EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration

Grants and Contracts Details

Description

The goal of this work is to create readable images of texts (damaged books, rolled papyrus), without opening theIn, using minimally invasive scanning, virtual unwrapping, and visualization. Achieving this goal will reveal texts thought lost, reviving perhaps sole extant copies of manuscripts that cannot be safely analyzed by any other known means. This challenge requires research advances in collaborative systems that support non-invasive volumetric scanning, texture and shape modeling and simulation, visualization for editorial analysis and enhancement, and underlying computational mechanisms that support massive data storage and processing. The key research challenges: • Volumetric Data Acquisition: identifying information within opaque objects via nondestructive volumetric scanning raises new research challenges related to x-ray scanning techniques, post-scan processing algorithms, and scanner portability • Modeling, Simulation and Visualization: extracting a high-quality representation of what may be present in a volumetric scan of an opaque object requires new advances in shape and texture lllanipulation, sinlulation to unwrap and unroll, and visualization with unique interfaces to enable collaborative editorial analysis and exploration • Distributed Programmable Data Storage: the volume of data and thc distributed, collaborative nature of the analysis requires support from the underlying computational storage and processing architecture We will develop new approaches to these challenges and will systematically build a system using simulation, real samples, and controlled experiments. We will then work with real objects from collections offered by our partners at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, the British ~luseum, and the Natural History Museum in London (see attached letters of partnership support from leaders at each of these institutions). We intend to produce images of complete texts that cannot be obtained by any other means. Education: \Ve will establish a three-credit course to be offered for a mixture of undergraduates and rising high school seniors in Jessamine County, Kentucky, our partner secondary school. The course will introduce students to fundamental technologies and the significance of the cultural artifacts themselves through a balance of technology and scholarship in the humanities.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/1/068/31/11

Funding

  • National Science Foundation: $1,346,421.00

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