Hey everyone! Hope you all are having a good fall semester.
Since my last post, I have been doing a ton of work on my thesis project and I decided on a topic. As I said in my introduction, I work in the Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab with the MISHA system. Multispectral imaging has been used for pigment identification, as every pigment reflects or absorbs light differently across different wavelengths, giving each one a distinct spectral signature. I was curious if that would also work for pigments with poison or that use an animal binder (milk, eggs, animal glue). They should have a different spectral signature from regular pigments. I am going to focus on just poison books, and work with the Rochester Public Library to try and image some suspected poison books with the MISHA system. I wanted to try and connect my thesis project with what I do in the lab, and also with my minor, criminal justice, which is why I decided to try and look at poison books and protein binders. I had a bunch of other potential ideas to look at, including seeing if MISHA could be used for forensic anthropology or to detect drug soaked paper (it is a way of smuggling drugs into prison), but I decided that my research question was way too broad. I would not physically be able to do it all in a year, and I had to think about what I could realistically do, and that was studying poison books. I have been working on finding and annotating new sources, as I had to cut a bunch that were now unrelated, and editing my abstract so it reflects my topic. Next step is more editing, and starting to draft a literature review with my sources.
See you all next time!
-Allie
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