Miniature from a copy of Bidpai’s Kalila wa Dimna. “The Fox and the Drum”
Iran, Shiraz; 1333
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Majlis Library: Catalogue of Digitized Manuscripts
The Library of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Parliament in Tehran has digitized a large number of manuscripts, which are now accessible on their website. These include Persian, Arabic and Turkish manuscripts: Manuscripts can be searched by name or catalog … Continue reading
Documenting Merv
CyArk completed a comprehensive digital documentation campaign at Merv in 2007 in conjunction with excavations in the grand bazaar undertaken by the University College London, the results of which are now available up on their website. This is Kind of … Continue reading
How do you spell muqarnas?
Yesterday I gave my first classroom lecture ever. It was a mild disaster, as you might expect (I certainly did), but it was also a good learning experience. My goal was to give the students a broad overview of Islamic … Continue reading
Tiberias
This summer I was excavating at Tiberias. The New Tiberias Excavation Project, led by Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is intended to clarify the structure of the mosque built in the center of the city, as … Continue reading
From: Hell, To: Paradise – Climate, Landscape and Affect
In addition to a nuts and bolts quantitative analysis of the more recent material from the MacDonald surveys, I’m also interested in how the ways in which people inhabit a landscape is reflected in contemporary historical sources. Khirbet Sheikh ‘Isa (SGNAS 4) and al-Rujoum (SGNAS 45), which were both investigated as part of the Southern Ghors and Northeast ‘Arabah Archaeological Survey, have been identified with the medieval town of Zughar mentioned by several geographers. MacDonald suggests that Khirbet Sheikh ‘Isa was the Byzantine town known as Zoara, and Donald Whitcomb follows up with a discussion of the possibility that al-Rujoum was Zughar.
Persian Illuminated Manuscripts
The HIAA listserv has been all abuzz with people seeking images of miniatures for the study of the Shahnameh and Persian MSS in general. Here are the resources suggested so far.
Recent Posts
Concerning Dense Point Clouds and Wireframes
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So, in addition Microsoft’s Photosynth, a number of new Structure from Motion reconstruction tools have become available recently, most notably Hypr3d and Autodesk’s 123d Catch. These seem to have been prompted primarily by the recent popularization of 3D printing, so their focus is on creating water-tight wireframes. This makes them rather different from Photosynth, which places emphasis on displaying photos at their full resolution rather than assembling them into a textured wireframe.
The great thing about photographing for structure from motion – apart from the weird looks people give you as you take 300 photos of something they might snap once or twice – is that photosets can be dropped into all of these new algorithms, and the reconstruction software is only going to get better. Here are some new models made from photos I took at Qusayr ‘Amra in Jordan and Cappadocia in Turkey: