From Carly - Textiles

Thank you Jeanette for your feedback. My brain is moving in a thousand different directions right now, I will certainly look into the floor projection systems more thoroughly but for right now I would like to focus on textiles a little bit:

This paper (which I originally found in the book Making History Interactive from the BAR International Series #2079 edited by Frischer, Crawford, and Koller which is in the lab by my computer if anyone wants to look at it.) is about the author's attempt at a sort of archaeological textile database that can handle large data sets, much like our collection. It is called the Textile Recorder and Visualizer. I looked into his program for a couple reasons. First, I thought it might be a nice way to help organize our data for the textile collection as a whole, and also it seems like it could easily produce nice 3D illustrations of textile structures using basic input data like the dimensions and thread count. This could help with general research and education with less handling of the fragile artifacts, as well as produce some images for the potential exhibit in a timely manor. The program is actually just a wordpress plug-in but unfortunately this author never quite finished his project. My peers here in the lab spent a LOT of time trying to help me install the program yesterday but to no avail (thank you anyway guys!). While the author was able to use his program for 2 datasets, which you can peruse on his website, it seems like he stopped working on it after his paper was due so we were unable to even download the plug-in. He does however invite anyone out there who is interested to contact him and help him complete it.

This was not a total dead-end. The Textile Recorder and Visualizer website did lead me to some more interesting reading. This website is basically the proceedings of 2 conferences on the idea of "virtual touch". I encourage everyone to read through it. I still have to read through a lot of it and I must admit that the idea seems very abstract and difficult to grasp (no pun in tended) right now. The goal is to mimic the experience of touching an object without actually touching it. Obviously this has applications for exhibiting textiles because everyone wants to touch textiles (or is that just me?), but we can not have crowds of people handling archaeological textiles. This also got me thinking about creating a wii-like interactive weaving exhibit. The museum visitor could maybe sit on a stool and look at a screen that shows them sitting at a loom, the person could essentially virtually weave. The resulting virtual cloth could either mimic an object on display, or perhaps the virtual weaver could pick from a few different structures/ yarn colors to design their own cloth.

I have been talking with Adam about animating the weaving process. I found some amazing videos here, on the website for the Royal Ontario Museum. The first animation shows knitting, garment construction, and dressing what appear to be ghosts. The second animation is of dyeing and printing techniques from around the world. The third is an animation of a very basic loom, weaving the most basic of weave structures, a plain weave (one yarn over one yarn, nothing fancy). I have asked Adam to check out these videos, maybe figure out how they were made, and determine if he can produce something similar. I will work on figuring out how to communicate/demonstrate more complicated structures to Adam. So maybe I should collaborate with Jeanette and Clark on what specific textile pieces we might want to exhibit, and from there, analyze their structures (maybe with the help of Dr.s Anne Tibali and Anne Peters). Then go on to animate more structures.

Ok I promise this is the last paragraph for this post. As Clark and Jeanette already know, the museum has recently received some funding for textile and pottery conservation of this collection (yay!). This will entail relocating some artifacts, and taking them out of storage to carefully unfold and photograph them. We might want to use these images to "dress" people, so computer science people, are there any requirements for the photos that would help with or be necessary for Maya Cloth? We should really only do this photography once so we can handle the fragile pieces as little as possible, so let' s do it right. I will also take that opportunity to take some measurements, and count yarns and maybe come up with some "fun facts" like how many miles, yards, football fields (etc.) of yarn were used to make a particular garment.

Sorry this was so long, again I always appreciate feedback. I have a lot of reading and research to do so you will hear from me again soon. happy holiday weekend!