Saturday, September 27, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Artifactor Scanning System”
By
Tara Johnson
at
Children’s Natural History Museum, 4074 Eggers Drive, Fremont, CA 94536 and via Zoom

A simple, convenient, fast, and durable system for unidirectionally scanning three-dimensional objects has many applications in archaeological fieldwork and cataloging collections. Please join us for a presentation on and demonstration of the Artifactor Scan System, a fossil and artifact scanning platform created by Tara Johnson and manufactured at Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale, CA. Using the Widar software (subscription required), scans take approximately 3-5 minutes to collect and 15-20 minutes to process. Please feel free to bring your iPhone and a non-fragile artifact, roughly 1 cubic foot in size, to try scanning for yourself. The Artifactor Scan System is still a prototype, with new types of clamping supports under active development, so feedback on possible new use cases would be greatly appreciated.

Tara Johnson is a senior at Irvington High School in Fremont, CA. She has eight years of experience applying computer modeling, programming, and rapid prototyping technologies in the digital humanities. She is the creator of the Artifactor scanning system, which was prototyped at Maker Nexus and is being tested in collaboration with the Children’s Natural History of Fremont. She is also a contributor to Pyhiero, a Python-based computational linguistics processor that translates Manual de Codage (MdC) notation to Unicode Egyptian hieroglyphs.
You are invited to attend in person but the presentation will be available in a webinar. The presentation will start at 2:00 pm PT and formally conclude at 3:30 PM.
Friends are welcome and also invited to join our organization. There is no participation fee but there is an entrance fee at the museum.