By Shibo Wu and Matthew O’Connor
This spring we, two students of the Digital Humanities MSc at UCL, undertook a three-week placement at Senate House Library and the Makerspace in the University of London, digitising artefacts from the Harry Price Archive (part of the Harry Price Collection) in Senate House Library under the supervision of Gabriel Bodard and Tansy Barton. This placement was part of an ongoing initiative to enhance the accessibility and preservation of rare and fragile items in University of London archives.This marked the continuation of the digitisation initiative that began with the Ehrenberg Collection at the Institute of Classical Studies, introducing the first digitised artefacts from the Harry Price Collection.
The placement commenced with two days of inductions to both the Ehrenberg Collection and the Harry Price Collection, familiarising us with their historical significance, cataloguing practices, and handling procedures. The Harry Price Collection was established by the psychical researcher Harry Price (1891-1948), a contemporary of Harry Houdini, containing articles and artefacts related to magic, spiritualism and psychical research. Donated to the Senate House Library in 1936, and bequeathed to the University of London in 1948, the collection includes various items from Price’s own investigations into occult and/or spiritual phenomena, as well as random objects relating to his antiquarian and other interests.
We conducted several photography sessions to capture high-quality images of select artefacts in the Harry Price Collection. These items were placed on a rotating turntable, photographed with a Nikon D850 digital SLR camera, and imported into the Agisoft Metashape Pro software for processing. We were able to produce 3D models for our artefacts using this software, which were then uploaded onto the sharing platform Sketchfab.
Some of these items, particularly those with metallic surfaces, proved challenging to model due to inconsistent reflections which disrupted the software’s alignment for images, even with adjusted lighting, exposure and the use of a light tent. Other items were deliberately symmetrical or featureless because they were designed as tools for magic tricks, therefore offering few reference points for marker-based alignment when merging chunks together. We learnt from these less successful attempts, allowing us to mitigate or avoid these issues when dealing with subsequent artefacts.
This early troubleshooting allowed us to develop careful and creative solutions for the artefacts we uploaded to Sketchfab; namely the Silver Ingot, the Metal and Glass Flashlight, the Lead Imitation Figurine and the Rapping Hand. For the Silver Ingot, the model was divided into front and underside chunks, manually merging them using precise marker placement in order to preserve the engravings on the front chunk (above) (direct link). We adapted this method for the Metal and Glass Flashlight, which featured a fractured glass side that distorted the model’s geometry (below) (direct link). To resolve this, we created separate low-resolution chunks for each half of the object, then constructed a clean base geometry onto which smaller high-quality chunks could be accurately aligned.
A micro lens was used to capture the finer surface details of both the Lead Imitation Figurine and the Rapping Hand, allowing for improved clarity on intricate features such as the figurine’s face and the lace of the hand’s velvet cuff. The micro lens also picked up background particles, however, requiring significant manual cleaning in post-processing. In particular, the Rapping Hand required extensive manual and automated processing, including masking, cleaning, and smoothing to address its complex geometry. Due to these processes, and upload constraints, the final model had to be decimated and compressed, which resulted in a noticeable loss of accuracy. By contrast, the Lead Imitation Figurine (not from the Harry Price Archive) benefited considerably from the micro lens, with its surface definition resulting in a highly-detailed 3D model upon upload (below) (direct link).
Gabriel provided us with a detailed workflow document, updated by placement students over the past several years, to which we also contributed our notes, documentation and paradata. This served two crucial purposes: it ensured that mistakes were recorded systematically, highlighting where the process had faltered, and acted as a reference for future digitisation efforts. This workflow offered guidance from previous projects when we met with significant issues, and allowed us to present our own insights which might benefit future teams. By documenting each step in the process, including our failed attempts, we contributed to a growing repository of practical knowledge.
We are immensely proud to have contributed the inaugural items to this new digitisation collection, setting the foundation for expanded digital access to the Harry Price Archive. We hope that these initial models will serve as a stepping-stone for future viewers and contributors to engage with these artefacts remotely, preserving their significance for decades to come. We are deeply grateful to Gabriel Bodard, the Institute of Classical Studies, Tansy Barton, Salvador Alcantara Pelaez and Senate House Library for providing us this incredible opportunity, and we look forward to seeing this digital archive grow in the years ahead.
The models uploaded to the Harry Price Collection on Sketchfab can be found here.
