Tracing the Past: a digital analysis of the Lady Chapel vaults at Ely cathedral

Webb, Nicholas ORCID: 0000-0002-5998-1961 and Buchanan, Alexandrina ORCID: 0000-0001-9433-9651 (2018) Tracing the Past: a digital analysis of the Lady Chapel vaults at Ely cathedral. In: 2018 3rd Digital Heritage International Congress (Digital Heritage) held jointly with 2018 24th International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia (VSMM 2018), 2018-10-26 - 2018-10-30, San Francisco.

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Abstract

This paper describes how contemporary digital surveying and modelling tools are used to augment our understanding of medieval vault design. The Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral in the east of England forms a case study to demonstrate this process, which is contributing to a larger investigation of medieval vaults across England and beyond. The use of laser scanning to document church and cathedral ceilings is described and how subsequent outputs from this, notably orthographic point cloud images and 3D mesh models, enable us to interrogate key geometry relating to vault ribs. With the acquired digital data, a process of reverse engineering is performed, starting in plan followed by full 3D projections, to hypothesise how medieval vaults were designed.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	laser scanning, reverse engineering, medieval design, vaulting, 3D modelling
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	08 Nov 2018 15:33
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 01:13
DOI:	10.1109/digitalheritage.2018.8810054
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3028581