Pal, K;
Avery, N;
Boston, P;
Campagnolo, A;
De Stefani, C;
Matheson-Pollock, P;
Panozzo, D;
... Weyrich, T; + view all
(2016)
Digitally Reconstructing The Great Parchment Book: 3D recovery of fire-damaged historical documents.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
10.1093/llc/fqw057.
(In press).
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Abstract
The Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th Century, at a time of social, religious, and political upheaval. Compiled in 1639, it was severely damaged in a fire in 1786, and due to the fragile state of the parchment its contents have been mostly inaccessible since. We describe here a long-term, interdisciplinary, international partnership involving conservators, archivists, computer scientists and digital humanists that developed a low-cost pipeline for conserving, digitizing, 3D-reconstructing, and virtually flattening the fire-damaged, buckled parchment, enabling new readings and understanding of the text to be created. For the first time, this paper presents a complete overview of the project, detailing the conservation, digital acquisition, and digital reconstruction methods used, resulting in a new transcription and digital edition of the text in time for the 400th anniversary celebrations of the building of Londonderry’s city walls in 2013. We concentrate on the digital reconstruction pipeline that will be of interest to custodians of similarly fire-damaged historical parchment, whilst highlighting how working together on this project has produced an online resource that has focussed community reflection upon an important, but previously inaccessible, historical text.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Digitally Reconstructing The Great Parchment Book: 3D recovery of fire-damaged historical documents |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/llc/fqw057 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw057 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Digital Humanities, Image Processing, Parchment, Reconstruction, Fire, Londonderry, Guilds |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Centre for Editing Lives and Letters UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1522609 |
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