Digital Humanities Seminar: Building Scientific, Reliable and Reusable Complex Digital Representations: The Digital Lab Notebook

How do we capture, process, and archive digital cultural heritage data in a way that is scientific, transparent, and reusable by others, both today and in the future?

This seminar features the Digital Lab Notebook (DLN), a new set of software tools for the near-automatic recording and archiving of computational photography-based digital representations and their contextual and process metadata. These computational photography techniques include Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI), 3D Photogrammetry, Multispectral Imaging (MSI) and sets of documentary photographs.

The DLN serves the same function as a written scientist’s lab notebook. It permits a digital representation to be qualitatively evaluated for reliability and fitness for purpose by others. This provides the opportunity for informed reuse of cultural heritage digital documentation.

The seminar will explore the necessity for transparent evaluation of scientific digital representations. The goal is to establish the conditions under which a “real-world“ artifact can be digitally represented as a “digital surrogate”, which can reliably serve as a digital stand-in usable for subsequent scientific or scholarly examinations. The DLN dramatically simplifies the process of scientific imaging. It also manages the creation of archival Submission Information Packages (SIPs), built in conformance with international standards (the CIDOC/CRM).  The DLN’s Archiver tool prepares image data, built digital representations and their scientific metadata for intake into long-term preservation environments.