Review of EuroMed Conference and Asinou Church Case Study
ITN-DCH
Marie Curie Fellow: ESR 5 Name: Georgia Stavropoulou Institute: Ku Leuven
In the first week of November, 2014, the fellows and partners of the ITN-DCH project met in Cyprus in order to attend the EuroMed conference but also to visit the Church of Asinou, which formed the first case study of the project. Conference sessions, project meetings and field work were successfully combined so that all fellows could maximize their benefits from the experience.
Early in the week, on the 2nd of November, all the participants of the project visited the Church of Asinou with main purpose not only to get informed about the monument but also to perform the necessary measurements for its complete documentation. Asinou Church is one of the most important monuments in Cyprus, built it the 12th century and with famous frescoes, dating from the years after
its construction to the 17th century. Since 1985, Asinou is enlisted as an UNESCO World Heritage
Monument, a fact that highlights the importance of the church in a national and an international scale. It is easy to understand that the importance of the monument demands its complete and detailed documentation for preservation purposes. However, a complete documentation is not just a simple image collection or a geometric 3D reconstruction of the object under study, but rather a combination of a wide variety of methods and data.
To achieve the documentation of the Asinou church, the project partners brought to the site various equipment and implemented a wide range of different data acquisition techniques. More specifically, it is worth mentioning the UAV flight for image capturing but also the Infrared Thermography and Optic Microscopy techniques with purpose the study of the frescoes' surfaces and the analysis of their materials. With this accumulation and demonstration of techniques in one day, the fellows had the chance to collect data for their case study and at the same time to be introduced to the variety of methodologies and technologies available for documenting the geometric and visual qualities of a monument, its materials and also the intangible heritage related to it. As the participating institutes are focused on different aspects of the digital cultural heritage documentation and implement different state-of-the art technologies, the young researchers understood the wide range of different scientific backgrounds that should be combined in order to achieve a complete documentation and as a result they benefited from each others expertise and exchanged knowledge.
Apart from the field work at the site of Asinou, fellows and partners also attended the EuroMed conference for the rest of the week. Within the framework of conference, the fellows of the project had the valuable chance not only to get informed about the current research and technological developments regarding digital cultural heritage but also to talk with both experts and young researchers, to present themselves to the scientific field and to promote ITN-DCH project. With additional sessions on the legal aspects of the Cultural Heritage and meetings with the project's advisors, the fellows gained a good insight into the current trends and lacks of the field and got inspired on how to further develop their individual research. Additionally, the presentations of some of the fellows' personal work formed a strong motivation for the rest, galvanizing especially the newest fellows to work more towards their own ideas.
Concluding, the project meeting and EuroMed conference were very successful in terms of arming the fellows with useful knowledge. Hopefully, the skills gained during these days will help the fellows to work more effectively as a team focused on Digital Cultural Heritage and to evolve both personally and professionally throughout the course of the ITN-DCH project.
