Timelines - data visualisation

Data visualisation is a problem when you are looking at the history and technology of materials. Different things happened at different times in different companies in different places throughout the world.
Information on the adoption of particular technologies is hard to come by from outside the industry being studied.
Patents are great as markers but they say nothing about adoption. They are just like cats marking the territory.
If a technology is unpublished , unpatented and secretive then it is even harder to track. One source is the “old boys” doing reminiscences as they retire or are asked back to speak at a dinner about “outdated technologies”. But be prepared for may “about 20 years ago” unquote statements.
Turning this data into a sensible format is also problematic. After many false starts I found Aeon and from this can produce a image file.

  Zinc - very drafty

Nickel timeline - very drafty
More later...
Conservation of Oxide coated Metals by David Hallam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

release early release often

release early release often _as a publication method_

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Release early, release often (also: time-based releases, sometimes abbreviated RERO) is a software development philosophy that emphasizes the importance of early and frequent releases in creating a tight feedback loop between developers and testers or users, contrary to a feature-based release strategy. Advocates argue that this allows the software development to progress faster, enables the user to help define what the software will become, better conforms to the users' requirements for the software,^[1] and ultimately results in higher quality software.^[2] The development philosophy attempts to eliminate the risk of creating software that no one will use.^[3]

This philosophy was popularized by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, where Raymond stated "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers".^[4]

This philosophy was originally applied to the development of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, but has also been applied to closed source, commercial software development.

The alternative to the release early, release often philosophy is aiming to provide only polished, bug-free releases.^[5] Advocates of RERO question that this would in fact result in higher-quality releases.^[4]

The aim of publication is to get accurate, reliable information out into the working community as quickly as is possible so it can change work methods and approaches. The current methods of peer review that are based in the old print journal tradition are not really useful in the digital age. The publishing houses are trying to consolidate their grip on digital content so you have to access the most up to date content from behind a “pay wall”. For those of us in the heritage community this leads to the dumbing down of our practice as we loose access to the latest data and discussions. We and up with “Haves" and "Have-nots”. Those with access to data and those who have no access.
If we look at the software industry we can see it is divided into the propriety software that exists behind a “paywall” of propriety secrets  and the open source which is often free ($) and to which you have access to the source code under a GPL licence.
Heritage information should be like this. Free and Open.
Ok so why "release early release often _as a publication method_” ?
Well if you are “publishing” on a public platform such as a wiki or a semi public blog that requires membership you can publish several versions and ask for peer comment between each version. This way you can get the information out in a timely way and also have some review method. Yes most will take your publication at face value or just mutter polite nothings behind your back. But also you will get some real useful critiques. Oh and a bit of daft spam!
I will be adopting this method with my recent Oxides work. Enjoy and please critique. Oh you will have to sign in - reduces spam :-)

Surfaces of modern metals in Heritage conservation questionnaire

This questionnaire is an attempt to access how the heritage conservation community understands the surfaces of modern metals. It is being conducted by David Hallam as part of a project  on the Recognition and History and technology of oxide coated modern metals.

Oxide coated modern metals

What are modern metals?

Any metal or major new alloy grouping commercialised after 1851. They may be the core of an object (as in stainless steel) or just the very surface as in metal coated plastic.

I consider oxide coated modern metals to be those that are primarily used in a bare state in such a way that the oxide is the primary interface with the environment. These metals maintain their stability thru the passive nature of this oxide. The oxide may be as a result of the alloy constitution or may be synthetically produced.

Examples are;

• Anodizing
• Zinc plate
• Phosphating
• Chromating
• MBV coatings
• Sheridizing
• Electroplated Tin
• Monel Metal
• German Silver
• Zinc-anneal
• Parkerizing
• Black Oxides coatings
• Electroplating
• Electroless plating

If you are a conservator, restorer, heritage manager or conservation scientist please go to;

http://goo.gl/forms/rS8xfPTSFo

And fill out the questionnaire.

Thanks

 

David Hallam

Wrapping up the Getty.

This week is wrap-up week.

I think I’ve achieve most of what I want. Working as a scholar at the Getty has been an amazing experience. I would recommend anyone with a serious conservation project that can be done succinctly within the timeframes should apply for a GCI scholar term.

When you arrive at the Getty you are told that the three months will disappear very fast, they did. As ever you start your project with certain parameters and ideas about what you’re going to get out of, your project then evolves as you gather information and results. Mine went through several stages stages of expanding and contracting. I now have some half decent timelines for metal finishing processes are massive database of PDF files which will be turned into a substantial bibliography and history and technology article. I also have a wide-ranging selection of conservation papers for the conservation review article. I’ve played with various forms of digital scholarship and have started to refine my processes even further.

On the Mac I’m using Zotero, Evernote, Scrivener, and Dragon. Most of this is transferable to linux. I’m pretty sure Dragon will work in wine.

Over the next few months I will post timelines, parts of chapters, bibliographies, and draft articles to this website. I will be asking for your candid non-critical feedback. I will be trying very hard to adopt the open source principle of release early and release often so initially I don’t care if there are problems with a page or information I don’t have I will put that in the post hoping that other people can help.

I’m looking for people who can help me decipher some of the German, Chinese, Japanese and East European articles I have. These articles I think outline the development of metal finishing in their home countries so it would be good to add these to a timeline. Currently my timelines are worldwide but I would like to make some of them regional.

I’ll be sad to leave here on Friday but I’ll be going on a road trip up to Seattle with my daughter to see some of the US. That should be great fun.