Course on digital forensics

Revealing Lost Content: Low-Tech Digital Forensics for the Bench
    Conservator

September 20-October 2, 2010

Instructor: Hal Erickson

Cost:  $785.00: Includes all course materials, lodging and most meals

AIC scholarships of $300 may still be available.

Course Description: High-end forensics for the recovery of lost or
obscured content can be an expensive proposition and may simply be
an unaffordable luxury in many cases.  When we observe evidence of
such content, it is seldom immediately clear what degree of effort
should be made in order to visualize it.  Certain easy and
inexpensive nondestructive forensic techniques can go a long way
towards revealing the lost or obscured content, allowing owners,
curators and/or institutional decision makers to better judge
whether to invest more money and effort in further recovery efforts.
These techniques are also useful during field surveys or in other
on-site situations requiring a recommendation based on a quick
examination, and can in many cases even be performed using nothing
more than a pocket camera, common photographic filters and a laptop.
In many cases, these "first-pass" forensic techniques may even be
all that is needed to fully visualize the lost or obscured content.
Indeed, it can be argued that these techniques should be a standard
part of the pre- and post-treatment photodocumentation of many--if
not most - treatments of manuscript materials and works of art on
paper, if only to reassure future users that no obvious evidence of
lost or obscured content was compromised by a treatment.  Among the
cases of obvious concern are: palimpsests (on parchment, vellum,
papyrus, exotica);authorial erasures or fraudulent
alterations;washed-away, delaminated, faded, bleached or otherwise
lost content;content obscured by paste-downs;content on obscured
binding materials (e.g. palimpsestic content on signature guards);
marginal annotations, evidence of provenance, inter alia erased by
dealers or previous owners.

To register for the course go to:

    <URL:http://www.campbellcenter.org/pages/registration.html>

Sharon Welton
Program Director
Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies
Mount Carroll Illinois
815-244-1173


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 24:12
                 Distributed: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
                       Message Id: cdl-24-12-013
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