Digital preservation

Saturday, 14 November, 2015

What do you do when an artifact you have is in danger of loss or destruction?? Preserve it of course! And that’s the role of archivists in terms of valuable items. Preference is given for physical preservation (we want to keep to “original”) but digital preservation (not withstanding the problem of maintaining access to data) is often sought after as it allows universal access and preservation of the data used to record the “presence” of the object (sound, radiation etc). This whole topic came to fore with ISIS’s destruction of buildings in Palmyra. Whilst there has been some effort to smuggle smaller artifacts out of Syria, it’s not easy to do this for whole buildings! Which makes digital preservation paramount. Obviously there are many photos of Palmyra itself, but archivists (and archaeologists) want to take this one step further and generate 3D models and collate detailed imagery of buildings before they are destroyed.

And this is of course where photogrammetry (and more specifically Structure from Motion) comes in - by deploying a range of low cost cameras the expectation is that a large number of images can be used to create a virtual model of current buildings before they suffer destruction. The Million Image Database has probably had more publicity but New Palmyra (and backstory) is also working with similar aims and has current models hosted on Github for download. Both are light on methods so it’ll be interesting to see, technically, how these develop.