When I started putting this together it's, you know, they have those shocking things
where you realize time's gone by really, really fast. So I’m going to talk—I’m just-- going to
talk about a project which now I’ve realized is over a decade old. So, and I’ve actually
done some time which you can reflect on that project and sort of think about other things.
So I want to start just with some questions because—about digitalisation-- I’m going to
talk about digitalisation. I want to sort of stand back and think well why are we digitising at all?
And there's some possible reasons, you know, and so I’ll put at the top: because you can.
And this seems to be one of the reasons why most people started to, at least, digitise; because
they had some kit, they could do something. But, also, we can think about additional backup. We
can think about increasing access … whether or not that access is for … online museums,
24-hour museums so which anybody can access anytime from anywhere, but also ease of research,
right. So I’ve got a picture up on the right the Portable Antiquities scheme
which is run from the British Museum. It's mostly a metal detector based database … but because it's
online, because it's digital, and it consists normally of photographs and some description,
then it gets a huge amount of use by students, by researchers. And when you start comparing
those numbers it's a bit false because we're talking about a national thing compared to
regional museums. But you start looking at museum use against the collections compared to
the digital you still get a sense of this idea of ease of research being really quite significant.
We might also think about things like economics, you know, the idea that if you can you can print
on demand-- I’m not going to talk about that—but yeah there's other reasons why you might think
about this sort of thing although there might be specific research-driven needs-- and I’ll
come on to that in a bit-- where something's very specific so in that way visualisation
slightly different. But whatever you're doing this dictates to something: what method you should use;
are you going to look at it in 2D, which is what most digitisation is, you can do it 3D, or
something else; what sort of catalogue information do you need with it as well so what's--
yeah this-- beyond metadata, what does that database need to be? So, in terms of what
I’m going to talk about, I’m going to start off with the very old project, and it's just
[inaudible] the Eton Myers Virtual Museum Project, and then I’m going to sort of reflect on that a
little bit by thinking about users, particularly with … a group we used to have here with which
you [inaudible] and stuff. And then I’m going to think a bit more about creativity in terms
of how we present to those users, or some of those users, in terms of a project which ran
a few years ago as well. So our starting point-- two starting points-- one of those is online
collections, the idea of the British Museum, the idea of a collection, yeah, some text,
image, yeah normal sort of information, on the one side. And then the other side, very old,
probably one of the first 3D collections, from the Hamson Museum, the University of Arkansas,
of 3D objects. The idea you could download, you could interact with the 3D objects
… really quite exciting. Particularly back in the day. There we go. Right. So with that as a sort of
a context let's go to Eton Myers. And I suspect most of you are aware of … Myers himself and
the British army. He collected a huge amount of … primarily Egyptian material culture … towards the
end of the 19th century. … Probably around about 1300 objects-- it's one of those normal problems,
you know, exactly how many have you ever counted-- but ran up 1300. He died in 1899 and he bequeathed
the collection to his school, Eton College. As you see, Eton Myers collection. And it's subsequently
supplemented by other collections so it's probably around about 3 000 objects there somewhere along
the line. And the collection was incredibly well known-- well some of the objects were incredibly
well known. They did the tour of the New York Met … and so on in terms of … where they appeared. But
the problem is most of the collection was hidden away within a loft in Eton College.
It actually wasn't very well used. One of the big challenges, one of the big questions, for starting
is how do you actually access, you know, how can you make a collection like that accessible?
Now part of the collection is on campus, the other half's at Johns Hopkins, or part of it’s there.
They're just some of the objects. Not all as you can tell it's not all Egyptian. So the particular
thing that we wanted to do was to facilitate universal access, as we like to call it. Now
that's not strictly true is it if you have digital literacy and accessibility value
[inaudible] facilitate universal access to the collection. Do it in 3D rather than 2D because
we thought you could have you can do more things, you can measure things, you can you can interact,
and seemed it like a great thing after we'd seen the university of Arkansas’ work.
But also then think about what how what can you do with it in the future.
So this project. Scanning done by Helen Moulden, who I think is now at the Ashmolean, and Martin
Bommas and Michela Luiselli… did the cataloguing. So he actual idea of putting the [inaudible]
materials together. And one of the things I’ll say now before before I forget is that actually they
ended up using the digital objects more than the physical objects while doing the cataloguing which
I think is really interesting. Maybe it points back to the Portable Antiquities from quite early
on. So the method we use is laser scanning. We use a barometer and two scanners, two different kind
of different resolutions and so on. But actually even then that is still creates issues it doesn't
actually help us entirely. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna run through very quickly about a million
slides, give or take, of different materials and some notes on the results from this. But as I go
through I’m going to highlight some of the-- I’m going to focus primarily actually on the problems
rather than anything else because, you know, the advantage is if you get a beautiful 3D model,
you know, you can see if you can measure things, there's all sorts of things you can do with that.
You can change the lighting on it so you can see other surface detail, that kind of stuff.
But I want to look at some of the problems. So wood’s great. Wood scans really, really
well… because it's not reflective. So [inaudible] laser scanning, you've got a reflective surface
the laser bounce off and goes the wrong way and so you end up with a muddle.
We'll see some of those in a minute. Things like ceramics work very well
as well. and just to highlight that one of the beauties of this sort of scanning is that you
actually get the form of the object as well as the texture. So you can, in terms of analysis,
you can actually remove the texture --with some objects either be painted or something
else-- it's actually useful to see before. Particularly something sort of made, manufacturing
on mass and then the details added through painting. So you can actually look at those two in
contrast. So what you're seeing here is basically with texture without texture in each case.
So just running through things… Plaster works really, really nicely and that's a great example
where removing the texture is quite quite handy. Now generally faience, depending on how much
faience there is, works quite well. If it’s too shiny it doesn't work. But the reason for
highlighting these is you've got text going right around the object. This is where the photography
is. This where we were thinking about how 3D’s great because you can rotate it, you can actually
read it. Now many of the texts are kind of saying the same thing; not always. Here’s another example
of a faience shabti. That ability to be able to rotate things and look under them and so on,
even scanning things like the catalogue numbering and that kind of thing on objects that's great.
Metal, well it depends on how shiny it is really. But I wanted to highlight this
example, the actual figure is about that tall. And you'll notice also there's another issue:
there's no scales on any of these. But if you look at the writing-- here it's actually quite
amazing-- the problem is, even with using two different scanners and different resolutions,
when you get smaller objects you're only you're naturally going to be bouncing fewer points off
of them, given it’s every half millimetre. So therefore the smaller the object the fewer points
therefore the less detail. And we get the same thing with this little Thoth figure. [inaudible]
It's not that great. We're not seeing as much detail as we might like to.
Nowadays you'll probably approach that using some photography,
photogrammetry, something like that to [inaudible] a 3D object. Stone.
Now one of the nice things as well about scanning is it's not just recording the objects, or videos
of the three dimensions, it's also recording the intensity of the reflection. So if you're hitting
text even if it's very very slight but otherwise [inaudible] you can sometimes get a difference
to break up the laser signals, you get difference in the intensity. So when you
can't see it on the object you can sometimes see it through the intensity of reflection,
which is quite handy. So the text is very slight on that
object. But reflective surfaces that I sort of mentioned earlier are really problematic.
There's a beautiful, very smooth alabaster jar. When you look at this you can see some
surface artefacts submerging because the way the lasers interact with the shiny surface.
And the same sort of thing goes for this object as well, part of a small statue. So again that you
know that highly reflective surfaces are awkward, but not always, you know. I just love this piece,
small small tile. Also I love that one and yeah I can't ever not talk about that one,
yeah just beautiful. But again it works very very nicely for some of these objects
better than others. And for some instances it's one of the one of the poor traits.
Actually scanning a flat object is something that's quite valuable because you can see
that the method in terms of paint work. So as I say things like inscriptions on the wood
before-- when they’re marking it out on wax before-- petrol painting happens.
So what—how does that end up. Well it ends up going into the usual catalogue, a Mimsy catalogue
in this case. So you end up with a lot of objects. And then you've got a problem because actually
when you look at these catalogues-- yeah this is like the British Museum-- that's what they
look like and you end up with your photo you can't embed your 3D interactive model into it.
Now you could, there's all sorts of ways. But then you've got issues about,
you know, downloading plugins and all the rest of it. So we decided with this to actually just
have a downloadable series of 3D models and downloadable free software in order to interact
with them. So what you ended up with was something like that. So it allows you to rotate, measure,
do whatever you like really with those objects once you download it. Although they don't get
used [inaudible] because they're not immediately obvious and not immediately interactive… you
have to actually know what you're doing before you start. So therefore you can't measure the
potential, you kind of need to know the potential before you do it, but you don't do it, yeah
you know what I’m going. Because we're thinking of all sorts of potential. We're thinking about
Haptics. We've experimented with this the idea of-- particularly for the partially-sighted--
of touching objects virtually. Particularly for really fragile objects. And we're also looking at,
you know, what has actually happened is this sort of 3D printing … of many of these objects.
Particularly things like that which, you know, are so fragile, you're not going to handle that.
So we're really excited. This, to move on to the second bit,
well this is great if you can actually scan all the objects in the collection—think about
all things which aren't on display-- you can put them all on display virtually through a screen,
you know, brilliant, which solves the world's problems. But so with that we thought well you
can access these objects any way you like, any time you’re here, you know, wherever you are. So
that was one of the goals we had with European Regional Development Fund from the
humanities stuff where we were creating interfaces for cultural organisations to effectively put
collections-- interactives for collections. The downside was that whilst we were thinking
this is great we can liberate the archive what actually happened was it was all about curation.
And I don't know if there's gonna be supplies to anybody here, but yeah, from our, you know,
non-museological background we just realised that actually people don't want a big screen full of
thousands of objects, what they want is actually something curated since there's a story. So that
was one of one of the one of the challenges we found. And other things which were important we're
actually saying rather than just giving a load of collection actually think about how to interact
with it, so user testing, understanding how people engage in museum spaces. But that's just
one of the types of [inaudible] at the beginning in terms of why digitise. The other reason--
there was the idea of bespoke specialisation.
So I started off thinking that if we digitise absolutely everything then
that's good for everybody forever, and that's great. But of course it's not.
So this is a great case in point. This is a work by Andrew Lewis who's a PhD student. He's looking
at refitting fragments of cuneiform tablets and trying to do that in sort of an automated way.
So you can have fragments from one collection and from another to actually bring them together.
And there's some work still going on in that area. But the actual needs of digitalisation
are different than if you just try and present something or just trying to-- just
in terms of public consumption, if you like. So different needs require different approaches,
different types of resolution, and so on. Which brings me to my final bit. But if you think about
users and audiences, if it's going back into broader audiences, we run a project which was
thinking about how do you create the best context for-- how do you create the best possible thing?
Now we're aware of the whole needs for, yeah, what was now sort of almost a stock phrase cross-sector
collaboration, all that sort of thing. But actually the reality of it we wanted to look
at. So this was well we actually ended up-- David Hopes just did a PhD on it at the time--
so working with creative industries as well as curators and just sort of seeing particularly
what we're measuring was actually how do people talk about collections. So that's your title
“CoPs and Robbers”. CoPs was communities of practice. So how the language is different
depending on what you’re doing and think about how people respond to both digital objects and
physical objects in terms of creativity in the language they use. And what we did to analyse that
was use Kolb’s learning cycle, which is quite old but useful. So this idea of trying to map
different sorts of language use across that. You've probably seen this sort of thing before,
I’m sure. But what we're interested in is this idea of problem solving and being creative,
at the top. So if we just look at the digital creatives,
you know people who are creating content, often being commissioned by museums to do that sort of
personal work, what we found was when they were using physical artifacts, or talking about using
physical artifacts, they were, you know, they had all the imagination in the world. They had
some great ideas and things which were frankly quite terrifying to a lot of curators because
they think you’re going to break stuff. But yeah they had really crazy ideas.
In contrast when they— bearing in in mind they are used to working with digital-- … when they
were working with digital projects they're all down in their own problem-solving means,
they're all thinking about method. And what we concluded from this was that
you know there think outside the box. It's really easy to think outside the box if you don't
know there's a box. And the whole thing about communities and practices you learn all the boxes.
So if we want to have a justification data like this is really handy in terms of
why we should be working from starting point of any project in terms
of cross-sector work, not just because people do different things but also think differently.
So what have we learned? Some final thoughts. So I think, conceptually, this again it's not a
surprise, it's all about audience, isn't it, and that audience isn't the same. And I know we know
it's not the same but some of you require bespoke research. Digitalisation is very different to
different audiences. We need to be, you know, you think the idea of
[inaudible] across conversation. I think about both the content you produce but also how people
interact with that concept. If you consider just having it there and they will come; it
didn't work, you know, we didn't download things. And technically the idea that, you know, one
method is not suitable for everything. Sometimes photographs are much better than 3D. It depends
what you're trying to do. So this idea I think, which is quite antiquated now, I think we can just
do-- this is the best technology, therefore it will be right for everyone. It just doesn't work.
[inaudible] However you do this you have to think about long-term planning. As well as
the objective of the objects themselves for your digital [inaudible] different levels of
differentiation for different requirements. So I’m going to stop there sort of so from
a very old project and through a load of other things hopefully that's been useful. Thank you.