00:12
Hello! Hi Asami. How are you?
Can one use that one is jet-lagged as a reason for general low energy excuses?
I believe that anywhere up to forever is just fine.
Oh, so you're just like, you're just permanently jet-lagged.
Yeah, perma-jet-lagged is totally normal, I think.
So yeah, it's been two full weeks since I got back to Asia time zone.
Yeah.
So I feel like I'm kind of, my excuses are expiring.
I am no longer waking up at 4am.
However, my work people, many of them don't know that I was in Japan a week prior.
So I'm just telling them that I'm still a little bit jet-lagged.
Clever, clever, clever.
And they're like, oh my god, I know.
It's like, you are like, what, 14 hours behind us?
Something like that.
Yes, let me bask in your understanding and sympathy.
Yeah, yeah. So that's the excuse I'm using so far.
But yeah, otherwise, you know, back to the regular programming, I guess.
Yep, you're back to the regular programming.
How are you?
I'm okay. My programming didn't change.
I've been doing my thing.
I can't even process what's going on now.
I think there's lots of grading.
There's a lot of end of semester feedback type things.
End of semester, or is it the beginning of semester?
I don't know which one.
Nearing the end.
Yeah, nearing the end.
So things are rolling out.
But yeah, I mean, your transition, right, to being 14 hours behind,
yeah, that's the right way,
was because you were out and about, right, at a conference?
I was. I had to go do my civic duty of saying hello to people
who give me money to do my research and who pays my salary.
And I also had a conference at the end of it.
So I actually was in D.C. for a week on this conference.
And that was my first conservation science conference debut.
This was the debut.
This deserves a little celebration, maybe.
I would clap and celebrate.
I think so.
I think so.
I mean, this is my first conference I'm giving non-poster talks.
03:04
So I'm giving an actual oral talk sections.
That was like 20 minutes talk.
So that's like, it's pretty big too, right, usually?
Because those ACS conferences,
that's a big deal, yeah.
When you do get those oral sections, it's like eight minutes.
Yeah, APS especially.
Yeah, I mean, those are giant conferences.
But I think, yeah, I was like, 20 minutes?
Shit, that's a long time.
I mean, the conference is pretty small,
maybe like 150 people or so on very, very specific topic.
The conference in conservation science is already small.
And it is specifically featured like two imaging techniques.
And like the users of that as a way of, you know, sort of like,
so it's a very narrowly defined conference.
So I guess, you know,
a nobody like me also got to present for 20 minutes as well.
Look, you went there, you were a somebody, you are a somebody.
You come in and you say, I'm here,
I'm going to give a 20 minute talk and you're going to listen.
But I mean, I might have shared this with you prior to flying for a conference.
But, you know, this is like a new field as well.
I legitimately don't know anyone.
And my PI who was supposed to come with me and co-present on this talk
was not able to come for various reasons.
So like a few weeks before the conference, he's like,
Asami, I can't go. Good luck. You'll be fine.
Well, wishes and all that. Goodbye.
Well, yeah, thanks. I can do the talk.
In fact, I wrote the bulk of talk anyway on my own.
Sure.
You know, it would be helpful if you're like there to introduce me to these people
so that I don't have to do this myself.
But at the end, it was fine.
What was nice about being a speaker at the conference is that
once you finish your talk, people come to you.
You don't have to go to them.
They come to you wanting to talk more about your talk
or asking me about specific experience and whatnot.
So that was nice.
And a lot of people seem to be very interested in what I was preparing,
06:02
what I prepare for this conference,
which was actually kind of like a side quest to my main project.
It's not even the main part of my project.
It's kind of something we put together a few months ago.
And unlike any of the research project I've ever ventured on,
it worked within the first few times.
I had a decent sort of promising results.
My talk was basically very preliminary, but very promising.
It was my spiel.
And people bought it.
People did think it was promising.
I don't know if you want to put it as people bought it.
I don't know.
I don't know yet.
There are a ton of cleaning up to do.
In fact, one of the big parts I anticipate to be a hurdle
is denoising of the data that we do get,
because the data we get is very interesting.
Maybe I'll spend some other episode talking a little bit more in details
about what this talk is about.
Basically, in a very high-level way,
my new method takes advantage of the noisy nature of the signal.
And using that sort of randomly generated noise-like signal,
I can sort of do some statistics magic to pick and choose
what slices belong to what signal and whatnot.
But that means my data is inherently very noisy.
I think in order to make it publishable,
I do need to come up with a pretty robust denoising protocol.
That's sort of like word trial and error as we speak.
But even without denoising, the data looks pretty promising.
It looks like it's demonstrating what I think it should be doing.
That was pretty cool, and people thought it was pretty cool too.
Yeah, that's awesome.
But this conference, though, gave me a lot of food for thought
in terms of what kind of researcher I want to be
09:03
in this field of conservation science.
I mean, I know that this is like n equals one conference
that I've been to in this field, and it's not even the biggest conference.
So I should really take it as a grain of salt.
It's not representative of the entire field by any means.
However, there were many of the major players of the field, right?
Okay, that's important, yeah.
So I'm kind of extrapolating it big time.
But basically, conservation science, you can divide the science people
here in this field into roughly two camps.
One who is object-oriented, so like artwork-oriented.
Their question is very strongly tied to the specific artwork
that they're interested in or their museum is interested in.
So their questions are like, what are the materials that are used
by the artist?
What are the specific techniques that are used by the artist?
And they're using scientific tools to understand the pattern
or evolution of the artistic style or the material changes.
And whether that coincides with the artistic practice changing
or the stylistic changes of the artist.
Okay.
You know, because sometimes artists become more famous,
and they're suddenly able to afford more expensive materials.
And that's sort of like a signifier sometimes of changes
in the development of an artist's life.
So those are some...
Some people's questions are more oriented specifically to art
and the artists, which I think is also interesting.
You know, not discounting that at all.
Is that like anthropological in nature or something?
Like it's about the people that were sort of involved behind the art?
Yeah.
The main question is about the art.
The main question is about the artist.
Yeah.
And to a certain extent, materials, right?
Because that is directly related to what the artist is trying to achieve.
Got it. Okay.
Or it's directly reflective of the artist's specific choice.
Like maybe it was super rebellious to use a particular glue
over another glue.
Or maybe that was specifically innovative about that artist
12:01
to be using the material in a certain way.
And these are the kind of questions that curators are interested in,
art historians are interested in,
and, well, a museum at large is also interested in, right?
So using science to answer these kind of questions
is one camp of people.
The other camp of people are more interested in
sort of engineering problems.
Because most of the time you're trying to look at artworks
that are one of a kind, super expensive,
or like, you know, priceless practically.
Like completely super valuable as a cultural heritage.
And you want to know everything about it.
You want to get the most out of tiny, tiny, tiny sample.
Ideally, you come up with non-invasive way to analyze them.
So without sampling like bits and pieces from the artwork, right?
And imaging happens to be one of those techniques.
You can just scan the entire painting or, you know,
do some nature of scanning and get the images.
And you get a certain amount of information out of it.
Because paintings, one can argue that it's 3D,
but paintings or artworks in general can be,
it's a 2D information, right?
It might be layered, like multiple layers of them are there,
but it's 2D information.
It makes sense to analyze them in a 2D way like an imaging.
And so, I mean, it's not just limited to imaging, right?
Like you can do molecular spectroscopy, like FTIR, Raman,
like those things you can do and get chemical information.
You can do X-ray diffraction, also get compound information.
You can get elemental information from it.
People do XRF, X-ray fluorescence as well.
People do all sorts of things to, you know,
get the most out of these precious materials and precious artworks.
You can do a lot with a piece of art and never mind the cultural importance, right?
It's a very specific combination of very scarce sample
and very sensitive sample.
And also we don't know the extent of mixture
or we don't know the extent of deterioration.
We don't know how damaged they are.
So it's like a hyper-difficult analytical chemistry problem, right?
Yes, yeah, it does sound exactly like that.
Yeah, you not only don't know what they're made of,
you don't know how damaged they are.
You don't know if it's a representative part of the artwork.
You don't know so many other questions.
Yeah, it's one of those worst situations to start with
15:02
where you begin with way more unknowns than you have known variables.
And so you sort of have to work by filling those in
until you're able to do more, right?
Okay, wow.
Yeah, and make it extra hard by making it an unknown mixture
because more often than not, it's a mixture.
It's a heterogeneous material or a sample.
Well, it's not like it was neatly and nicely mixed
and concentrated to 12 point something.
No, no, no, no, no.
It was whatever color I needed at the time with the tools that I had on hand.
Exactly, and when you're trying to look at artworks from hundreds of years ago,
how reliable are they, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So there are so many questions on it,
and you quickly hit the wall of resolution,
whether it's chemical trace resolution,
whether it's spatial resolution or spectral resolution.
You really hit sort of the limit of how finely combed can your combs be.
And that's where we also come in, conservation scientists,
like kind of coming up with ever more sophisticated way
that would tackle very specific problems that cultural heritage material faces.
So I am more interested in that kind of question.
It's like, how can I improve the resolution?
How can I get chemical specificity without losing spatial resolution, for instance?
That's the kind of question I'm interested in.
I don't care what artwork I'm looking at.
It just makes me tackle different problems, and that's it.
I found out that I am kind of a minority in the field for being interested in this kind of...
Really? Okay.
I thought the split was like roughly 50-50,
people who are interested in art historical questions
versus people who are interested in science questions.
Turns out it's more like 70-30 or like 80-20.
Oh, wow. Okay. Yep.
And it kind of makes sense because most of the time,
the research grant is given to a museum whose interests are primarily historical questions.
And therefore, the people who are doing the research
also tend to be interested in art historical research.
My grant is coming from university, so that's a little bit different situation.
18:02
Right. Okay.
Where I am required to generate scientific advancement
and sort of scientific novelty is more important
than the novelty as an art history knowledge.
So a bit fine line to negotiate for sure,
because you do have to respond to both needs in this field.
But that's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time!
