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Archaeology in the 'Information Age'

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The Bristol Path
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Dead Buildings of Providence

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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Deep in the basement of the Classics Department there is a ledge with a dozen or more boxes of lantern slides which belong to Brown (which department is a good question). The slides are delicate pieces of emulsion sandwiched between two plates of glass, and require a special projector to view properly. The resolution of images is very high--the sheer size of the image (about 2"x3") on each slide helps make up for the quality of the lenses and equipment used to produce the images--in some cases over a hundred years ago.

My project will, hopefully, track down exactly whose slides these all are, and their history within Brown, when they were abandoned in the basement of the Classics department, etc., and finding out if some sort of catalog of them exists--since there are a large number of them and as of right now, the content is anybody's guess. The few sitting out of the boxes are mostly images of monuments of the Mediterranean; what the others might contain is tantalizing.

The next step would be to digitize at least some of the more interesting slides into a Zoomify presentation (as opposed to the method of display which Bryn Mawr or Kingston College chose for their lantern slide collections])--similar to the daguerrotypes we saw in class. But as also as we discussed in class--it's not just about the message (i.e., the images) but the interface--how the images were viewed back in the day. Hopefully I can track down a magic lantern projector to set up a demonstration--all documented and online.

The digitizing of the images will be interesting to say the least--some of the glass slides are scuffed which means a wet scan would be ideal though I'm not sure it's practical. Also, since the emulsion is sandwiched between two pieces of glass, unless the focus of the scanner can be changed, the image will come out blurry to the added distance between the surface of the scanner and the emulsion (as opposed to a piece of film or paper placed directly on the scanner). An aerial projection (the lantern slide is projected onto a plane in midair, and a camera is focused on the same plane) a high quality photo could be taken and then scanned at a high resolution.

Lantern Slides

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Posted at May 16/2007 05:22PM:
chris witmore: Excellent. There are many angles to this piece. The photography is superb. The fact that you dusted off the old projector and thought about issues of projection and engagement is fantastic. Moreover, I am extremely impressed with the level of image detail...