Hello. This video is part of a series introducing key concepts about data collection for the From the Ground Up Research Project, a partnership grant sponsored by the Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada and based at the University of British Columbia. For more about the project, visit our website at frogbearer.org. We'll be going outside the CK Troy building on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to talk about a common but sometimes challenging task in documenting East Asian religious sites, working with inscriptions on stone or epigraphy. As you might know, for centuries, the most common method for reproducing stone inscriptions was to make ink squeezes, sometimes called rubbings, by placing a sheet of paper over the face of the inscription and inking the raised portions, leaving the incised surface white. This produces an exact and detailed copy of the inscription that's portable and life-sized, but it's not always practical. First of all, it requires skill and time, making it impractical for short field trips with lots of material to document. Second, over time, repeated inking and rubbing wears down the stone and it leaves ink on the surface, so the custodians of historic sites are rightfully wary about giving permission to make ink squeezes. And in some locations, the inscriptions are visible but inaccessible. Photography is our next best option. It's fast and accurate, but it can still be surprisingly difficult to create good photographs of inscriptions. That's because there's often very little visual contrast between the surface of an inscription and the insized portions. Looking at the inscription straight on, it can be hard to tell whether there's an inscription there at all. So a photograph will only show a uniform stone surface and you'll end up with a folder of newly identical, gray, unreadable images. This video will introduce some techniques for overcoming that problem. Here, we have only a handful of inscriptions, but in some sites you may have many more. So the first step is to survey the site and figure out the scale of the task, by their 5, 50 or 500 inscriptions. If there are too many to photograph them all in the time you have, how will you choose? On a recent trip in China, we decided that we couldn't document inscriptions from 1949 or later. But of course, if your interest is in modern religious activities, you might have the opposite plan. In some cases, the older inscriptions are already well documented, but the newer ones have been ignored. Once you have an idea of which inscriptions you'll be documenting, it's a good idea to assign them numbers, so that you can coordinate all the information you'll be collecting about them. Ideally, map out the inscriptions first, assigning a number to each. If you're going to visit multiple sites on a trip, you can give each site or zone a short code to identify it and restart the number for each site. For example, we can call this location, CK Choi Building, CK C, and number the stones CK C01, CK C02, 0304, and CK C05. Make sure to include the leading 0 in the number so that the records will stay in order when you sort them. All of this work is best done in a team, or actually in multiple teams. One team can record the physical details, such as measurements and physical condition, while another takes photos. The team doing the photography should consist of at least two people, but preferably more. Once there's a numbering system in place for the inscriptions to decide, they should create a checklist to ensure that they get to every inscription. If location and context are important, as is often the case at religious sites, it's important to take some overview photos that show the inscriptions in their surroundings. Let's take a couple of pictures that show the stones in relation to one another and to the buildings around them. As you can see, we're using a whiteboard to indicate the content of the photos that will follow. This is helpful in many contexts, but vital when documenting a pygrify, so you can sort out hundreds of similar looking photos. You can simply update the code number for each inscription as you move through the site. This will make it very easy to group your photos into records for the repository. Typically, you'll create one record for each stone and perhaps additional records for the context photos that show multiple stones together. If we just point the camera at it and shoot, most inscriptions will be almost invisible. The problem is that the natural light is illuminating all the surfaces of the stone equally, and the inscription doesn't stand out. The best way to overcome this is through what is called raking light, light that comes from the side almost parallel to the surface. Much less of this light reaches the recesses of the inscription, so those portions are left in shadow, while the flat surface is illuminated. Sometimes, sunlight will hit a stone at just the right angle and light up the surface in this way, revealing the inscription in sharp relief. But we're not always that lucky, so we have to create those conditions artificially. The technique we recommend is using a flash, which is through a very bright light on the surface of the stone, overpowering the ambient light. You can also try using a piece of cloth or cardboard to block out the sunlight if possible. The flash needs to come from the side of the inscription, so it has to be controlled wireless e from off the camera. There are various systems for this, the most reliable ones use radio control, and some are actually quite inexpensive. This system uses a small battery-powered transmitter that attaches to the camera's flash mount, called the hot shoe, and a receiver that the flash sits on. Some flashes have a built-in receiver. The camera setting we recommend is manual or M mode, with an ISO of 100 or 200, and ideally an aperture of F8 or higher, up to F16. Some cameras also have a special mode that sinks with the flash, you could try that instead. You can place the flash some distance from the inscription and a few centimeters from the plane of its surface. Exactly where and at what angle is something you'll need to figure out by trial and error. We've found that in general, illumination from the left side is more effective than illumination from the top or the right. So, take a shot, check it in the camera, and try again. You can also change the power of the flash. We've found that half power is usually sufficient in shadow, but full power was often necessary against bright sunlight. You should make sure that the details are clearly visible, and that everything in the photo is in sharp focus. You may need to zoom in on the display to achieve this. A tripod makes it much easier to retake the same shot while changing settings. You'll also have to monitor how much of the surface is lit up by the flash. On large inscriptions, only one section at a time might be illuminated, so you'll have to take several photos to capture the whole thing. If you do that, make sure to leave plenty of overlap between the sections, so that viewers can easily figure out how they relate to each other. In that case, it's best to take a wide shot of the whole stone, too. Just as important as getting good photos is creating good metadata. Inscriptions are often complex objects that require extra documentation that doesn't easily fit into the standard Frogbear metadata template. This includes things like the physical dimensions, authorship, and dating of the inscriptions. So we recommend recording these details and creating a spreadsheet of additional metadata to record them. This can be included in the repository as a separate file that links to the individual records. At least one team member should be assigned to collecting this information. Record as much as you can while you're on site. This includes physical data such as measurements and condition of the stone, as well as information about its content, such as tidal, date, and authorship. Figuring out this historical information is one of the most difficult tasks, especially if the stone is in poor condition. It should be done by someone with subject matter expertise who can spot and decipher relevant details. For example, sometimes the title and date of an inscription are missing, but a historian can assign an approximate date based on clues such as people mentioned in the text or the calligraphic style. This is a great opportunity for training students. An experienced researcher could be paired up with a student who takes the notes and learns how a scholar works with this material. The notes could also include a map sketching out the locations of the inscriptions. Thanks for watching this video. Other videos in this series discuss basic camera techniques and how to produce useful photographs of documents and objects, as well as correctly formatted metadata. For more about the data and metadata requirements for the project, visit our website at frogbear.org. You