Technological innovations have made it possible to complement our traditional (physical) museums and libraries with digital archives. Emerging digital technologies are quickly making possible new forms of access to artifacts, including virtual museums built on immersive visual technology. In such environments, it is likely viewers will be less passive; they will configure artifacts as they wish, and not be limited by the experts' views of what is good, useful, or significant. This raises concerns about historical and interpretative accuracy, both concerning replication of materials and with respect to setting them in relation to each other to produce meaningful interpretations. As a first step to exploring such issues, the PI will in this project investigate the technological difficulties in creating accurate 3D representations of physical artifacts. She will focus in particular on three fundamental unsolved problems: automatic 3D data acquisition of arbitrary complex shapes; representation of these complex shapes allowing search algorithms to easily access the right object or a part thereof; and the proper display/visualization of such objects as they serve the user needs depending on the user's questions.
To anchor this research, the PI will focus on works of Sikh art and cultural artifacts, an area chosen because it supports a large collaborative project to establish a Virtual Museum of 500 years of Sikh art and cultural artifacts, involving the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) at UC Irvine, and the Sikh Foundation of Palo Alto, which will provide financial and in-kind assistance in identifying and enabling access to virtually all major Sikh art and cultural collections in the West.
Broader Impacts: This project constitutes in many ways the cutting edge of the relation between IT and humanities research. If successful, the work will form the basis for collecting, collating, displaying, and distributing materials for the purposes of advancing art, historical, cultural, and social research, and education on particular cultures. We will be able to assess comparative studies of similar objects (their geometries, materials and functionalities), and their evolution over time. In turn, this will enable better explanations of the evolution of the societies that produced these artifacts.
