Creative Commons Copyright

Conservation of Oxide coated Metals by David Hallam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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If a technology is unpublished , unpatented and secretive then it is even harder to track. One source is the “old boys” doing reminiscences as they retire or are asked back to speak at a dinner about “outdated technologies”.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.

 

Digital workflow

One of the things I’m trying to do whilst I’m here at the Getty is to improve my digital workflow. I stopped worrying quite as much about what software I use and what operating system I use and I’m tending to concentrate more on the output.

I’m trying to ensure that my workflow can be used on any platform, Mac OS, LINUX, Windows. My basic workflow can be divided as follows;

• mind mapping
• bibliographic
• note taking
• writing
• editing.

 Mind mapping.

I use mind mapping to plot out what I think I’m going to write, and then to plot out each section. My choice of mind mapping software is really only limited by the requirement that it can output as opml. I find that my first mind maps are really exploring my thoughts as they currently stand are and they change quite drastically over the course of my project. As an aside comment I also use mind maps for doing such things as stream proposals short reports Project planning in fact many things. It is essential that the mind mapping software also has a facility for adding notes to each of the nodes in the mind map the note field is equivalent to a paragraph in a written work. My current software of choice on a Mac’s thoughts, and on Windows or Lenox its simpleminded.  I find that I thoughts is nice and clean and has all of the export functionality that I need. It pains me that it is a Mac only product and is definitely not open source. Simple mind by contrast is not really very clean and particularly if you hook it into dropbox you can find that your files are all over the place and you’re unsure of which version is which it also is not open source. Open source products such as freemind, plane mind or Docear are also available.

At the end of this process I will have a very draughty outline of how I feel the paper is going to be written.

Bibliographic

I try to do the majority of my bibliographic work online. Gone are the days when one could wander into a library and just find some books in the catalogue and then browse the shelves. Wherever possible I try to download the bibliographic data from wherever I have done the searches. On this current project I am finding the Getty’s online primo search to be invaluable. It allows me to look at what the Getty has in its collection first. Download the bibliographic data. And then spread the search wider.

For scientific papers I also use scope this and Google scholar. Please also don’t forget to use Google or being because both of these will capture when an academic has posted their papers to their own webpage. This can avoid the hassle of having to find something that is behind a pay wall. I tend to give open access periodical is a preference.

When I am searching the web I tend to capture my search results into Evernote and have a folder for each project the great thing about Evernote is that you can use it’s quite substantial search characteristics. The other wonderful thing about Evernote is that it will be accessible from any device that is network connected. Devon think is a product many people on Macs use but I find it too limited as it only works on one device and operating system.

Bibliographic software is quite crucial. I find that Zotero is best. Yes it doesn’t have a sexy interface but you can use it for collecting both bibliographic data from papers and also cataloguing appropriate blogs and academic websites. For capturing websites you need to use as tarot within Firefox. When I’m not capturing websites I tend to use is Zotero stand-alone.

Note taking

 If I’m not very careful I tend to end up with notes scattered all over the place, notebooks, digital notepads, scraps of paper and wood documents. What I have managed to do with this project is limit my note taking to Zotero, and within PDFs filed in Zotero.  I use is Zotfile to extract annotations, and store them in Zotero. I feel find that when I am reading a book or a large paper that it is useful to use speech recognition to record my comments in a text file. That text file can then be pasted into is Zotero as a note.

Obviously as I go through lit reading the literature and taking notes I will be having some brainstorms. Depending on where I am I will record these in Google Doc, or Google notes. From there they can easily be copied to’s Zotero  or they can be used to modify my mind maps.

Writing.

I use scriveners as my writing program of choice. All of my notes will be copied into the research section of my Scriven file. The outline of the mind map will be exported as OPM L and will provide the basic structure for my ritual written document. My notes bibliographic data and other thoughts can now be used to assist with my writing.

Again use voice recognition rather than typing for a majority of my written work. Currently I use Dragon product for my voice recognition. I must admit I get very frustrated with its constant demands to be updated and its constant inability to run on the present version of Mac OS without being updated. For some reason the cost of the updates always seems to be about the same as the cost of a brand-new version. Dragon would have to be one of the least open and most frustrating organisations to deal with as soon as there is a viable option I will use it.The main problem with using voice recognition software is that people think you’re rather mad sitting in a room talking to yourself. It can also be quite distracting for fellow workers in an open office space.

Editing.

Once I have finished my writing I normally check the document over in Scribner making sure that all of the sections are falling as I want them, stations are inserted and that they flow in the way I want them. I then compile the document. This time I’m going to try and use the RTF function of is it Aero to identify my citations and insert them after compilation. We will see how this goes. I expect to do the final checking and editing in libra office having used scriveners compilation to libra office.

 I will also use the compilation function to export drafts of sections which can then be posted to this website for external comment. Again and experiment.

Let’s see how these last two sections go.

 

Salt and Sugar

Coffee, Salt and sugar.
I’m amazed how much salt and sugar is hidden in average American sorry United States food. To make it even worse it’s hard to tell where this material is hidden because the labeling seems to give a priority to calories and lists everything as a percentage of the average daily income which is assumed to be 2000 cal. So things like sugar and salt are then listed as a percentage of the average daily in take for a mythical portion.
I used to moan about food labelling in Australia because it wouldn’t list many things by name but this system means that you never know whether one food has more salt or sugar than another because each of them tends to use different portions in their calculations. The Australian system of doing it as a percentage of the product by weight may not be ideal but it beats the hell out of this crazy system over here.
I think the only way of avoiding excess sugar salt and other additives is to buy directly from the producer or to make it yourself even then I wonder...
Mind you I must admit I am having a wonderful time discovering or rediscovering things about the United States and its consumption of food.
Did find decent coffee though. At a Vietnamese bakers. See around soon!

.. as a Getty Scholar

Amazing….

How often in your professional career have you been told .. “Be selfish” this time is your time to do research! Well I’ve now been here at the Getty as a Scholar at GCI for 6 weeks out of my 3 month stint. I have heard this mantra for some time now.. Today from the head of GCI and yes they’ll  mean it.. Because if you are here e for 3 month you can get amazing things done - but - you do need to be selfish. 3 months is not long but.. it is long enough and can spread the projects further.

I mean how often can you ignore emails and just bury your head in a supurb real and virtual library ignoring all else? How often can you ask staff if you can talk about analysis possibilities and get a . "Yes once I return from *** ". we will talk as that sounds interesting. This place is - buzzing with activity. And ideas.

Then that night its a scholar “potluck” dinner so you have to provide something. Preferably edible. Eventually you end up in a heated discussion on the pros and cons of open source access to data with a bunch of art historians. Magic.

We did not agree but did debate -

The opportunity to actually ignore the world for 3 months and focus on “one” project is magic. The Getty program is amazing as it on brings together artists, art history scholars and conservators under one roof of the scholar housing. Interchange is going to happen. no matter.

As a modern metals conservator who specialises in technology objects I feel very privileged to be here - I am not from the art world - but I do not feel out of place. The digital scholarship push unites us in ways we could never have seen a decade ago. It’s magic.

This makes the potluck dinners magic and eventful as we debate the end of academic process as we know it …. currently

Thank you Getty.

The conservation Oxide and Conversion coated metals

I’ve been lucky enough to get some time at the Getty Conservation Institute to carry out the following projects. Thank you Getty Foundation for the funding.

I will update progress on this page.

The characterisation and conservation of conversion coatings on modern metals

Project description

The project came out of a desire to update the 1993 article by Adams and Hallam and the obvious need that was seen during the Aluminum Conference in April 2014 for a guide to the identification of coatings on modern metals.

Expected outcomes

Hence the project aims to;

• Produce a review article on the conservation of oxide coatings on Modern Metals

• Construct an article on the history and technology of oxide coatings on modern metals  aimed at the objects conservation community.

• Produce a identification flow chart which could be developed into an online decision aid.

Methodology

• Review relevant literature.

• Survey the needs of the conservation community the online surveys.

• Gather published, unpublished and historical information into a bibliographic database

• Write review articles (Getty)

• Publish review articles  

• Look for information in parallel field such as military and forensic sciences.

• Develop and test decision tree both in workshops and online. (Getty)

• Publish decision tree in an online form

Project contribution to the advancement of the field

The awareness of oxide coatings importance to the aesthetic and function of modern metals in the conservation and curatorial fields is still minimal. Traditional techniques are still used to conserve steel, zinc and aluminium.

The ability to understand, recognize and conserve such coating will be useful in the following fields;

• art conservation

• technology conservation

• architecture

• historic objects

What is a Technological Conservator?

A (large) Technological Objects Conservator

These are some thoughts for discussion.

What is Technological Objects Conservator;

• a conservator, with a mechanical competence, and the ability to apply materials science to complex projects.
• a person with high grade hand skills and LTO treatment experience.
• a materials scientist
• a project coordinator
• a team leader
• a philosopher
• a team builder mentor and confidant
• a technological history expert
• has a high degree of understanding of engineering culture

What a Technology Conservator needs to be;

• a chemist, materials expert, metals conservator with a wide base in materials deterioration
• *a pragmatist*
• ~~a treatment development specialist~~
• a person who understands and appreciate engineering culture
• a person who understands the value and worth of specialist trade skills and training in a heritage context.
• *a Technological History curator*
• A person who is able to bring together the intent of the creators intent in a meaningful and considered way. 

What a Technological Objects Conservator is not;

• restorer
• a tradesman
• an objects conservator
• a conservation manager
• a history curator

What do technology conservators do differently ;

• understands the concept and responsibility to conserve form and function in an object
• describe objects by function
• understand that it is nessesary to measure in the units in which the object was made - not mm.
  • dutch inches for a 16 century dutch object
  • thou if it was made in the UK
  • UNF if it was made in the USA
  • centimetres if it was made in France
  • Inches/feet if it was Japanese naval..
  • and so on
• talk about wear rates and risk
• can make paint cross sections in their sleep
• understand coating systems history
• understand the significance of the original surface
• understand the curatorial need to restore with incomplete information
• are information getters, object archeologists for the curators.

Sunday, 19. October 2014 11:14AM

Life in a degrowth ecomony..

Just thought I'd republish this here as it raises important points.

Thanks to Creative Commons and the author Samuel Alexander from University of Melbourne. 

Life in a 'degrowth' economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

By Samuel Alexander, University of Melbourne
What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever.
This week’s Addicted to Growth conference in Sydney is exploring how to move beyond growth economics and towards a “steady-state” economy.
But what is a steady-state economy? Why it is it desirable or necessary? And what would it be like to live in?

The global predicament

We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more resources. We would need one and a half Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. Every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.
At the same time, there are great multitudes around the world who are, by any humane standard, under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge of eliminating global poverty is likely to increase the burden on ecosystems still further.
Meanwhile the population is set to hit 11 billion this century. Despite this, the richest nations still seek to grow their economies without apparent limit.
Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-orientated civilisation suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.

Degrowth to a steady-state economy

The idea of the steady-state economy presents us with an alternative. This term is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that we simply need to maintain the size of the existing economy and stop seeking further growth.
But given the extent of ecological overshoot – and bearing in mind that the poorest nations still need some room to develop their economies and allow the poorest billions to attain a dignified level of existence – the transition will require the richest nations to downscale radically their resource and energy demands.
This realisation has given rise to calls for economic “degrowth”. To be distinguished from recession, degrowth means a phase of planned and equitable economic contraction in the richest nations, eventually reaching a steady state that operates within Earth’s biophysical limits.

In a world of 7.2 billion and counting, we need to think hard about our fair share. Karpov Oleg/Shutterstock

At this point, mainstream economists will accuse degrowth advocates of misunderstanding the potential of technology, markets, and efficiency gains to “decouple” economic growth from environmental impact. But there is no misunderstanding here. Everyone knows that we could produce and consume more efficiently than we do today. The problem is that efficiency without sufficiency is lost.
Despite decades of extraordinary technological advancement and huge efficiency improvements, the energy and resource demands of the global economy are still increasing. This is because within a growth-orientated economy, efficiency gains tend to be reinvested in more consumption and more growth, rather than in reducing impact.
This is the defining, critical flaw in growth economics: the false assumption that all economies across the globe can continue growing while radically reducing environmental impact to a sustainable level. The extent of decoupling required is simply too great. As we try unsuccessfully to “green” capitalism, we see the face of Gaia vanishing.
The very lifestyles that were once considered the definition of success are now proving to be our greatest failure. Attempting to universalise affluence would be catastrophic. There is absolutely no way that today’s 7.2 billion people could live the Western way of life, let alone the 11 billion expected in the future. Genuine progress now lies beyond growth. Tinkering around the edges of capitalism will not cut it.
We need an alternative.

Enough for everyone, forever

When one first hears calls for degrowth, it is easy to think that this new economic vision must be about hardship and deprivation; that it means going back to the stone age, resigning ourselves to a stagnant culture, or being anti-progress. Not so.
Degrowth would liberate us from the burden of pursuing material excess. We simply don’t need so much stuff – certainly not if it comes at the cost of planetary health, social justice, and personal well-being. Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning.

Do we really need to buy all this stuff anyway? Radu Bercan/Shutterstock

Degrowth, by contrast, would involve embracing what has been termed the “simpler way” – producing and consuming less.
This would be a way of life based on modest material and energy needs but nevertheless rich in other dimensions – a life of frugal abundance. It is about creating an economy based on sufficiency, knowing how much is enough to live well, and discovering that enough is plenty.
The lifestyle implications of degrowth and sufficiency are far more radical than the “light green” forms of sustainable consumption that are widely discussed today. Turning off the lights, taking shorter showers, and recycling are all necessary parts of what sustainability will require of us, but these measures are far from enough.
But this does not mean we must live a life of painful sacrifice. Most of our basic needs can be met in quite simple and low-impact ways, while maintaining a high quality of life.

What would life be like in a degrowth society?

In a degrowth society we would aspire to localise our economies as far and as appropriately as possible. This would assist with reducing carbon-intensive global trade, while also building resilience in the face of an uncertain and turbulent future.
Through forms of direct or participatory democracy we would organise our economies to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and then redirect our energies away from economic expansion. This would be a relatively low-energy mode of living that ran primarily on renewable energy systems.
Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy-intensive global society of high-end consumers. A degrowth society embraces the necessity of “energy descent”, turning our energy crises into an opportunity for civilisational renewal.
We would tend to reduce our working hours in the formal economy in exchange for more home-production and leisure. We would have less income, but more freedom. Thus, in our simplicity, we would be rich.
Wherever possible, we would grow our own organic food, water our gardens with water tanks, and turn our neighbourhoods into edible landscapes as the Cubans have done in Havana. As my friend Adam Grubb so delightfully declares, we should “eat the suburbs”, while supplementing urban agriculture with food from local farmers’ markets.

Community gardens, like this one in San Francisco, can help achieve sufficiency. Kevin Krejci/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

We do not need to purchase so many new clothes. Let us mend or exchange the clothes we have, buy second-hand, or make our own. In a degrowth society, the fashion and marketing industries would quickly wither away. A new aesthetic of sufficiency would develop, where we creatively re-use and refashion the vast existing stock of clothing and materials, and explore less impactful ways of producing new clothes.
We would become radical recyclers and do-it-yourself experts. This would partly be driven by the fact that we would simply be living in an era of relative scarcity, with reduced discretionary income.
But human beings find creative projects fulfilling, and the challenge of building the new world within the shell of the old promises to be immensely meaningful, even if it will also entail times of trial. The apparent scarcity of goods can also be greatly reduced by scaling up the sharing economy, which would also enrich our communities.
One day, we might even live in cob houses that we build ourselves, but over the next few critical decades the fact is that most of us will be living within the poorly designed urban infrastructure that already exists. We are hardly going to knock it all down and start again. Instead, we must ‘retrofit the suburbs’, as leading permaculturalist David Holmgren argues. This would involve doing everything we can to make our homes more energy-efficient, more productive, and probably more densely inhabited.
This is not the eco-future that we are shown in glossy design magazines featuring million-dollar “green homes” that are prohibitively expensive.
Degrowth offers a more humble – and I would say more realistic – vision of a sustainable future.

Making the change

A degrowth transition to a steady-state economy could happen in a variety of ways. But the nature of this alternative vision suggests that the changes will need to be driven from the “bottom up”, rather than imposed from the “top down”.
What I have written above highlights a few of the personal and household aspects of a degrowth society based on sufficiency (for much more detail, see here and here). Meanwhile, the ‘transition towns’ movement shows how whole communities can engage with the idea.
But it is critical to acknowledge the social and structural constraints that currently make it much more difficult than it needs to be to adopt a lifestyle of sustainable consumption. For example, it is hard to drive less in the absence of safe bike lanes and good public transport; it is hard find a work-life balance if access to basic housing burdens us with excessive debt; and it is hard to re-imagine the good life if we are constantly bombarded with advertisements insisting that “nice stuff” is the key to happiness.
Actions at the personal and household levels will never be enough, on their own, to achieve a steady-state economy. We need to create new, post-capitalist structures and systems that promote, rather than inhibit, the simpler way of life. These wider changes will never emerge, however, until we have a culture that demands them. So first and foremost, the revolution that is needed is a revolution in consciousness.
I do not present these ideas under the illusion that they will be readily accepted. The ideology of growth clearly has a firm grip on our society and beyond. Rather, I hold up degrowth up as the most coherent framework for understanding the global predicament and signifying the only desirable way out of it.
The alternative is to consume ourselves to death under the false banner of “green growth”, which would not be smart economics.

Samuel Alexander does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.