Continuous developments in the field of 3D digitisation pave the way for new approaches to researching museum and archival objects that are not possible to achieve with conventional two-dimensional documentation methods. The precise and high-resolution 3D capture of objects allows them to be visualised and viewed from any angle. Material peculiarities are highlighted and made accessible through their radiometric and geometric properties. In this way, it is possible, to characterise the raw materials used, to investigate the manufacturing techniques of objects or their historical usage practices and to trace the changes to the objects and their materiality over the course of time.

The methodological challenges in this area are far from resolved. There is a lack of established standards to specify the quality of 3D digitised items to ensure that quality requirements are met. The same applies to materiality data concerning museum objects,which is essential for targeted communication and consistent collection of information. Additionally, on a theoretical level, questions about the relationship between the digital representation and the original physical object still need to be addressed. 

The workshop of the case study ‘Materiality in space and time’ of the DiViAS research project focuses on the potentials of and requirements for 3D digitisations to make the materiality of museum and archived objects accessible. 

The objects analysed in the case study provide our starting point: on the one hand, ethnological objects from present-day Alaska, which are housed in the State Museum Nature and Man in Oldenburg, and on the other, items from captured ships that are part of the Prize Papers Collection held in the National Archives in London. The corpus of these objects is largely shaped by the fact that they have been preserved by chance and is therefore extremely heterogeneous containing African gold rings, wallpaper and fabric samples as well as everyday objects owned by sailors or even coffee beans and plant seeds.

Within the framework of the transdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and technical sciences in the DiViAS project, the goal is, among other things, to develop tools that support and make transparent the processes of data collection, storage, dissemination, and usability, thereby combining modern analytical methods with specialised expertise.  

Following 20/30-minute keynote presentations, the workshop will provide a space for experts from the humanities and technical sciences to address these questions and to discuss them along the objects from the case study.