"Digital documentation of Hagia Sophia inscriptions": preserving cultural heritage through technology

Inscriptions on the walls of St. Sophia of Kiev will be digitized to preserve the cultural, artistic and historical monument of Ukraine.

This was discussed at the presentation of the project "digital documentation of inscriptions of Hagia Sophia", writes UNN.

Details

On the walls of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, there are about 7,500 inscriptions and frescoes that are very valuable for preserving our history. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the issue of preserving cultural heritage became acute.

Therefore, thanks to the cooperation of Ukraine and Sweden, a large-scale work was carried out to document and create an interactive online portal of digitized graffiti in Sofia of Kiev for further study and popularization. 

The main goal of the project "digital documentation of Hagia Sophia inscriptions" is to protect information that is a threatened research material. the project is funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, the Royal Swedish Academy of literature, history and antiquities, and the Swedish National Cultural Heritage Council.

Sofia of Kiev has about 3,000 square meters of wall paintings and about 8,000 inscriptions are identified.

During the development of the online portal, the researchers focused on those surfaces where these inscriptions are most often found. three types of technologies were used to digitize inscriptions.In particular, this is a laser scan, with which you can cover the entire interior of the cathedral. This way, you can also capture each mural and Inscription locally. We then worked on creating images using photogrammetric techniques to create high-resolution 3D models and orthographic (measurable) photos.

The portal was developed by the Gothenburg research infrastructure in the field of digital humanities. the main developers were Jonathan Westin, Tristan Bridge and Matteo Tomasini with the support of other representatives of GRIDH.

What is this online portal?

The main interface of the online portal created as part of the project contains three types of images: plan view, surface view, and label view.

Users are offered an interactive map where they can visually filter data for other types of images. When viewing one of the surfaces, the label view will narrow down to the labels registered within this surface.

All data surfaces are divided by color: yellow, orange, and red. The color depends on the amount of data. However, over the next year, developers will add data for more surfaces.

Labels on the platform can be filtered using several methods: by type, language, writing system, genre, and description. You can also narrow down your data search to a specific room or surface.

Thus, the system will be able to display, for example, all inscriptions in Church Slavonic in a certain room or inscriptions with drawings on a certain surface. What is convenient, you can view surfaces and study data from them by clicking on the surface itself or the inscription that interests you.

Each label has its own unique URL, so it is easy to distribute such information and give links to it. for high-quality visualization, the developers used several open source libraries, and then created a unified user interface to make this data as easy to use as possible.

Thanks to high-resolution images, you can zoom in on the surface and notice small details.

In addition, the view of all surfaces and inscriptions is supplemented with topographic visualizations, which use 3D data to emphasize the inscriptions, as well as see details related to the technology of life painting. To create visualizations for the project, we used the Topography visualization Toolbox, an application developed by Esheli Green of the Swedish stone art archive and the Gothenburg Digital Humanities Research Infrastructure.

In general, the online portal was created for use in research, as well as for data registration.

recall

The United States will finance two new projects to protect Ukraine's cultural heritage. They will help in restoring damaged objects and strengthen Ukraine's abilityto investigate the illegal export of cultural property.