Girdi-Bazar Square Bowl and Potter's Pivot Crowdsourced Photo-masking Project

Hello all,

my name is Aris and I am currently a level 2 student in the Department of Archaeology in Durham University. I am taking the Advanced Skills in Digital Heritage course. Crowdsourcing is an area within Digital Heritage that allows engaging ‘members of the public’ (who do not necessarily have prior knowledge of Archaeology and History) with an archaeological project (like this one) or museum projects more at large. As a main assignment in Digital Heritage we created a photo-masking project in Micro-Past and are now asking you to help us with it.

If you’d like to give it a try, we are asking you to photo-mask some ancient artefacts. Instructions can be found on the application we created in the Digital Heritage class. In a nutshell, there are 65 photographs of the artefacts that must pass this procedure: tracing a polygon around the object in continuation and then clicking submit. This action will allow generating a mesh that is created by the collection of the polygons of the 65 photos. This mesh will help us create 3D models of the artefacts. These 3D models can help various academics to do research based on the modelled artefacts without having the real thing with them. Moreover museums can use these 3D models as exhibits etc.

For our project, we ask you to trace polygons around a square bowl and potter’s pivot. These artefacts were found from a 3000-4000 years old site in Iraq. The excavations were held by the University of Munich. By photo-masking these objects you will help the Munich team with their research and studies and you, in return, will learn more about the past.

-Aris Spathas