Internet Archaeol. 17. Allison. 6.2 Capturing the Vetera plans

6.2 Capturing the Vetera plans

The first step in the process of transferring printed site plans into GIS drawings involves digitally scanning the site plans.

For this project, each plan, or set of plans, had limitations that needed to be overcome before they could be scanned and then digitised for use in GIS. For example, there was no single published plan of the entire Vetera I site. The twelve plans of the excavated areas of Vetera I were at various scales (Hanel 1995, plans 1-12), which meant that they had to be consolidated to a common scale before they could be digitised.

All of the Vetera I plans were scanned using a large-format digital scanner and were saved as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files. The different scales and alignments in the digitised Vetera I plans were rectified as far as possible using Adobe Photoshop. The results were adequate for digitisation, though some parts still required careful visual interpretation to decipher the detail of the original plans.