THE ARCHIVE
In the last fifteen years, it has been harder to fund traditional fine arts publications. During the same amount of time, increased capabilities of computer publication have led to a revolution in online publication. This essay records the process of transforming a collection of art into a digital archive ready for computer publication.
There was never a question whether computers were suitable to record and store descriptive and measurement data. To those of us who are aware of the potentials of computers for exhibition and publication, the traditional presentation of an on-site exhibit and glossy paper publication seemed limited. The exhibit is limited to a particular site and may not be available for viewing year round. Paper publication is a static presentation of information; it is difficult to conduct further analysis of the data if it is necessary to first copy the published information into a computer. Further, access to the publication is often limited to those who have access to a library. With web-based publication our ability to search for particular classes of artifacts is much more rapid as is the retrieval of rich data. Collections can be accessed online 24 hours a day from home or institutional networks.
Many thorny issues have been raised in the development of the digital archive and have been addressed to the best of our abilities. The major problem encountered in the course of this project was securing funding. Since this project is interdisciplinary in nature, it required communication and cooperation between humanists and computer scientists and among several different disciplines of the humanities. Among other concerns, this cooperation has the tendency to blur the perceived boundaries of project ‘ownership.’ Enduring concerns regard control of the project, such as unlimited and free access to collections and copyright infringement by end users. Other issues were becoming educated about and ensuring access to new technology so that ideas of what should be possible were directed to developed technology.
Publishing such a large collection at once was impossible. First, the collection was divided into logical geographic, cultural and chronological blocs that are being prepared in individual fascicles for ECAI. We contacted a number of academic publishing houses that accept manuscripts, but they were not willing to handle this specific kind of publication. Further, securing funds to pay for professional photography and printing was sporadic. Our solution was to devise ways of cutting costs. Hiring a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) to handle all technical aspects of the project was less expensive than turning the work over to professional photographers and publishers. Then it was necessary to research low-cost methods for the production of digital images as well as purchase computer equipment for the project. We realized to our dismay that it was impossible to utilize existing computer labs on campus that had strict hourly access regulations. Thanks to a departmental grant we were able to purchase a Dell Computer with a 12GB harddrive and 128MB ram, an Epson Stylus Photo EX printer, and a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 5200C for the departmental seal archive lab in 1997.
The first generation catalog of seals in database format was a creation of Jeff Zorn, who copied the notes of Edward Gans onto a tab delimited spreadsheet. Ms. Demos described the Sasanian glyptic and devoted her undergraduate honors thesis to editing the collection catalog. All of the inscribed Sasanian seals were translated by Phillippe Gignoux. The methodology of numbering Sasanian seal glyptic has been treated at length by two French scholars, Philippe Gignoux and Rika Gyselen. Their system is abstracted from a methodology of iconographic notation developed by structuralist art historians in France, exemplified by the study of Françoise Digard. (1) The numbering of iconographic motifs based on Rika Gyselen’s catalog of the Sasanian seals in the Bibliothèque Nationale was performed by Sanjyot Mehendale and the database was updated and rectified by Ms. Demos. (2) In the process of applying this notation system to the Sasanian seals, it became abundantly clear that this particular manifestation of an iconographic notation system is more appropriate to paper publication and less to an object-relational database. For example, in comparing two groups, sub-classes in the numbering hierarchy are arbitrarily assigned. Since it is difficult to search by this notation system, it is not highlighted in the search feature of the archive with a separate option for those scholars who are familiar with it. Digital images were the last physical component added to the database. In the beginning of the digitization project our intention was to publish the archive on cd-rom. After four months of struggling with database issues and after a fortuitous conversation with Lewis Lancaster, the director of the then-newly-formed ECAI, the decision was made to publish the archive on the internet. The software for the data archive was upgraded five times between the fall of 1996 and spring of 1997. At that time we began to address issues of data conservation. We realized it was crucial to be able to back up data onto a secure server and realized our small project needed the infrastructure to cope with necessary software upgrades.
The text-based database was housed on a first generation Macintosh. Currently, the object-relational database resides on a Dell Pentium III. The earliest database used MS works version 1, the interim database used FilemakerPro (FMP), and the final version is in MS Access. In the second phase the project planned to publish on cd-rom and it was at this point that the database was migrated to FMP. The FMP interface was easy to use and it integrated images into the text database. To our general dismay we found that linking images created an enormous database that was impossible to transfer onto disk or even back up in a manageable way. Further, a FMP database with objects was impossible to translate into a web-based publication. Therefore, it was necessary to come up with another solution.
Database management software for Macintosh was expensive and not easy to deploy for collections management purposes. Luckily, we were using a lab in the Archaeological Research Facility at Berkeley, which had a Macintosh and PC connected to one another. At that critical moment, the decision was made to transfer the growing archive from a Macintosh platform to PC to best conserve and manage our data. After quite a bit of research, we decided that the best solution for database management of our archive was to convert the data to run on Microsoft Access, as a bonus, it easily migrated into a web-based publication.
IMAGES
Digital images of the objects were produced in several stages. Seals are typically studied from impressions, rather than by images of the object itself. Engravings on the stone are difficult to read because they are carved in negative and are further masked by the color and texture of the stone. It was necessary to take clear impressions of the seals on white or gray polyform. This renders the engraved designs and inscriptions on the sealing surface in positive and on a flat surface, making them easier to read.
The first group of seals prepared for electronic publication contains 371 Sasanian stamp seals. These seals have standard dimensions and shapes and their impressions were relatively easy to batch process on a flatbed scanner using Adobe Photoshop. The impressions were scanned at two resolutions: 600dpi and 1600dpi, and at two scales: 100 and 300 percent. The reason for using higher resolutions is that Sasanian seals are very small, from 2cm to 7cm in diameter. The images are archived using the Photoshop file extension, a non-compressed file format. In addition, several masking layers were created for presentations in different end media. For example, each black and white image has a black masked layer, a white masked layer and a layer that labels its archive number. Further, each master image was copied and the copy converted to a JPEG file format for publication on the ECAI server. This constitutes the core of the image archive.
Ms. Demos communicated with multimedia and computer technology experts throughout the project to gain insight and tips from the wider community. In one particular conversation with Dr. David Forsyth of the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department about shape and image recognition, Dr. Forsyth explained that the images in the seal archive could be searched for particular motifs using the technology developed in his laboratory. Dr. Forsyth is developing ways of searching for specific shapes in a catalog of images, for example, to search for images of lions in a collection of photographs of the Sahara. This is possible in our case because the Sasanian seals have a standard repertory of themes and motifs. However, only images produced from flat impressions could be used for this purpose. For three-dimensional objects a photographer will typically turn the photographed object at an oblique angle to refract light off the stone and into the camera lens rather than move the studio lights for each object to maintain a completely flat surface. In this case, it would be impossible to accurately measure the images for specific image-shapes. In the future hopefully, a feature to search the seal images themselves will be added to the text-based search.
In addition to the impression images, we have also produced images of each seal stone’s carved surface and its profile. For imaging the three-dimensional object, photography was necessary rather than flatbed scanning. Around one-third of the engravings were photographed by a UC Berkeley architecture slide librarian and the rest were photographed by Koorosh Angali, who also photographed all of the seal profiles. The resulting slides were sent out for scanning onto Kodak color CD-roms. The digital images were color rectified by Mr. Angali.
THE SEAL ARCHIVE TODAY
Jeanette Zerneke in UC Berkeley’s Center for International and Area Studies facilitated the transformation of the seal archive into its present shape on the ECAI server. After Ms. Demos and Ms. Zerneke transferred the data into MS Access and designed a querying protocol, Ms. Zerneke has managed the website design and Access database on the ECAI server while Ms. Demos manages the seal archive in the Near Eastern Studies Department. The seal archive lab in the Near Eastern Studies Department houses the Gans seal collection, the database archive, an image archive and a copy of the website interface. The image archive contains a slide collection of each seal’s engraved surface and profile, zip-disks of the digitized seal impressions and cd-roms of the digitized slide collection.
NOTES:
1F. Digard, et al., Répertoire analytique des cylindres orientaux I-III, Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1975.
2 R. Gyselen, Catalogue des sceaux, camées et bulles sassanides de la Bibliothèque
Nationale et du Musée du Louvre I, Collection générale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris,
1993.