2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Worth More Than a Thousand Words: State-of-the-Art Visualization in Cultural Heritage

Art in its various forms is a bridge toward civil discourse and interaction. Recently, new ways of engaging with objects from our shared cultural heritage are possible with advances in computation and imaging that allow scientists to analyze art noninvasively, historians to pose new social questions about the art, and the public to explore and interact with art in ways never before possible. This symposium will address these advances in imaging with speakers from museums, academia, and industry who use cameras sensitive to various regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to realize a greater understanding of culture artifacts. The symposium will highlight how facial recognition software is being used to identify unknown subjects of portrait art from the 15th century; how crowdsourcing of tourist snapshots from architectural monuments is helping to document subtle changes to buildings over time for predictive models of deterioration; and lastly, how multiple wavelengths of light illuminated from all directions onto works by Hieronymus Bosch and Paul Gauguin are helping to reevaluate how these artists created their works. The session will be a comprehensive assessment of the field and its impact for society by enabling different narratives of our shared cultural patrimony.