Description

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This volume details Virtual Anthropology, a new branch of science that combines elements from such different fields as anthropology, radiology, forensics, mathematics, and computer science. It offers an ideal introduction into the discipline. Coverage details medical imaging and digitizing techniques as well as the analysis and reconstruction of morphology based on spatial geometry of biological objects. Many examples of real applications and future perspectives are featured throughout the volume. In addition, an accompanying DVD contains instructive exercises, answers, links to free software, and 2D and 3D data, allowing readers to take their first steps into the subject. The volume carefully walks readers, step-by-step into the methods of operation to particularly understand their relevance for research and society. It is ideal for all kinds of students from biological to medical and technical fields as well as by teachers, journalists, and interested laymen.

About the Author

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Gerhard W. Weber is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna. A pioneer in digital extensions of anthropology since the early 1990s, he leads the Virtual Anthropology workgroup and the Vienna Micro-CT Lab as well as other projects at the University of Vienna towards centred on the new technology. He also established the digital@rchive of Fossil Hominoids and initiated and coordinated the EU-funded European Virtual Anthropology Network. He has been active for a decade in field work in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia. His teaching comprises applied statistics, human evolution, and Virtual Anthropology. Fred L. Bookstein, an American, is Professor of Morphometrics at the University of Vienna and Professor of Statistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the principal figure responsible for the emergence of Morphometrics over the last quarter-century as an interdisciplinary method combining medical imaging, analytic geometry, and multivariate statistics in novel tools for the analysis of biological form and its variation. The course he most enjoys teaching is Numbers and Reasons, about the origins of quantitative methods in the real world.