Disclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and InnovationDisclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and Innovation

Text Brittany Brighouse

The images presented here show some of these unexpected and colourful outcomes of the digitisation process. They illustrate the technical challenges of creating 1:1 copies of archival material, so saving themselves from the desktop trashcan. Does a digital file still have some form of physical materiality? What happens when the digital is made analogue again? The results illustrate the process of re-imagining material objects in the digital domain. Below you can see both digital and analogue errors made in the Nieuwe Instituut’s DigiLab and read how they were made.

Here you see an exploded view of the east façade of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, drawn by Pierre Cuypers. The image was photographed in 35 sections and stitched together to create a 6GB high resolution image, allowing the viewer to zoom in and see every detail of the drawing. The resolution of the image is so high that when it was opened on our computers, it began to slowly disappear, one blue square at a time.

When a drawing is too big for the camera, we have to take several photos of the object and then stitch them together using a script in Photoshop. Sometimes the images that are being stitched together are not aligned with one another and an error can occur. This is an example of a stitch error.

Before anything can be photographed for digitisation, the camera setup must be calibrated for sharpness, colour and white balance. This image shows an overexposure warning, with the red indicating that the white area is overexposed. You can also see the face of a rogue colleague reflected in the image, indicating that the face is shining too brightly on the surface.

Moiré is an interference pattern that occurs when two sets of lines are superimposed at slightly different angles, or with slightly different line spacing. When digitising the collection, this often occurs when the pattern from the camera sensor collides with the graphic patterns depicted in an object. Examples of archival materials affected by moiré include printed paper materials such as newspapers, magazines and posters. Below are some of examples of moiré: 1) a printout of a digital drawing; and 2) a photograph in a magazine.

To solve this problem, we place the object under the camera at a slight angle in order to counteract the pattern clash between the camera sensor and the printed material.

For the Disclosing Architecture project, it was important to ensure that the process of capturing the archive material could be carried out rapidly, while at the same time ensuring that the images were of the highest quality and in line with international cultural heritage imaging guidelines. With this in mind, the Phase One iXG was acquired, a camera designed specifically for cultural heritage, with a lens shaped to capture a flat surface with minimal distortion at the edges. Throughout the six-year project, the Phase One camera caused only a handful of glitches, one of which is pictured here.

Loading errors often occur during the quality control of a scan. Each image is exported as a TIFF to ensure that the digital image can be preserved at the highest quality. Each TIFF is relatively large, with an architectural drawing faveraging around 300MB. This means that quality control requires a lot of computer processing power, which can lead to long loading times or glitches. Here are some examples of files that do not load properly due to the amount of processing power required to display the images on screen.

The digitisation process at the Nieuwe Instituut mainly uses cameras to create 1:1 reproductions of objects. We do this by connecting the camera to the computer so that the images appear directly on screen. Once, when we were digitising the slides, a glitch kept appearing on the screen: CMYK colours kept seeping through the digital images, creating beautiful but useless images. Eventually, we discovered that the cable was too long. When we used shorter cables, the glitches stopped.

As well as digital errors, there are also human errors. These can be as simple as accidentally pressing a button or having a hand or a face appear in the frame.

This image also uses an overexposure warning. Here we have deliberately adjusted the exposure to see how the light is dispersed across the surface. This image shows how the LED lighting used in the DigiLab spreads across the paper. In this case, the light is dispersed relatively evenly, even though it does not appear so at first glance.

Movement is a human error, but it deserves its own section. Here are two examples of images in which movement can be seen.