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The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) Grant Project
A Comprehensive Training Program for 3-D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation
In February, 2009, Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI), in collaboration with its partner organizations*, was awarded a grant to fund the development of a training program for three-dimensional (3-D) digital rock art documentation and preservation. The hands-on class, to be held in the Presidio of San Francisco, will provide content for online training materials, including do-it-yourself (DIY) guides and videos.
50% of the budget for this project is covered by the grant from NCPTT. The rest of the project budget, an additional $29,500, is covered in part by donations from partner organizations and other sources.
We are proud to announce that the Unbroken Chain Foundation has awarded CHI $5000. This money will fund the completion of high quality instructional tools that will enable not just rock art specialists but all types of cultural heritage workers to adopt and use RTI.
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The training will be based on state-of-the-art computational photography techniques that are emerging as the next generation of cultural heritage tools for use both in the field and in museums. Over the past several years, an international consortium of archaeologists, museum conservators, and computer scientists have worked to develop a suite of capture, processing, and semantic provenance tracking technologies. The most mature tool in this suite, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), has proven to be of tremendous value for creating digital representations of cultural heritage objects of remarkable quality. Used alone or in combination with stereo photogrammetry, RTI is extremely effective in the documentation and analysis of rock art. This project will bring key experts in these field domains together to produce a self-contained program that puts these techniques in the hands of archaeology and conservation professionals, non-technical Native American audiences, and the interested public. This will be accomplished through video podcasts, do-it-yourself guides, and online dissemination of materials.
This project is made possible by the generous contributions of these individuals and institutions:
Meg Conkey, international rock art researcher and professor of Anthropology, will donate her time to review classroom and web content, specifically with an eye to the needs of rock art documentation and preservation. She will assist in dissemination of produced materials through the Society for American Archaeology.
Carolyn McClellan, Associate Director of the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian), will donate a professional video team to document the workshop proceedings, and will advise and review classroom and web content, specifically with an eye toward education of non-technical and Native American audiences.
Tom Noble and Neffra Matthews, from the US Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center, bring state-of-the-art photogrammetry expertise to the program. The BLM will donate their time and training materials.
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Cruz are donating expertise to develop and review the soundness of the overall capture and process and analysis methodology.
The Presidio Archaeology Lab of San Francisco will provide the workshop venue and participant lodging.
Cultural Heritage Imaging is donating all indirect costs for the project.
Cultural Heritage Imaging Publications
(authored and co-authored papers)
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"Image-Based Empirical Information Acquisition, Scientific Reliability, and Long-Term Digital Preservation for the Natural Sciences and Cultural Heritage -- Eurographics 2008, Crete, Greece
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"Open Archaeology: Fundamentals of Intellectual Property and Open Source" -- CAA 2008, Budapest, Hungary |
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"A Digital Future for Cultural Heritage" -- CIPA Athens 2007, Athens, Greece |
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Lighting & Byzantine Glass Tesserae" -- EVA London Conference, 2007, United Kingdom
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"The Simultaneous Capture of Spectral and Textural Information" -- IS&T, Society for Imaging Science and Technology, 2007, Arlington, Virginia, USA
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"New Reflection Transformation Imaging Methods for Rock Art and Multiple-Viewpoint Display' -- VAST 2007, Cyprus, Greece |
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"Reflection Transformation Imaging and Virtual Representations of Coins from the Hospice of the Grand St. Bernard" -- VAST 2005, Pisa, Italy |
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