Course 9: Imaging Technologies in DH

Peter Fornaro · University of Basel

Lecturer

Peter Fornaro is a Professor and Head of Research Projects at the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel, bringing a background in electrical engineering, experimental physics, and scientific photography to the study of digital visual media. His research focuses on digital imaging, color science, 2D and 3D visualization, and the long-term archiving of visual cultural heritage, with applications ranging from photographic collections to 3D representations of complex artifact surfaces. He has worked with institutions such as NASA and is actively involved in projects like Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA) and Digital Materiality. Fornaro is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and a contributor to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Fornaro gives a technical introduction to digital imaging for digital humanities. He widens the concept of an image beyond photography to include screens, moving-image streams, and many other visual outputs, then explains the digital basis of images through binary encoding, file formats, pixels, and sampling.

Main Points

Digital images should be understood broadly, from photographs and scans to e-reader displays, interface graphics, and cinema projection.
All digital media are built from binary data; what those bits mean depends on format, metadata, and interpretation.
The lecture explains why binary encoding is practical for computing even though it is far from human intuition.
Images are sampled representations made of pixels, and image quality depends on factors such as resolution, color information, and storage trade-offs.
Fornaro presents imaging as a technical foundation for how humanities researchers create, store, and use visual data.

Examples Mentioned

Kindle displays and iPod cover graphics
Digital cinema as a stream of images
JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and other file formats
Camera sensors and sampled landscape images

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 9_Fornaro_Imaging Technologies.txt

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