A Quick Update from #Swordgate Central

1/8/2016

I've mostly been doing other stuff today, but Swordgate continues to percolate in the background. Here are the highlights.

Last night, I did an interview with Serra Head and Kenneth Feder for the ArchyFantasies podcast series. We talked about the sword and sword-related topics, including how this story has played out so far and what we can learn from it. The podcast should be available in a couple of weeks. Full disclosure: I was drinking a glass of wine during the interview. Given how long I've been in the trenches with Swordgate, I think I've earned it.

I'm playing around with my 3D scan data from the Design Toscano sword. I only just got my scanner working properly before the holidays, so this has been a good opportunity to play with it before I start using it to crank out real archaeological data (i.e., 3D models of actual artifacts that can tell us something about the past). There's a lot to learn as far as figuring out the settings for finding a good balance of scan resolution and file size. I made some pretty detailed scans of the Design Toscano sword (the raw data for a single scan exceed 1 GB at the settings I used), and it's taking a long time to experiment with different processing settings. You have to first fuse the various scans together into a single model then run algorithms to "polish" the model. The trick is not to polish out details that are in the original along with the noise.

The Design Toscano sword with a 3D model on my computer screen in the background. I'm still learning how to process the data to smooth out noise without losing details that are in the original.

The California sword is scheduled to be delivered to my office today. According to the FedEx tracker, it's somewhere on a truck in Columbia right now. I hope it gets here before I have to leave.

Finally, I received yet another "take down your picture of the sword" email from J. Hutton Pulitzer (and, in a shocking development, Steve was CC'd). This time it was about the sword image that I used in my first blog post on the matter. It's the same image that's posted all over the internet now (when I do a Google image search on it I get about 600 hits), but apparently Pulitzer has a problem with me using it to illustrate what he's talking about. I don't have time for the silly games, so I took down the image and replaced it with a referring link to a YouTube video that shows the sword. Yawn.

In his email, Pulitzer said that I could "license the image." I inquired as to the purchase price of such a license, but have yet to get a response.

And now you are up to date.

Update (1/8/2016): The California sword has been delivered, and it is awesome. It will be going on the scanner first thing Monday morning.

Maleficent

1/8/2016 12:40:49 pm

I would just like to point out something I pointed out yesterday in one of the Oak Island groups. Even if this "sword" somehow turns out to be of the correct era, the complete lack of a documented provenance (and in this case provenience) makes its age a moot point. Without a documented provenance/provenience it's just a cool story.

Andy White

1/8/2016 01:19:19 pm

Right. Pulitzer's argument would be that there is a Roman shipwreck down there, and the sword is evidence of that. If the sword ain't Roman, however, what happens to the possibility of a Roman shipwreck. The sword is the so-called "smoking gun" that is the linchpin of the whole endeavor. But I agree with you that we could just as easily have been shown an image of an authentic Roman artifact, and then the main conversation would be "so what?" rather than "is it Roman?"

Maleficent

1/8/2016 04:41:33 pm

Saying it came from a Roman shipwreck makes no difference because there is no proof it was on any shipwreck.

Andy White

1/8/2016 04:52:12 pm

It's all weak coffee. The sword, however, was put forward as a positive piece of material evidence. If one can show it's not even Roman, the rest becomes moot.

Ryan

1/8/2016 10:27:40 pm

This doesn't have anything to do with swordgate, and I'm probably useless in terms of anything technical to do with archaeology or anthropology. But I think I can offer some advice on the file size vs resolution thing. Its probably less important for sword gate, but might be good advice for the more serious stuff your working on.

I work (when I can) in photo and video. In our field the best practice is always to record at the highest resolution you can practically work with, which usually means the highest resolution your equipment can record. The idea being that even if your footage or images are higher res than can be practically used (a lower res is needed for print, or your recording above broadcast/projection limits) you definitely want the higher res files/formats for archival purposes. Down the road they might be useful for higher resolution re-use, restoration etc.

My feeling is the same would be true of 3d scans of artifacts. While there may be a practical limit to what is useful, or what you can actually work with now. 10 or 20 years down the line the extra resolution might very well become important.

I'm willing to bet there are other limitations though. Aside from raw file sizes, I would guess that processing these things takes a certain amount of computing power. So there would be a limitation as to what a particular work station is capable of working with. That sort of thing comes up all the time with video work. However not knowing much about these 3d scans I have to assume that there isn't an easy quick way to down covert or re-encode these things to a lower resolution. That's what we do with video. We might shoot this huge complex high res encoding at 1080p or above.But that can be transferred and re-encoded off the clock into something smaller and more manageable to actually work with and deliver. And then of course the processing (the "polish" step) would have to be done individually for each resolution. In photo/video we can either skip it for the archival footage, or do it first so its represented in every subsequent version.

So if my assumptions are correct you've got one or more additional variables pushing you to keep things small. But none the less in terms long term usability of the images bigger is better. For resolution anyway, I have no clue if there are compressions available for this sort of thing that might reduce file size at a given resolution. Or what impact compression might have on the files' use in SCIENCE!.

I'd tell you to start hording hard drives (funding dependent). And depending on what you have at home or in the office, consider a more powerful work station if these things are resource heavy to work with. Storage is cheap these days fortunately. I keep an eye on deals.kinja.com they aggregate sales (mostly on tech) from across the web. And there are almost always cheep, large volume, external drives available from decent brands (in my experience there's really no reason to go with specialist producers like Lacey, the added cost doesn't get you much). Also you can often pick up cheap hardrive enclosures which you can use to re purpose old drives from dead computers (you're IT department has stacks, all of them do). Or even what we call a toaster. Which is a hot-swap bay you can just drop any drives into and have them read as an external. With USB3.0, thunderbolt and what have these days you can often work direct to an external drive without bottle-necking your speed.

So I'd tell you if its practical run off higher quality scans than you can work with or think you need. Archive those for posterity, then run off a best fit file to actually work with. The problem being: if there's no way to down convert or re-encode things then you've just doubled your work load and/or labor costs.

Michael

1/8/2016 11:06:56 pm

I really appreciate this comment. I can't say if it is or isn't relevant at this point for Andy, but this knowledge is beneficial to me. Thank you very much!

Andy White

1/9/2016 06:55:52 am

Thanks for the comment, Ryan. This is the second time I'm writing my reply - the first one was erased by one of my kids swiping my keyboard with a toy kitchen spoon.

I think your point is an excellent one. I don't yet know if it is possible to downsample the high quality data so that I have working files that are "good enough" for present purposes while preserving the capacity to go back to the "overkill" files in the future. I presume that should be doable, but I'll need to figure out the cost-benefit in terms of initial processing and storage. It's a smart strategy as long as I'm not limiting my ability to collect data in the first place (in terms of apportioning the limited road time available looking at museum and private collections, etc.). Those are the kinds of questions I'm trying to get a good answer to (through my own trial and error, mostly) before I start using this scanner to collect archaeological data in earnest.

Your point about collecting higher resolution data that you need for immediate purposes also applies to many other aspects of archaeology. Doing more than the minimum in the field, for example, will often pay off hugely in the future. I know this from my own experience working with old collections and excavation data. A little more effort can go a long way toward making raw data more useful for other purposes not directly envisioned when the data were being collected.

I also know from my own personal experience that doing "more than the minimum" in the field is often a pretty hard sell. Fieldwork is expensive, and a lot of archaeological data these days are collected in the context of Cultural Resources Management archaeology, where work is compelled by state and/or federal law and paid for by the industry that is getting the permits, etc. Saying "we want to do X, Y, and Z (and you're going to pay for it) even though we're not going to make use of that information for this project" doesn't typically fly. It's unfortunate, but it's a real constraint within the system.

The ever-changing (and hopefully improving) nature of archaeological research methods is why archaeologists are typically very interested in preserving portions of sites for future work: it is difficult to anticipate what kinds of additional information might be useful in the future and what kind of analyses might be possible with that information. Excavation is a non-repeatable experiment.

Doris link

4/29/2016 11:39:32 pm

Totally agree with Maleficent's idea. Although the sword itself was a possitive piece of material evidence,is it sensible that it was on a Roman shipwreck??

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