On 9 June David Howell gave a spell-binding seminar to a packed Centre for DIgital Scholarship: It’s a kind of magic: early results from Analytical Imaging in the Bodleian Libraries.
After a tour through some of the fascinating and high profile conservation projects David has worked on, he turned to a history of analytical imaging techniques, the tricks our eyes use to make sense of the world around us, and, via the mantis shrimp and C5 BCE Persia, to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and hyperspectral imaging. We were very grateful to colleagues from Special Collections for bringing items from the collections to illustrate David’s talk. Alan Coates, Rare Books Assistant Librarian, brought an incunable (a printed book from the earliest years of print), and Gillian Evison, Head of the Oriental Section, brought some of the oldest items in the Bodleian’s collection, the fifth-century BCE Arshama clay seals.
You can recapture a little of the magic through a Storified version of tweets from the seminar, or through David’s slides, which he’s kindly published through Slideshare: