Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It produces images that can be lit from any direction, as if you had the real object in front of you. It is an excellent technique for analysing fine details on surfaces, something that has particular utility in archaeology.

The full text will be available online after the next edition of BA comes out.

The photo above is of the PTM illumination dome which I designed and built at Wessex Archaeology. You can see more details about the dome in my building a PTM illumination dome Flickr set. I have much more to say about PTM, so stay tuned.

Find out more about the Wessex Archaeology PTM rig and see interactive examples.

An increasing amount of information is only published online, and as web pages change or are deleted, we are losing an important record of our history and culture.

Head over to the Guardian to read more.

The story on Reuters claims that 14,000 photos of the artefacts will be published online in early 2010.

“I can think of no better use of our time and our resources to make the images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginning of time, available to a billion people worldwide,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a news conference at the Baghdad museum.

“Most American companies are not yet operating in Iraq, and we would like to show that it’s possible to do business in Iraq, that Iraq is an important market that will grow quickly, that it’s sufficiently stable,” he added.

Ah, so the latter quote shows some of the politics involved, but recording, cataloguing and making freely available such an important collection is surely a good thing.

The questions that arise from this news are numerous, and, just to add to the speculation, ReadWriteWeb quote Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt as saying that there will be “a few surprises“.

Will Google be releasing the raw data? Will it be structured? Are Google going to release a collections management system? Will they work closely with other museums?

Definitely one to watch.

It is good to see that online methods of communication will keep some essence of this excellent institution alive.

The Wiltshire Heritage Museum library has just gone online with a digital library created in just 5 months using the controversial Google Books service.

The Library has been collecting books about the history, environment and archaeology of Wiltshire for over 150 years, and has many rare and important books in its collection of over 8000 volumes. Until now, the idea of getting the library online has been only a dream for librarian Dr Lorna Haycock. Without Google, it would have cost tens of thousands of pounds, buying a computer system, exhaustive data entry and only a few of the books could have been scanned electronically.

Museum Director, David Dawson explained that the controversial Google Books service has a ‘My Library’ facility, where you can simply click on a book that you have found on Google Books, and then add it to your own digital library. Work began in May this year to catalogue the entire library, using Google Books, and over 5,000 books have now been recorded. Many of them have already been digitised, and the full text of many can be searched online. He commented “as far as we know, we are the first library in the world to have created a digital library using the Google Books service. As an independent charity, we simply couldn’t afford to get our library online until Google Books gave us this fantastic opportunity to enable people to carry out their research online.”

The digital library has now been launched through the museum website – http://www.wiltshireheritage.org.uk. Everyone can now browse and search the library online – finding books that contain detailed information about where they live, or about the history of their family. Director David Dawson explains “people can then visit our library to read the real books, discovering the wealth of material that we have in our fantastic library”.

While they have not digitised the text from their books, this is a fantastic start, and clever thinking. Most of their titles can now be searched, and thanks to the Google Books digitisation programme (the ‘controversial‘ part) the content of many out-of-copyright titles can be searched or downloaded as part of the Google Books Library Project.

Visit the Wiltshire Heritage Museum Library to find out more.

And as an aside, I ought to mention the Wiltshire Heritage Museum’s YouTube channel, which, at the time of writing, does not have many views on its videos. Their short films are of excellent quality, professionally produced, and really watchable – just the right length, and many of them featuring Wiltshire’s most famous archaeologist – Time Team/Wessex Archaeology’s Phil Harding, who is no stranger to being in front of the camera. Go there at once, and watch some of them! Or better still, visit the museum – something I’ve shamefully yet to do myself!

(note to self, visit Wiltshire Heritage Museum!)

By sourcing images and applying the principles of photogrammetry and distributed computing, the results are very impressive. They aren’t going to rival laser scanners just yet, but the animations on the Building Rome in a Day project website are impressive, and show the huge potential of this approach.

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

This particular project aims to create “sparse point clouds” to give a 3D overview of the layout of a city, and has interesting potential for interacting with and exploring a place virtually. They are running a parallel project investigating dense point clouds which looks promising, but probably won’t see any popular use for a long time due to the massive amount of processing and data storage involved (dense 3D point clouds and meshes are huge datasets).

The University of Washington project is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth project. But the difference is that with Photosynth, users have to manually create “synths” by uploading photos of a particular place. Photosynth does not allow users to tap into the millions of other images out there, which moves me to my next point.

What about the copyright implications of crowd-sourced photos? Even if just using Creative Commons licensed images, imagine what the “attribution” page would look like if hundreds of thousands of images have been used from potentially tens of thousands of photographers. I’ll be interested to see how they deal with that side of things.

But overall, this is an exciting development. There is huge potential for cultural heritage applications, especially in the areas of survey and interpretation. I will be following this project very closely.

We surround ourselves with noise these days, either to mask out other people’s uninvited noise or because we find the silence too difficult to deal with. I use ‘we’ in the loosest sense here. I want civic spaces which are deliberately quiet, still and, I suppose temple-like or at least sanctuary-like.

Another way in which I have thought about museums as sacred spaces is related to the debate about the display of human remains. Entire volumes can be written about all the arguments about what we should do with archaeologically-recovered human remains, some of which I will go through in time in subsequent posts, but I want to offer a new framework. Can we ever perceive the museum to be a new temple of the deceased? Isn’t this where we go to learn about the past? And haven’t humans for all time looked to their ancestors for knowledge and wisdom? Whether you have a spirituality or not, there is no doubting that we can and do learn a lot from the remains of our (the broad humanity ‘our’) ancestors.

And so it will be on these two subjects that I will begin.

I concur with your thoughts. I don’t think Wikimedia is, however, anything other than extremely naive not to have thought things through a bit better. That they couldn’t even respond promptly (allegedly) to original complaints by NPG is highly unprofessional and this in itself has lowered them in my esteem.

By and large I think the NPG’s response is balanced and correct. We should all be well aware by now that someone has to foot the bill for this quality of digitisation and delivery. It occurs to me that the ‘free, free’ mob is just as naive as WM in this regard.

Perhaps Wikimedia Foundation Inc could do what they did for Wikipedia last year and have a high profile campaign to raise money, but specifically for organisations to digitise and make available some of their content by way of return? I also don’t see any reason why WM needs to host such high res images; a decent image doesn’t have to be art catalogue quality and a link to the zoomify image on the organisation’s own website would surely suffice in the bid to ‘open up access’.

There is an active discussion going on on the Museum Computer Group and also the Museum Copyright Group which some have lamented as indicative of the lack of cohesion inherent in the museum/heritage/cultural sector on issues of access vs. the need for income to fund projects.

Some have said, well as they are publicly funded, they should make all this available for free. But who should pay? The very people who advocate this radical stance must enjoy taking their wage packets home at the end of the month and are not, as far as I can see, willing to give up their jobs for the greater good?

And in any case should we now question the motives of Wikimedia administrators who say they are doing this for the greater good of providing the sum of human wisdom to the world for free?

Whatever the legal rights and wrongs of all this two things are clear: in all acts, even ones purporting to be for the greater good need to be honourable and this one clearly was not, whether through naivity or not. Secondly, those who campaign for absolute open access to everything for free really need to start coming up with new arguments for how this could be made possible, assuming for now that the State is not going to suddenly decide that this is more important to support than propping up corrupt banks and over-bloated businesses.

Edit: I have just received an email from an anonymous person from Wikipedia Belgium wishing to point out the exact difference between Wikimedia Foundation Inc who ‘own’ (is this the right word?) Wikipedia and other projects like Wikimedia Commons. I have slightly adjusted the phrasing of the paragraph above regarding fundraising to clarify. I had appreciated the difference but had not expressed it clearly enough before so I hope this helps.

I was rather disappointed to have received this response to my post privately, which itself misunderstood what I was suggesting, as it means I cannot publish it here with my response, but I can say that I hope this anonymous individual will maintain a correspondence to make very clear a) what his/her opinion is and b) how projects like Wikimedia Commons can work more openly _with_ organisations like NPG so conflict like this doesn’t have to arise again. I can say, however, that the individual cited the Bridgeman Art Library vs Corel case in the US in his/her response, to which I replied that the ruling does not apply as a UK precedent as many of us who have been involved in collections digitisation realised a long time ago.

…
I have since received a further response and will be respecting the individual’s privacy as one can understand that in the current circumstances they would prefer it this way. I would, however, like to thank him/her for expressing their own personal thoughts about this case. I have been reminded that the nebulous network of people like Wikimedians don’t always in themselves agree about the best way to do things and there has been disappointment amongst other uses in the way the NPG images were reused, which were contrary to the terms and conditions NPG applied to their content. There is also a genuine desire to work more closely with organisations to make their content available through such initiatives as WM Commons and there have been examples of this, e.g. Wikipedia Loves Art and Wiki Loves Art. While content is usually sought on a gratis basis, there have been instances where illustrations have been paid for, and these are supported by the Philip Greenspun project.

So it’s been good to get some of these things aired. Wikimedia Inc has challenged the way we present our information in all its projects and it is perhaps not a bad thing that this conflict, which we all hope can be resolved amicably and quickly, has happened as it will at least give people and organisations pause for thought when undertaking digitisation projects, asking perhaps more obviously, who are we doing this for, why, and is this the best way?
Edit

Read more about the Museum of Computing reopening on Culture24 or their own press release for more background on the museum.

Friday 23rd May 2009 – We are delighted to announce that the Museum will be reopening in July 2009 in Swindon town centre. Our volunteers are now hard at working transforming what was previously retail units into one of the most exciting and original venues in Swindon. The museum will be located at 6-7 Theatre Square, an section of the town that has been designated a cultural area in Swindons regeneration plan. We are very grateful to Swindon Borough Council for making these premises available and to all the people who have worked so hard to make this happen.

I have recently contributed two reviews, and added them to two groups I run. The first is a short response to Shah ‘Abbas at the British Museum and the second is in response to Byzantium at the Royal Academy.

Read response to Shah Abbas in the Iran and Persian Culture group.

Read response to Byzantium in the Medieval and Byzantine Objects group.

Please note: For some reason my paragraphing is not preserved and so the Byzantium review might be a little hard-going. If you happen to read it and would prefer to read it in a more sensible format, please leave a comment here, or on Creative Spaces.