A Digital Restoration Initiative
What is Heritage Science?
Heritage science is the interdisciplinary domain of scientific study of cultural or natural heritage. Heritage science draws on diverse humanities, sciences and engineering disciplines. It focuses on enhancing the understanding, care and sustainable use of heritage so it can enrich people's lives, both today and in the future. Heritage science is an umbrella term encompassing all forms of scientific enquiry into human works and the combined works of nature and humans, of value to people.
What is EduceLab?
EduceLab is a highly specialized heritage science laboratory expertly designed to provide data-intensive yet object-centric solutions to the most challenging problems in the study of cultural heritage. Its unique ecosystem of non-destructive instrumentation offers key scientific capabilities that are crucial to addressing the challenging variability of heritage science contexts. These capabilities include:
- Materials characterization
- Advanced multimodal imaging (tomography, photography, photogrammetry) with gold standard bench equipment as well as a flexible, configurable prototype environment
- Cyberinfrastructure and methodologies for capturing, structuring, processing, and mining large-scale data sets
- Mobile and flexibly-deployed instrumentation for in-situ data acquisition and on-site evaluations
EduceLab comprises four operational clusters – BENCH, MOBILE, FLEX, and CYBER. Each one is based on usage patterns that match the needs of diverse heritage science communities.
How EduceLab Works
Representing the following National Science Foundation’s “Big Ideas”
Growing Convergence Research – Heritage science is a convergence activity in itself, blending a number of scientific disciplines and relying on robust collaborations for success, and EduceLab activates and facilitates such activity
Harnessing the Data Revolution – EduceLab activities will be data-driven and data-intensive, relying on emerging computational tools at play across disciplines like chemistry, physics, and computer science to capture the essence of objects and their environments
NSF INCLUDES – The EduceLab ecosystem combines STEM with heritage fields in a culturally informed way to strategically grow the interest and participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields and increase societal public literacy and engagement with science and technology
A 2021 National Science Foundation Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Project
Award Number 2131940