenge, the recording was made by colleagues from the Factum Foundation.
Cue photogrammetry experts, Imran Kahn, who photographed the ceiling from 16,000 positions at ground level.
And Otto Lowe, who first recorded the entire room using LiDAR and then captured three bosses from the top of a tall tower.
And I couldn't resist climbing the tower myself. Being able to get up-close to the carvings was a great privilege.
From a height of eight meters, it's possible to see some of the carvings in a way which would be impossible from the ground.
Like this cleric who appears to have been writing the same page for the last 540 years.
From this perspective, we can also appreciate how delicate the bosses are.
Some are almost completely hollow in structure. My colleagues at the Factum Foundation are continuing to work on this recording,
with the final aim to be able to navigate the model in a virtual reality presentation.
This initial preview gives us a sense of how the final and even higher definition recording would appear.
In addition to the 3D presentation,
an enormously high-resolution orthographic view has also been extracted from the photogrammetry and can be viewed online.
Using this image, we can zoom into every detail of the ceiling at a resolution of 1000 pixels per square inch.
And this is an incredible resource for the research of the 455 ceiling bosses.
Each one appears to be unique.
The extremely detailed elements, which can't be studied from the ground, can now be seen with clarity. From one of the bosses,
it's even possible to count the feathers on the wings of the angels.
Here we can see a boss featuring an Eagle and Child motif.
And as we move past another showing a Tudor rose, we finally reach a very beautifully carved Green Man.
One of the bosses which has been made into a physical facsimile.
But to conclude,
let's move from a recording of something enormous to a recording of something which is just a few millimetres in length. From this colour image.
it's hard to make out what we're looking at. But from the render we can see the outline of a tiny fossilised wasp.
And this is just one of dozens of specimens which were recorded at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History earlier this year.
In order to make these recordings, a brand new portable version of the Selene was used.
Taking just a few minutes to set up, recordings were made alongside curators and students.
Through analysing the initial recordings together and understanding what they can reveal.
They were able to support me in selecting specimens which would benefit from being recorded in this exciting new way.
These are among the first recordings made with the Selene of objects from the natural world.
And the results are very exciting.
Fossils make incredible candidates for photometric stereo recording, and by being creative with the renders which we make.
We can create representations which are both informative and also beautiful.
This collection of fossilised leaves appear to have a flat, uniform surface.
But the render allows us to see the topography as it truly is.
Even the delicate veins are visible. Researchers at the museum were excited by the speed with which the recordings could be made and processed.
And by the ways in which they could be analysed. Being able to study the specimens in this way may assist in identifying a given species.
The renders can be easily shared, allowing for remote consultation with experts from other institutions.
And as well as recording specimens from the Museums’ Earth collections,
examples from their Life collections are equally fascinating and beautiful.​
Here is a render which shows the tiny scales of a mantis. This composite render shows the surface of an unidentified snake skin.
It was a specimen collected by the explorer and naturalist William John Burchell.
Burchell described and collected over 63,000 specimens, most of which he gave to the British Museum,
but several others were donated to Oxford’s Natural History Museum.
These include a tortoise which he collected in 1814.​
Here we have a colour recording of a Ulysses butterfly. And here's the render of the 3D surface.
As is the case when recording dark regions of an oil painting, the surface details can be revealed very effectively in a 3D render.
We can see how the scales on the left side of the lower wing,
suddenly become visible. At the beginning of this presentation, I shared a high resolution recording of a macaw’s feather.
In this example, we see a small African bird's wing.
Every vane of this extremely delicate specimen can be seen in this atlas render.
And this is the final recording I'd like to share.
What we're looking at is a fragment from the Gibeon meteorite, which was collected in Namibia and fell to Earth in prehistoric times.
Fine lines which have been recorded so successfully with the Selene, show
the fragment's crystal composition. The patterns are the result of the meteorites having been slowly cooled from a molten state.
This would have occurred in the vacuum of space when the solar system was first formed.
Our collections are truly out of this world.
Recording them as best as technology allows ensures that preservation and helps us to understand them more fully.
These have been the aims of ARCHiOx, and will continue to use and develop this technology,
so that both Oxford University and other institutions can benefit from their enormous potential.
If you'd like to find out more about ARCHiOx, you'll find several articles on the Bodleian blog, which is called The Conveyor.
I'd like to give special thanks to Dylan Schirmacher, who's my colleague who's worked on ARCHiOx with me,
Elaine Anstee and Jorge Cano, who developed the Selene.
Thank you very much. It's wonderful.
John, thank you very much. So we've heard a lot about the work that's been happening at the Bodleian,
and now we're going to move to the other half of the partnership to hear more about, um, work that's been ongoing in Factum.
And welcome our next speaker, Carlos Bayod,
who holds a PhD in art history and theory from Autonomous University of Madrid and a master's in architecture from Polytechnic University of Madrid.
He is a project director at the Factom Foundation,
and his work is dedicated to the development and application of digital technology to the conservation,
study and dissemination of cultural heritage. With the Lucida 3D scanner,
Carlos has recorded hundreds of artworks in the world's main museums, collections and archaeological sites.
He's also a frequent speaker about facsimiles and museology, and has taught the Masters in Historic Preservation at Columbia University.
So Carlos is going to talk us through some of the latest developments at Factum.
Thanks Carlos. Thank you. Thank you Judith.
Good afternoon.
I would like to share today very quickly some examples of the type of work that we have been doing with the Selene scanner outside of Oxford.
So at the same time as John was doing all these, beautiful recordings that have helped to, you know, bring these amazing discoveries,
we have kept developing the system in order to adapt to the different requirements we have for, scanning,
diverse range of artefacts, um, mostly from our base in Madrid, but also in museums all over the world.
So here in the Bodleian, what happens is the Selene is fixed in the photography lab, and then objects come to be recorded.
What we have been doing mostly is bringing the scanner to the institutions.
So for example, when we were given the task of recording this important historic book in Madrid,
in the Lázaro Galdiano museum, which is a book by Pacheco, Pacheco is the master, was the master of Velázquez.
We just installed the Selene just for a couple days recording so we could capture as many pages as possible, both in colour and relief.
We are talking about a historic book, not too different to Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Also, in this case, all the lives of Spanish artists, writers, play writers, etc. were portrayed that were drawn by Pacheco himself.
Jorge Cano, has been developing and leading this work of creating the Selene,
and also kept advancing both hardware and software in order to match new requirements and new challenges.
So, for example, at the very beginning it was about controlling the scanner, literally writing lines of code.
Probably at the beginning. This is what John had to do.
Then over time, it's been about creating a proper user graphic user interface to make this operation more intuitively.
So this is what we keep developing as we do the recordings.
When we were working on this important book by Pacheco.
Each page was unveiled in this manner.
So as we have seen today, it's all about making accessible the materiality of books and other,
artefacts through on screen visualisation, etc. but also,
and I think it's important to highlight the Selene allows to obtain both colour and relief data that can be re materialised as facsimiles. As
replicas that are physical,
and this is what we did for creating a facsimile of this book that will facilitate researchers to have a more direct access without,
putting in danger or in risk
the original. This is especially important with objects like, for example,
this series of important print blocks by Christophe Jagger in the um plant in the Plantin–Moretus Museum in Antwerp.
Because this collection of printing blocks are actually toxic.
So if you want to manipulate them, it's not possible to do it, let's say without proper, precaution measures including gloves,
etc because of these specific treatment, they have to protect them from insects and so on.
So in order to record this beautiful, originals, we have to develop what we can refer to as a portable version of the Selene.
As you could see, the core of the system, which is the camera with four light units, can also be mounted on a tripod.
And then with a bit more of work, it's possible to record smaller areas you know, more or less manual way.
These type of recordings allow a new access to this printing blocks, as you can see.
It would eventually allow a re materialisation of them or even new prints if necessary, if that was the desire by the museum.
And then because we are talking about very dark elements
it is only through this idea of removing the colour and allowing to see them, and actual bas reliefs or low relief objects,
that we get to understand all their complexity, all these curly structures on the animal.
This curly structures are somehow similar to what we found when we started working at De Lakenhal Museum in Leiden.
This is a state of a series of sample books as Adam was showing us earlier.
It's a collection of about 30 volumes from throughout the 18th century, and they contained a like an inventory of samples of fabrics
so these like different types of cloth with different tints and for, because of the condition that they are in,
it's very difficult, let's say, impossible for researchers to get to read what is written in this archival records.
This is why we approach this work by combining two different recording methods.
One, as you can see on the image, the actual portable Selene scanner,
so we could get very close in to understanding the
texture and surface qualities of this fabric samples.
We can even get closer and eventually get a proper archive of these different surfaces,
but also we understood the book as a volumetric object, almost like a sculpture that needed to be recorded with photogrammetry.
So once we have recorded, let's say, a book open, in this particular page, we have this 3D model,
and then we developed a method for virtually flatten these pages.
Was having to do it on the original, it was possible to carry out a kind of virtual flattening so that the text would become readable,
and then with a bit more, um, image processing, which would require more refinement, make some text really visible again by researchers.
This idea of flattening volumetric objects and highlighting this double quality of both 3D and two and a half the qualities,
is also something that we applied for recording this navigation globe, in this case in The Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
Again, the combination of two technologies portable Selene recording, but also photogrammetry.
So we are at the same time understanding this globe as a sphere, what it is,
but also trying to get an even closer look to the skin of the object.
So with the Selene scanner, we were focusing on certain details along the surface of this globe,
and then we would combine those, , techniques, those types of information to layers together on the same file.
The way we did it is, trying to imagine how this globe was built in the first time, in the first the stage.
So basically a kind of unwrapping or unfolding of the sphere surface through digital means so that it could be extended as a flat area.
And then it's possible also to map one layer of data onto the other.
What we can see on the image right now is like the central area which contains even higher detail,
is the Selene information on top of the photogrammetry information.
All this multi-layer file, this kind of stack of layers of information is what we provide to the museums so it can assist them in the process of,
conserving the original or any treatment,
it's going to happen on this particular object.
And eventually, the same way as we unwrapped the surface of the sphere, it will be possible to use the same method
if we wanted to re materialise this object. That's a facsimile.
So we have been bringing the Selene scanner as a portable version to key institutions
that somehow were in need of unveiling the three dimensionality of their collections.
The important collections of original plates by Goya at Calcografía Nacional in Madrid.
It's a relevant project because it is only very recent that they managed to remove a coating that was,
in a way, covering the original copper of these plates. It was a complex process that now, for the first time in many years,
it is possible to go to this place and see the surface of the plates a closer to the way Goya made them.
And thanks to the Selene scanner, it's possible to understand, exactly what's the information contained in them.
Copper plates as shiny, as these one are probably some of the most challenging and difficult objects to photograph.
You don't really get a proper image of what is represented in there
and as John was showing earlier, the advantage of saline is to remove for one moment any call or information if you want,
and then focus on the actual relief data. Like what these images are showing.
So thanks to the Selene, it was great opportunity to be able to read this,
plates eventually being able also to produce new additions, if that's, again, what the museum wanted.
But also, we had a big challenge with objects like this once when we are talking about with metallic objects,
there is always a bit of, um, excessive reflection that could affect the quality of the data from the Selene.
And this is why we tried a new development, the new improvement in the system,
which is creating a system of cross polarisation filters that could be adapted to the Selene scanner.
We are talking about installing a special set of filters, both on the light units, on the flash units and on the lens on the objective,
so that any excess of reflection can be balanced, can be somehow masked, let's say
and then we would obtain more accurate results, not in the depiction of the texture,
but especially in avoiding, um, an artificial recreation of fake shape.
A few images to explain this improvement,
so if we are recording a very flat metallic plate thanks to the cross polarisation filters, we are getting a very accurate and precise and
the best correspondence between the data we obtain in digital and the actual shape of the plate.
If we are not applying this system, of course polarising, we might get, let's say,
fake data because of the reflections, because of this shiny material qualities,
and maybe extract a shape that does not correspond to reality.
So this is part of the ongoing development that we are carrying out in order to make
the Selene capable of getting to record more and more diverse types of origins.
Another way of presenting this same object without or with this accessories would provide an even better and even more accurate depiction of it.
Once we developed this new improvement, it was possible, for example,
to go to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and then record a series of highly reflective objects like this,
series of originals from the Middle Eastern department, like this metallic shield,
and then obtain information that it's accurate both in texture and in the shape,
in the overall shape. Also, as part of this project, we have the opportunity of using the Selene for capturing a series of cylinders.
Not too different to the ones that John was showing earlier.
In this case, by rotating the cylinder in a few, um, few sections of angles so that we can complete the entire area,
external area with the Selene, and then maybe make it as an
educational tool, something that could be used for museums to have tactile versions of them,
reproductions for, um, new engagement with the original without touching, um, the real object.
So the Selene Circle is the name we have been given to this community.
We are somehow nurturing with institutions all over the world.
It's about creating a network of users of the Selene scanner.
We have the opportunity of sharing with what started as a direct dialogue between Madrid and Oxford,
between Factum and the Bodleian Library is now including new actors,
such as Princeton University Library, that since the summer of 2023,
they also own a Selene scanner that they are using it for recording their collection,
and it's also very interesting to see how other institutions are applying their systems for their own means.
So for instance, in the actual platform, the website or the digital platform of the Princeton University Library,
they are presenting recordings like this, like these are the Joseph's screenshots from their platforms,
and we can see, um, different layers that you can navigate both to highlight the colour on one hand and the 3D without the colour on the other,
or the composite of both.
So again, this is giving access to libraries to understand books and flat objects as three dimensional objects for the first time.
We are also very proud of having British Museum as one of our partners in this Selene circle.
So also since last summer we were installing the Selene scanner and
making it available for them to embark in a very challenging project of recording,
hundreds of thousands of clay tablets with cuneiform texts on them.
In addition to installing the system, we are, of course, providing the training, the necessary technical support and
let's say conceptual support that that's what we are trying to provide in this network of users so that every new requirement,
any need or problem or new challenge that present in the process of recording their collections,
we can help develop the necessary tools to make it more accessible.
So this is a project that is in a way starting, and it's already required for us to go back and apply certain modifications to the hardware,
to the structure of the settings, because, for example, they were telling us that they rather be working, standing instead of sitting on a desk,
so things as simple as that might be the difference between a proper systematic recording or having it less useful.
When we install a system like this in an institution, we want to make sure it's being used.
We don't want it to be, you know under used for any reason.
The Institute of Valencia de Don Juan is a unique institution in Madrid.
It is a place that is actually not open to the public, but it's open for researchers who want to go and inspect the their incredible collection,
mostly of medieval originals in Spain, including ceramics, for example,
that for a period of about two months, we have a team working with their stuff for capturing as many objects as possible,
so that, again, researchers can access this information without having to get to the originals,
therefore making it possible to protect them better. Ceramics, textiles, etc are just some of the unique objects in this collection.
This will be this collaboration will stay for the next two weeks as well,
and we will be able to provide a proper overview of the different capabilities of this system for different objects,
and then as part of our work is the dissemination of the system.
We have been discussing the technology in different locations in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in Madrid, La Biblioteca Nacional.
John was with Jorge Cano presenting, for example, in the 2 and 3D photography conference in the Rijks museum in Amsterdam.
All these events are important to gather and to capture the interest and attention of potential users
and even more important to that is the workshops is the training initiatives that can be shaped around the Selene scanner.
So it is incredible to see how not only students but also young professionals,
technicians in church in charge of imaging in different institutions are engaged with
this system because it's allowing to see things that it was not possible before.
Workshops with the University of Complutense in Madrid, with Granada University,
also with our partner Initiative Archive in Venice, in which we were also capable of presenting the system and
this will for sure will have a continuation in the next months.
So at the end, the Selene project,
it has been a great opportunity for getting to work with some of the most exciting institutions dedicated to to be custodians of this unique
objects and get new access and shed a new light on these unique artefacts and allowing researchers to engage them in a different way,
but especially, it's been a reason for getting in touch with incredible professionals and the best
the best group that we are, we are creating the best network, the best community and being able to share all this excitement with all of them.
This is an ongoing project, and of course we will keep working and developing the tool over the next months, over the next years,
and two of the possible ways in which this system will be going is, for example, trying to get even closer to the objects, even deeper.
When we are changing the lens with, with a different for example, in this case from 50 to 100 or one 80mm,
it's possible to get to see micro mosaics, even with higher detail, with higher resolution, but also getting higher.
So one of the latest improvements is being able to put the Selene not working horizontally,
but working vertically on a kind of telescopic mast so that it's possible to record wall paintings,
easel paintings, elements that are actually on a vertical position,
and then extending the possibilities of discovering new stories in texture of things beyond, um, the walls of a library, for example.
Thank you very much.
Okay. Um, third and final speaker for this session,
welcome, Richard Allen, who is a software engineer in Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services,
where he plays a role in developing the digital volume platform and a variety of internal tools.
He's the main developer for the Bodleian libraries' contribution to ARCHiOx, and in addition to his work in the university,
Richard is the founder of a university spin-out company called PalaeoPi,
which you heard John referenced earlier that specialises in cutting-edge photogrammetry hardware.
And so Richard is going to talk to us about
the work that we've been doing to integrate all of this work with our IIIF and image delivery workflows in the Bodleian.
introduce, so I begin. Today,
I'm going to guide you through the work that my team has done over the last two
years to make sure that we could beat the amazing work we did in part one.
the focus this time around was more on developing ARCHiOx as a service and getting more items online,
and my hope is that by the end of this talk, it'll be clear to you that we've done a lot of work.
A hero's journey, if you will,
and the ARCHiOx part two is up there with the sequels better than the originals, in my opinion, like the movie Aliens.
Um, so without further ado, I, I believe the last time I was here, I left you on a cliff-hanger.
Um, would Richard get the tiles loading seamlessly or wouldn't he?
Well, I did, but it was surprisingly difficult.
Um, but first, before I talk about a bunch of technical stuff, we need a quick recap.
Um, you've seen some of these slides earlier, in the other talks, but,
for the benefit of people who don't have much experience with this,
I'll go over some of them again. For the last two years, we've been working very closely with Factum to develop, the photometric stereo,
to capture the 3Dness of shallow relief objects and record them in a 2D format,
and here you can see Selene again, which is, probably the best machine on the market for what it does.
Basic principle is a series of four lights, you eliminate the subject whilst a high resolution camera takes a photo of four photos.
Um, these photos are combined in a process processing processing application written by Jorge Cano,
to output a set of derivatives and normal map, and albedo map and a depth map.
again, for the benefit of those who are new to this project, I hear you ask, what is a normal map?
A normal map makes up makes use of a two dimensional image file to encode the direction that a normal would face at each pixel,
using the RBG values to plot a 3D vector.
In other words, a normal map stores the orientation of a surface at each pixel location inside an RGB image.
here you can see a normal map of one of our wax seals,
and once we have this information encoded in a 2D format, we can blend it with a colour map of the same image, also known as an albedo map,
in a special graphical program called a Shader, and render and relight the object in real time via the browser like,
Google Chrome or Firefox, using something called WebGL.
The photo on the right is a scene of one of our copper plates from an earlier test object on our QA system.
And we achieve this by, my line manager, Andy,
you might meet him later,
writing a small extension to the IIIF presentation API to feed into our manifest labels that a computer would understand,
so that our Shader program could get the, um, correct image to process in real time.
and here you can see that it's all about context.
we use a context and it allows us to label an image as a depth map, normal map and an albedo map, a composite render and a shaded render,
and we are actually thinking of getting rid of the last two, since they aren't really maps in in the sense of the technology.
But early on, being able to label all of them was really useful.
skipping ahead to the end of the first part of the project,
and here you can see the demo video I did on the 5th of December 2022 displaying the fruits of our labour,
a plug-in for the IIIF called Mirador, rendering a normal map and albedo a map combined in real time with interactive lighting.
so back to the cliff-hanger. The first thing we aimed to solve when I last gave the talk was the efficient loading of images.
You may remember that to deliver gigapixel images efficiently over the internet, you need to have a dividing conquer strategy,
by chopping up the images into tiny squares called tiles,
and by doing this, you can deliver them in parallel and get around the texture size limits of this thing called WebGL,
which does the rendering in the browser, well, we had to achieve this
but we were showing people a loading screen and we were also replicating the work viewer was doing already,
so essentially duplicating the gigapixel amount of data twice and that needed to be gotten rid of
then there was also the goal of trying out different shaders and perhaps write our own.
And so, , readers could experience a higher level of, of authenticity when engaging with the objects.
those were my aims at the end of the last project. However, it wouldn't have been a very good project if it was just about me,
so the main focus of part two was to get ready for transition, for ARCHiOx to become a service.
And to do so, we needed to also work out the back end tools for delivering content and ironed
out any issues that got in the way of quality of media and user experience.
Anyway, regardless of my lofty goals from the last time
What happened? Well, a few weeks after the December 5th talk, I got back to work and quickly came up with a method to load in the images, ,
asynchronously piggybacking off the, um, the viewer that we were plugging into which is called OpenSeadragon.
and then we were now managing to load the data once.
and Tim and Andy were now very happy in my work was done.
Except it wasn't and I'll tell you why later. My next wanted to work on making our own shaders with Jorge at Factum.
we began having weekly meetings together, working on the shader code in a test application he wrote called Scan and Shade.
However, once we started meeting and got talking, it turned out we were both talking about the same thing.
PBR shading or physical based rendering
So instead of rewriting our own shaders, we realised very quickly that these shaders were already available to us in the tools that we were using.
let's pause for a moment. What is PBR?
Well, it's a shading technique that aims to recreate realistic renders of everyday objects using a set of simplified principles
basically dividing materials into rough or smooth metal or non-metal.
and you saw an example of that on the Bible that Dylan imaged using photogrammetry.
now the shaders we were already using and just kind of shade had some of these properties available to us
so we started playing around and I worked with Jorge getting it's kind of hard to work on multiple image tiles,
and soon discovered a problem with renders coming from the Bodleian imaging server looked terrible.
Why did Jorge look so good but ours look so bad?
I sat and looked at the screen a while, perplexed. The render
whenever I changed, the shader parameters looked very grainy, very blocky, very ugly,
and then it dawned on me I was seeing pixels lump together with their neighbours.
This was lossless compression of images, and you can see it clearly in this image with the depth exaggerated.
You can see it's very blocky. That is a JPEG image.
now what is lossless compression, I hear you ask? This picture demonstrates it quite well
from left to right, the image is compressed progressively and you can immediately see the effects.
It's basically data loss and something like compressing our normal maps.
Well, so what? We use JPEGs all the time for other digital modelling items, and they look great, I hear you say.
However, you may remember back to one of our previous slides.
A normal map stores information on the way a surface interacts with light.
So data loss is not what you want to see, when you want to relight your scene.
However, this is a well-established problem in internet technology and photo and photography,
so there is a solution. Don't use a lossless image format
and to solve this, we need to figure out how we could get Mirador to feed lossless images into our Shader program.
So we started with IIIF,
and the way to do this already existed to in the form of something called preferred formats via the IIIF Image API version three.
Easy, right? Well, not exactly. We use IIPImage to deliver our images in tiles, and therefore there were some constraints.
We could only choose a format that IPPImage supported.
The format had to be lossless, and we had to be able to deliver them via the web.
So final file, final tile size was also an issue.
Here you can see a PNG is the best in terms of quality,
but look at the file size compared to JPEG or webP,
it's an order of magnitude greater. We tried PING first, an easy change because the stack already supported the delivery of them.
The images looked amazing,
but looking at the network traffic for the file streaming, it quickly became apparent we couldn't do this in a production environment.
So I looked into expanding our stack to serve, um, the webP format, um, a format that afforded lossless compression for a similar size to JPEG.
which turned out to be a full stack change, meaning some part of every part of our system architecture needed to be changed
and everybody loves those. I had to update the plugin several times, including messing around with something called Content Negotiation,
which I will note now came back to haunt us later.
I had to build our own version of OpenSeaDragon to add in a one word change to get it to support the new format
we were not that, that far at the cutting edge that they hadn't gotten around to updating it yet.
I then had to install and compile the dependency for IIPImage that makes webP tiles,
and ask for the developer of it to make some changes to support this
after weeks of work, basically, um, the quality
and then you'll say that the quality problem was solved. No more data loss in our normal maps.
Huzzah! However, my celebration was short lived
there was now another issue. We noticed the relighting.
when relighting the images, something weird was going on with the lights
they were inverted on the y axis. In other words, the light moved in the opposite direction.
Up was down, and down was up. After some research, it turned out that normal maps have two formats direct X and OpenGL.
Our renderer uses OpenGL, and the Selene processing app was producing normal maps in direct X.
A classic problem that continues to haunt newbies in the field every day
and this is one reason we need standards. Um, here you can see the impact of using one format versus the other.
You need to get this right because an inward facing facet becomes an outward facing facet, and vice versa,
when using a direct x normal map in an OpenGL renderer.
The only difference between the two is the green channel. On the other, BGR is inverted.
The problem we were having is that unless you have a visual inspection process, there is no way to know which format your normal map is in
until you until you can actually interact with it.
There was also, the possibility of one image being recorded in one orientation having the other axis inverted
too
we decided that the best thing to do was to correct the rotation and invert the y channel of the normal maps somewhere in the processing pipeline.
We came up with multiple ways to do this
first we expanded our lighting map extension, and then this allowed other users to use whatever format they want.
And then John was able to correct the rotation based on the advice of Jorge.
And since then,
he's updated the processing application for the solution that allows users to choose which format
they want to and export normal maps in and embedded so that a machine can read what format it's in.
Getting around the problem of having to do visual inspections.
Weeks of work are relighting our works as expected, and now lighting is the right way round, and although the process is still manual today,
there's still a little bit of this going on with Tim, Andy and I staring at images as they come online.
We, in theory, know how to automate this now, so this is going to be.
In parallel to these issues, I also spent days looking at how we could feed in start-up parameters to our shader so that each object,
had the properties of the shaders encoded in the manifest.
And this is still a work in progress.
And but a lot of the homework has already been done in order to make something that people in libraries and,
archives can find useful, we need to use something called controlled vocabulary.
So we need to figure out library ways of describing these technical things
and you can see in the next slide, we've also expanded our lighting map extension of IIIF to begin to
talk about these
we have a conductor, which means an object that's 100% metal, dielectric, which means something which is should be set at zero metal.
then there are words that comment on how shiny an object is
and the idea being that we can create a set of shininess depending on the level that an object needs when it first loads in the viewer.
none of this is in place in our infrastructure yet, but
because I think we should seek the advice and feedback of the IIIF community before deciding on the controlled vocabulary we use.
And the next major part of the project this time around was UX and user testing.
Tim and Ruth made a lot of, um, putting a lot of effort in arranging for a plugin to be tested by experts on the objects we were digitising.
It was compared against similar tools, and through the process we got a lot of positive feedback,
but also some critical feedback to help really make our tool something useful to them as researchers or curators.
And I had already anticipated some of these issues arising from this exercise.
And so I was working on this when disaster struck. Out of nowhere, a bug in Google Chrome,
propped up with an update that added a black screen of death,
basically that required a user to hard reload the browser plug in and something that became was it was happening during testing.
Now, although this didn't break the plugin because you could technically reload it from the cache,
is unacceptable for the user to have to know that.
So we spent a huge amount of time trying to figure this out, and we finally did.
And here's a joke. How many software engineers did it take to find a bug?
the answer is three days,
one engineer, one senior systems architect, one digitisation and digital engagement manager, one project manager, and one Judith Siefring.
It turns out that Chromium browser doesn't respect content negotiation like normal.
And, if you first nav it, if you navigate from something like Digital Bodleian and using version two, it remembers that it's used version two.
So when you try and load version three, it it doesn't know the the, um, lighting map extension doesn't appear.
So the machine doesn't know what it's looking at, and you get the black screen of death.
But we managed to fix that. Um, the next issue that, um, has been pointed out is
we needed to do mobile optimisation because we had some people in IIIF community trying to use their phones on trains to look at ARCHiOx objects,
and, um, it became apparent that the um, user interface was too big for, , tiny, um, iPhones.
So we got a lot of useful feedback on that, and we actually managed to put in some of it in place, ready for today.
and these are different shots of mobile views that you can activate in Google Chrome to check it's working.
See on the left there is something called Specular enhancement mode, which has less sliders available,
and then in the middle you've got PBR shading and then you've got the tool menu,
which can be basically put away into a drawer so that you can see more of the screen on a mobile.
Um, another issue was that people weren't finding the image layers in Mirador, because there's all these.
There's this stack of wonderful renders that we have available for people to, um, look at.
So we've now got a button that allows you to cycle through them when you're not looking, when you're not relighting it.
I have the ability to toggle between the shading techniques,
as I previously mentioned, we've got specular enhancement mode,
which is basically allowing the user to remove that colour like it's been mentioned before,
so that you can focus on the details and bring out the shadows and highlights of an object in real time.
I made improvements to the way we lit by adding in
the ability to choose a particular angle that you using a light,
you can see on the sphere, there are little grid gradations of
the angle that you can put the lighter so you can go from a really exaggerated, light to almost
zenithal overhead. And, um, we've even added in a little helper so that people can see where the direction of the light is coming from,
it's a little blue arrow. Um, and there's also a number of sliders that we've added,
one of them is normal depth that really makes the details pop out.
And you can see here. Um, that the people who created these Japanese woodblocks pressed really hard on the paper because this is really shallow,
but in the viewer, we can we can exaggerate the depth and the, um, when you put raking light over it, you get real detail popping out now.
To wrap up quickly, I'm just going to go over some of the impact that this projects, spawned,
this is a shot of a chess set that, one of the convenors of the IIIF 3D community did.
I got invited to help draft a
the draft, the new IIIF 3D specification in Washington,
and that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't become an expert in Mirador and creating these 3D tools.
So if it wasn't for ARCHiOx, we wouldn't have, um, been invited to be part of that community.
You've already seen in the last presentation that John and Jorge were given the opportunity to go to the conference in Amsterdam,
and they received a lot of positive feedback on their work because I was there to witness it.
I was able to improve OpenSeadragon several times,
version five of OpenSeadragon now in which is used by thousands of people around the world,
now includes fixes that were needed for our project, but they benefit the whole community basically.
So that now supports WebP as an image format,
and also we fixed rotation and flipping of overlays, which were broken.
I've also written a static website generator in Python so people can host the photometrics,
stereo images or RTI images without having a complicated infrastructure.
and this is the project here. Um, it wasn't working for Jorge and but I'm confident that I've now fix the black screen of death,
it should work, now. It's Google Chrome fault. Um, and here is our
ARCHiOx plug in using an alternative. This is
just basically to point out that, um, the plug in works with anything that produces a normal map.
So this is just a little RTI I did of a fossil, and it works just the same as a photometric stereo.
I've gone almost over everything, but I'll now quickly go over what we're going to do next in part three.
We're going to focus on getting more of these UX changes out
and we have this huge, um, board that we prepared after user testing, and I'm going to go through it and,
and follow the advice that we were given and make our tool like the best in terms of web browser tools,
we're going to focus on maybe publishing our IIIF line extension after involving the community.
We're going to be we're part of the 2.5 D, group, and we're going to I'm going to ask for that help in deciding,
some of the vocabulary that we're going to use, and then we're going,
I think we should try and publish this so that people can,
because it's one of the requirements to being able to host the stuff yourself is being able to understand the lighting map extension.
And so, to do that.
but mainly we're going to focus on getting our pipeline completely smooth and allow us to deliver more ARCHIOx as of course service.
And you'll see here we have the pleasure of
we have a dedicated collection of ARCHiOx objects on our Digital Bodleian website that you can go to and on,
when you click on each object on the right, there is a button that says view in 2.5 D,
and when you click that, it will take you to Mirador, and you'll be able to interact with these images yourself using our improved plugin.
And there is a QR code if you want a shortcut to the collection.
And I'd like to thank you all for listening.
And thank, thank my colleagues, um, in the Bodleian and our colleagues at Factum and more and most importantly, our kind benefactors
Helen Hanlyn Trust. Thank you. Wonderful.
Thank you Richard. Carlos, do you want to come down to the front?
Do we have another chair? Yes we do, so we have around 20 minutes for questions.
I'm hoping that you've all been scribbling them down during those talks.
Do we have, we do have a microphone. Excellent.
Any questions? Don't be shy. There we go.
Hello, how are you defining 2.5D?
So 2.5D I mean, I've referred to all of the recordings as 3D because they they all have a Z axis
but two and a half D is, is the texture recorded from a static position above
So with photogrammetry, you recording an original from every conceivable angle, evenly illuminated.
The opposite is true from with the Selene, which uses photometric stereo that is a two and a half the recording system.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
So 2.5D, for instance, if you had a triangle that you were recording,
but there was nothing underneath the triangle, given that it's been recorded from above,
it would assume that that triangle is solid, but it might just be something which was sticking out, which had a void underneath it.
The camera doesn't know that there's something, whether there's something there or not.
so that's the really the limitation with, with photometric stereo.
So you're am I correct in thinking that you, you use the term two and a half deep for just a surface?
Yeah. Okay. I know that's another definition
perhaps it can also be understood as any three dimensional object which has three axis of direction x, y,
z, in which one of the axes is much, much smaller than the other two, meaning flat shape with some texture.
Yeah. And in our plugin, the geometry is just a flat plane, completely flat,
it's a bunch of tiles linked together and, um, the only thing I'm feeding in 2D images
and the normal map, is basically telling the shader to where the light direction is coming from,
so it gives the illusion of 3D. So it's not I'm using a 3D technology, but it's really 2D
so that's why I prefer the term 2.5D for this. This, for instance, is a 2.5D recording
so this was recorded with the Selene. Um, the skeleton of this um, recording is just simply a mesh of, of squares,
in fact, and those squares have been displaced with a texture map, um, something called a height map or depth map, and
right, there we go, so as you can see, the sides have not been recorded and we can't turn the seal over.
So this is a this is a 2.5 D recording, whereas this Magna Carta seal we could see that we could turn it completely over.
We've recorded the sides. So this is a photogrammetry recording.
and as I said, there are advantages and benefits to both those, um, , both those procedures.
This takes a very, very long time to, to record.
So this, this probably took a day to, to make this recording of the, of the, of the seal using photogrammetry.
The previous seal probably took two seconds to, to record and 40s to process.
That is so incredibly efficient. What do you think of the potential consumer uses of this system outside of research?
You can teach. You can use them. I'll plug in works in a browser and it's delivered as software, as a service.
and it's all open source as well. So, the front end is open source, so anyone can deploy it for a collection that they have.
and it, it just means it's a nice way of,getting students and things to engage with it.
given that the viewers that we're using also support technology such as annotating and things like that.
you could set up a, um, you could set up a system where
students could make their own annotations and keep them, keep their own notes on objects.
so I think... And how small are you planning on going with the images?
Do you recon you could get microscopic with the software or even cellular level.
Already it already does deliver so millimetre details.
You're kind of only limited by the lens which you put into the system.
So typically we use a 50 millimetre lens and that gives you a million pixels per square inch.
If you tried that for 100 um, millimetre lens, you get 4 million pixels per square inch.
So I think it's something that I'd like to explore putting on really, really high magnification lenses.
And I'm sure it'll work for far too I, I've used a dioptre on a camera and I got 30 micron details.
So it's it's really you can get really high high magnification
well, relatively high magnification just using a camera.
So, but the principle I reckon you could use it on a microscope if you had four tiny lights.
So challenge, I think that the limiting factor might be depth of field.
And you do need good sharpness,so yes, it must be sharp.
question for anyone who wants to, you talking about dealing with highly reflective surfaces such as metal?
How far do you think you could push that? Could you do glass or jewellery?
I mean, there's some limitation with, translucent or transparent objects at the end.
We are talking about optical systems that depend on getting up
something that can be properly measured once you have images that are yeah, fine in detail.
So the moment you are, you have confusing information.
It's not possible to compute the 4 images into creating relief data.
said that there's ways of, you know, in a way helping to avoid the negative effects of highly varnished surface, for example.
Or, Saddam was showing this morning, perhaps combining Selene with other technologies like Gaussian splat.
It's possible to, even if you are not recording 3D, but effectively being able to visualise
3D. So yeah, again, it's about pushing the limits of the technology
one step at a time. You might recall the, um, small portrait which was, um, under glass in the first session.
So that was highly reflective, like recording through that glass is is possible because the,
the lights of the Selene are in position such that they're not really reflecting onto the surface.
So really the central portion of each recording is the most accurate part.
And especially if you're making a multi tiled image, you're combining the best part of each image.
so actually reflections is not something that I struggle with.
And a lot of our copper plates, I mean, some examples that I've showed you are very dull and highly corroded, but others are extremely reflective.
And actually Selene is very, very good at recording these surfaces.
do you have any plans of incorporating that spectral domain?
you mentioned pushing through,the technology.
you can incorporate multispectral imaging, for example.
Is that a plan that you have? I mean, you can layer multi-band images with the Selene recordings.
So that's something that I showed in the in the first section with a I don't know, Adam.
Is that something that you've considered thinking to the question? So, so it's combining multi-band imaging into the Selene.
I mean. I think to get the best results, probably it's best to use a very high end multi-band system and the 2.5 to the Selene,
because I think it's better to to get really good quality recording systems rather than trying to make one machine to do everything.
not as well, if you see what I mean. I was very interested to see your mobile unit
because obviously,
the full scale Selene thing is a thing that's static in a few museums or galleries that are lucky enough to have one or the means to buy one.
but there's huge potential for this type of technology to go out to
other places who might need it for an object or two objects or, you know, for three weeks or something of that sort.
so the machine is one thing, but the expert to take the images and process the images is another aspect of that.
I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how, whether it's through ARCHiOx or through the Factum Foundation,
or how really you're going to be able to, operationalise this for the broader,
heritage community, which may not have the means or the need for one of these
piece of kit all the time, but could, generate immense value from it for particular projects.
Thank you, so I would say the goal of all this project is about making sure that
you want to know about making sure that it's possible to record as many original objects as possible,
as many collections as possible, because that's essential for the conservation, the long term preservation of the objects.
So it's part of the work of the Factum Foundation to provide the technology and the know
how, about how to do that. And I think the focus in this case is about making it very specialised to the needs of the institution.
In some cases, they will need a full working system like what they have here at the Bodleian.
In other cases, it's about one particular object or one specific type of object that perhaps doesn't need the complete system.
So we could train the, technicians into only one aspect out of the complexity of this project so that they don't really need to understand.
I mean, there's so many variables, both in the capturing and in the processing,
but sometimes it's just about focusing on one specific, set of skills.
And yes, answering to your question, the idea is, any possible way of making it as accessible as possible.
Jo
I mean, I think in what we're doing with the archive in Venice is running the Archive Online Academy, where, um, there's learning by doing courses.
So that both professionals within institutions and interested third parties can understand how to do the work.
then the development of the portable Selene means it can go very easily.
I mean, it's tripod mounted. It fits in a box.
So, what we're proposing really to put into Saint Catherine's Monastery is effectively a slightly glorified,
um, portable system because it needs to tie in with what, Justin's doing with the multi-spectral recording.
So I think the idea is, rather than just thinking there's this system,
desk and studio, if you're thinking it's really a camera with a different lighting system and some software,
and I mean, from the event to years ago, what I think,
Richard was just talking about what's been clear from John and, and Carlos's
presentations is it's becoming easier and easier as the software solves the problems.
I mean, you still have to know how to take good photographs.
You have to understand it. But the principle of it... has to be
I mean, if you have a single object, does it make, you know, how do you get that piece of kit to and the person who knows how to do it?
Well, I mean, one way is you get on an airoplane and you take the scanner, I mean, so a scanner's going to Naples today working on a special project.
I mean, what
Helen Hamlyn's Trust enables us to do by having two scanners that could be lent out is to do single use or relatively focussed projects.
But but basically, it's growing very fast. So it's becoming easier.
And the systems, I mean, the systems cost money, but they're not horribly expensive.
I mean, you know, when you've got institutions who spend, you know, a large amount on buying a phase one medium format camera
this is a 35 millimetre with four lights with very good software.
So it's becoming affordable in different ways and producing very, very good results.
I mean, comparative comparable to I mean, is that Selene circle something else that could enable as a sharing system to.
The Selene circle is a sharing system, a community of practice amongst all the people who are working with the equipment and that spreading.
I mean, the more people who have them, then hopefully there'll be one near you.
Jo, I think that's part of our vision with ARCHiOx
John's already been out and taken the mobile Selene
yeah, so, yes, that is part of our vision.
But we need to make sure that we get it right. And, um, and, you know...
well, no, we just need to make sure that we've got enough people within the Studio downstairs,
which is also part of our vision to to get that training and become part of integrated into how we work here.
And the community of practice will just help that. And I think in the longer term, it would be nice for the community of practice to to have
software people excuse my lack of technical knowledge, everybody.
photographers and other people, not necessarily Selene users, but people who are really,
really interested in what we're doing so that we can just share that knowledge.
So I think it's there is a lot to work forward to, but we've come a long way in the last nearly three years from um,
Factum and Jorge and Adam and idea all the work they'd done leading up to that because there's three years, 3 or 4 years before that.
And we're getting there, but we've got a long way to go and a lot more to do.
Will this developing technology speed up the
repatriation of artefacts back to their original locations?
I think that might be above the pay grade of everyone in the room. Adam, do you want to take that one?
I think probably it's always good to answer a question like that with an example.
So, Factum has been working for the last 7 or 8 years in Nigeria, in southeast Nigeria,
on the recording of the Bakor monoliths and the end last year,
beginning of last year, there was an exhibition at the British Museum of the Bakor
a Bakor monolith that's in the collection of the British Museum.
And Factum put out a rather, I suppose, cheeky call saying that any museum that had a Bakor,
monolith that thought it shouldn't have if
they gave us permission to make an exact facsimile, which they kept and returned the original object to the,
local site Factum Foundation would fund the project.
And slightly to our surprise the Chrysler Museum in North Carolina
approached us and said they had a Bakor monolith that they'd been donated that they felt they shouldn't have.
we went in and recorded it. We made a facsimile.
the facsimile is now on show in the Chrysler Museum
as part of a display focussed on the problems of preserving cultural heritage
in parts of the world where there isn't really a culture of preservation.
the original monolith was handed over to the Nigerian ambassador in Washington, and it's now made its way back.
It's not quite where it needs to be. It's about 50 miles away, but it's in Calabar and it's on show in the museum in Calabar.
While the site in the village is being prepared for it to be looked after.
So I think there are examples where I think
attitudes towards ownership are shifting and I think there's a lot more to be done in terms of how you can share objects.
But really, for me, the excitement that I tried to show this morning is once you've got a digital recording,
that's not just an image, not just a photograph extracted and put online, but is an object that you can handle
that you could look at that you couldn't in a virtual space engage with, then I think you're changing the whole relationship between,
objects, how they communicate, what they communicate, and what people can get from them.
And I think the whole question of the relationship between originality and authenticity is really opening up a lot.
And I'm sure the debate will run for a long time. Um, but hopefully in some cases things can migrate to where
they're more purposeful or where they can fulfil a greater need.
So I think we're getting past a minor yours battle.
I hope, I think that's taken us to the end of our Q&A time.
so I'm going to invite Adam up to wrap up for us.
before the all important drinks reception in the Blackwell Hall, but before Adam, wraps up for us, just join me in thanking, Carlos and John and Richard.
I think you've all had enough of me for today, but I mean, I actually feel quite emotional.
I feel the, the level of conversation and focus has been really extraordinary.
So from 1:00 till now, there seems to have been a really intense, concentration on the materiality of things in museum library collections.
You know, I loved seeing the Raphael drawings being kind of unpacked, unpacked, looked at as physical objects.
And I had the great privilege when I was a student at the Ruskin, to have
a studio which was called the Ruskin Masters Drawing Studio, which was within the Ashmolean.
And so a big part
of my education as an artist was actually going to the prints and drawings and handling many of these things and thinking drawings,
they're not images. They're not just images. Drawings are objects absolutely packed with information.
And one of the things that we didn't see is we also recorded one of the extraordinary Michelangelo, um, late crucifixion drawings.
There, you could start to almost see how the laid lines in the paper were influencing the drawing.
How the the watermark suddenly becomes a part of it.
So the drawings immediately become physical objects.
And I think that's been visible all day today.
And in the sort of three years that ARCHiOx has been running
I think we've moved a very long way.
I mean, I think what you saw in Carlos,
talk from the software development that's going on in Richard's talk the whole way that you put it online.
And for me, getting this true three dimensional handling of an object in a,
in a virtual space, in an online space is something that's going to be a game changer.
And I'm very, very happy that in a way, it's been the collaboration here at the Bodleian between, you know, the studio in Madrid.
And it should be said that, you know, Factum Foundation, in a way, is is an idea.
I mean, Factum is a group of people who are focussed
it's almost like a playground where everyone's focussed on trying to work as a team,
trying to be cross-disciplinary and stand outside of normal professional positions
and focus on shared problems and find solutions that have a real application.
So, I mean, what's become very clear is that more and more people are wanting to visit Factum in Madrid,
which is a bit of a nightmare because actually it's a chaotic, highly functioning, hard working studio and more and more people want to come and talk.
But something's happening. And I think the collaboration here and, you know,
it's it's very true that Elaine and John and the team in ARCHiOx has
really worked as a collaboration because they've responded in amazing ways.
Um, and you know what, what Richard was talking about these weekly meetings with
Jorge, so I should say it's very sad that Jorge is not here today.
Um, he's not been so well recently. And I hope he will be back to full health very soon.
Um, but, um, you know, he's missed. I mean, he's one of a team
probably of about 8 or 10 people who over 7 or 8 years have been focussed on trying to get this photometric system to work.
So in a way, Jo to answer to your question, I mean, the portable Selene is exactly what you ask about.
I mean, we need to be someone needs to be able to say, can you bring it here and do this?
We can say, yes, it's going to cost you X to have it in there for one day, for two days with an operator.
And, you know, this is not prohibitively expensive.
obviously, the more the systems get spread around the world, hopefully the different institutions will be able to detach.
I mean, like John does a lot on his detach the head and put it on a tripod and use it as a portable system.
So, um, it's actually functioning in different ways.
I on a personal level, I'm incredibly happy to see, um, the focus not just on cultural objects, but also on natural objects.
So I think where the recording of fossils, um, you know, I mean, John knows I get very overexcited.
But when I saw these images coming through of what you could see on the fossil with and without colour,
and how suddenly the whole detail of the wasp's legs and everything else comes up
and now we're working in Madrid with the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and with Natural History Museum here
I hope we have, I mean Factum put in the Diplodocus, with Keith who is here too
and, the big bronze one, and I really hope we can use some of these technologies to show when you get
groups of people who are really communicating what can be achieved and how.
Culture and nature technology suddenly build a polytechnic world
that's incredibly exciting. And I hope in a way, the things that I feel in the room today is there's a real interest.
And this isn't just a dry conversation about some academic footnote
this feels much more like a revolution in thinking of objects as material evidence.
And so the question this morning about forensics, you know,
can we do this in more and more forensically accurate ways is obviously something we're all trying to do.
And can we go smaller and smaller? And the insect I showed you is about a centimetre, maybe one and a half
but we've got a whole case of mosquitoes from the Natural History Museum in Madrid.
And we're desperately trying to do those with magnifying lenses
and it would be wonderful to go microscopic. So I think for the next phase, which I think I'm allowed to, to say now is has again,
very generously been supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust
we're moving into investigations, both in the software, both in the software to access the data
and in different hardware developments, which will hopefully result in very fast systems for recording insects.
I mean, many, as John pointed out a couple of times,
the photogrammetry can be quite time consuming both in the recording and the processing, whereas the Selene has got it down to a few seconds.
But if we can get the recording of insects, tiny insects down
probably 20 minutes an insect and there's 2 billion of them,
then you just have to do the sums; how many systems can each system, each operator, operate 3 or 4 systems.
So they put an insect in place, press the button, go to the next one, put it in place
but you get multiple recordings at high resolution.
And then of course, it's all about machine learning.
it's all about how you analyse the data, what you can do with it, how you process it, how you cross-linked it,
how you basically find connections that make that data mean different things in different contexts, how new meanings get generated by doing this.
So I mean, really, thank you all very much for coming.
thank you all for the feeling that I can pick up in this room.
And I just like, I think if I got a; I'd just like to say a big thank you to the Helen Hamlyn Trust.