This blog is growing and I’m starting to get contributed posts. The goal of this blog is to network with like-minded professionals and students. Samantha Stout is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego. She is in the Materials Science and Engineering program and conducts research on scientific methods for cultural heritage analysis, both in San Diego, and Florence, Italy. Samantha is interested in exploring the function and utility of collaborative efforts between museum entities and university researchers; this sounds as a good match for the scope of this blog. Enjoy Samantha’s post! Antonino.
During the last week of June, two 2-day workshops were held at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (UMK) in Torun, Poland, and were co-organized by CHARISMA partners Marika Spring, from Scientific Department of The National Gallery (London, UK) and Piotr Targowski of UMK. As the CHARISMA project is a EU funded initiative the details of the meetings, including the full program are preserved on the website.
Eleven different countries represented, 8 European, plus the UK, Taiwan, and USA.
(accessed at: http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/~oct4art/CHAR_2013/).
The first meeting “New techniques for the non-invasive investigation of the surface and sub-surface structure of heritage objects” was geared towards a broad survey of scientific techniques. Presentations were given, stemming from a variety of different approaches, including conventional and laser optical techniques, thermal imaging, microscopy, and spectroscopic analysis. The NMR-MOUSE, subject of previous blog post and workshop in Volterra, was also featured as part of this workshop.
Torun, Poland
These sessions, over the first two days, allowed the attendees to get a sense of the many different ways that challenges in analysis and documentation for cultural heritage objects are being tackled. Improvements in layer visibility, data acquisition workflow, portability of equipment, and monitoring of conservation procedures were discussed. In addition, the audience was allowed the rare opportunity to participate in a dialogue and exchange with the each of the speakers. This often resulted in the discussion of complementary techniques and necessary trade-offs for optimization and efficiency when applying a tool in practice.
In particular, the session titled “A CHARISMA round robin…” stood out as a unique foray into what the collective potential of the state-of-the-art diagnostic tools could provide within a scientific research setting. This talk focused on the comparison of multiple techniques performed on a single painting, and was formulated from a case study being performed to demonstrate the specifications and cross learning of several techniques still in the process of being developed. However, despite any disappointment that most of the techniques mentioned were not ready for prime-time forensic application, this talk was refreshing because it presented an honest and well thought-out depiction of research at the ground level.
Many thanks to the organizers for a well-crafted programme! Even through two packed days of lectures, the audience was kept engaged and many new applications and concepts were learned by all.
