Meet the Dean
For the past 15 years Professor David Arnold has been leading research at the interface of technologies supporting the documentation and analysis of cultural heritage data. He has been the coordinator of two large EU projects since 2002, as Head of the Cultural Informatics Research Group. The first was the EPOCH (Network of Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage) a project which involved 95 partners over 4 years and benefitted from €7.88M of EU support under contract no. IST-2002-507382). The second has been the 3D-COFORM project (Tools and Expertise for 3D Collection FORMation) – a large scale Integrating Project under FP7 which has involved 19 partners over 4 years since 2008 and an EU contribution €8.45M under grant agreement n° 231809; 2008-2012.
David was educated at Gonville and Caius College and was awarded his PhD, 'A Computer Model of Housing Layout,' by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 1978. He was a research assistant at the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies at the University of Cambridge, before taking a lectureship in Computing Science at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in 1978, where he was promoted to full Professor in 1989. In 2002 he joined the University of Brighton as Dean of the Faculty of Management and Information Sciences. Since 2010 he has been the Dean responsible for Doctoral Students – activities which were brought together across the University in 2011 under the Brighton Doctoral College. Alongside this and the work of the Cultural Informatics Research Group he also holds the role of Director of Research Initiatives.
Professor Arnold is a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Information Technology Professional, a Member of the ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH and the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC). He is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and the EUROGRAPHICS Association of which he is a past chairman.
He has been chair of many international programme committees including for VAST (Virtual reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage) on several occasions since 2001. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH).
Interests
David Arnold’s research interests lie in the conception of ICT tools that fundamentally empower new forms of enquiry and communication about cultural heritage. Experience in the adoption of technologies in other spheres suggests that this is a multi-facetted challenge, starting from the fundamental difficulties of discussing potential applications across disciplinary cultures and hence of perceiving meaningful applications in the fast paced change that characterises technological development. The challenges then involve addressing the practical issues of making tools usable and relevant to a variety of situations and working practices and ultimately to develop new paradigms for the use and communication of cultural heritage data whether to analyse research questions or to communicate and entertain the public.
The CIRG believe that to achieve our goals we must embed collaboration with museums archives and other heritage organisations within our work and to that end we have had active collaborations with both international icons in museums (including the Vistoria and Albert Museum, The Louvre Museum, the Academia Museum in Florence, the Royal Belgium Museum, The Rijksmuseum and the Berlin State museum) and in archealogical sites (e.g. the temples of Abu Simbel and UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Cyprus, as well as the UNESCO World Herirtage HQ in Paris). We work with these organisations and others to test prototype technologies and to develop new models of sustainable enterprises.
Major results
The EPOCH Research Agenda for the Applications of ICTs to Cultural Heritage has now been downloaded in full approaching 10,000 times. This book drew on the experience developed over 4 years of the EPOCH project to formulate the next set of challenges. The 3D-COFORM project is now addressing many of these in an integrated way so that data may be repurposed for multiple application scenarios, whilst addressing challenges such as referential integrity, long-term preservation and recording the provenance of digital artefacts.
The 3D-COFORM project is producing a public exhibition which will be held in Brighton from July 27th to August 25th 2012. This will showcase the project’s results across a wide range of experimental deployments of 3D documentation. Figure 1 shows the results of digitising a Ganesh figurine, which has been carved from Labrodorite – a semi-precious stone which exhibits highly directional light properties. This model was captured by a device developed under 3D-COFORM by the University of Bonn – a partner in the project.
3D-COFORM’s work with 3D documentation has recently been recognised by the signing of agreements with Europeana – the European digital library – for the supply of 3D data from June 2012.
The CIRG has been advising the Public Monuments and Sculptures Association on the design of new database schema to record data on public monuments in a form compatible with the CIDOC-CRM standard and suitable for supporting interactive web-based applications.
Publications
http://www.culturalinformatics.org.uk/davidarnold
