Undergrad_Book_16-18_Pge_View_Print_no print marks_compressed

Undergraduate Research at UMass Dartmouth
23
Upon seeing the blocks on the web, I immediately
thought of 3D printing a copy. I was initially going
to venture off by myself to attempt to 3D print the
blocks. However, upon learning about Dr. Linker’s
project, I approached her and asked if I could
contribute to her research. Subsequently, Dr. Linker
pulled me into her team of undergrads who were
working on their Digital Scholarship Summer
Fellows project at Bryn Mawr College. The Fellows
are Umma Tanjuma Haque, Shuang Li, Linda Zhu,
and Eleftheria Anagnostou. My focus was to learn
photogrammetry from the students, assist in the
project, as well as document the process through
photography and film.
What is photogrammetry? Specifically, it is the
ability to take measurements from series of
photographs. These measurements allow one to
measure a surface. A non-profit named Cultural
Heritage Imaging (CHI) trained individuals at Bryn
Mawr College, through which they trained the
Digital Scholarship undergraduate students how
to do the process. The sage leaf block, pictured
below, has a very shallow or “low” relief. The image
on top of the leaves is hard to see. This proved to
be the hardest thing to photogrammetry since the
photographs could not provide the software enough
surface points. It wasn’t until Matthew Jameson,
PhD candidate in Classical Archaeology at Bryan
Mawr, suggested putting the leaf block at a tilted
angle with the assistance of an ingenious piece
of Styrofoam. After that, our team was able to
successfully capture the surface points. While there
were two other blocks with the sage leaf block, the
sage leaf block is fundamentally the one I am most
interested in as it relates to my argument which I
will explain in the following page of this report.
The software we used to compile all our images
and put them on the XYZ planes is Agisoft.
Within Agisoft and thanks to the efforts of all the
students, we were able to capture up over 120,000
points within 184 pictures. The screen-shots in
the following page shows how the pictures are
Photo of the sage leaf block, Photo by Daniel W. Everton
The sage leaf block positioned on a Styrofoam wedge, within a
lightbox. Photo by Daniel W. Everton