Evaluating the Historical Accuracy of Blackwork Embroidery with Fractal Analysis

The intricate monochromatic embroidery that graced the collars and cuffs of Renaissance nobility and domestic materials from that era has been little studied beyond the historical costuming and crafting communities. This style, known as blackwork, for it was traditionally done in black silk on white linen, exemplifies how complex and visually-appealing designs can arise from repetition of simple forms, often demonstrating the fractal property of self-similarity. Though most blackwork patterns are not true fractals, fractal analysis offers a means of objectively quantifying their complexity and new lens through which to examine this embroidery technique. The purpose of this study was to look for trends that could be used to evaluate the historical accuracy of blackwork patterns. Images of historical patterns from the Renaissance period, historically-inspired, and modern patterns were gathered from eight published books on blackwork. The fractal dimensions of these patterns were calculated using FracLac, a fractal analysis plugin for the ImageJ software. Subsequent statistical analyses revealed several significant differences between the fractal dimensions of patterns for fillings, borders, and complete projects. Though there was some variation, a trend noted was that Renaissance-era patterns had a fractal dimension around 1.75

Evaluating the Historical Accuracy of Blackwork Embroidery Patterns with Fractal Analysis

The intricate monochromatic embroidery that graced the collars and cuffs of Renaissance nobility and various domestic materials preserved from that era, a style known as blackwork, for it was traditionally done in black silk on white linen, has been little studied outside the historical costuming and crafting communities. Fractal analysis offers a means of objectively quantifying the complexity of blackwork designs and new lens through which to examine this embroidery technique. In this study, recreations of historical blackwork patterns from the Renaissance period, historically-inspired, and modern blackwork patterns were gathered. The fractal dimensions of these patterns were calculated using Fractal Count, a fractal analysis plugin for the ImageJ software. Subsequent statistical analyses will allow questions to be asked, and hopefully answered, about change in the complexity of blackwork designs over time and as a result of various technical, artistic, and sociocultural factors. Additionally, this study looks for trends in historical blackwork patterns that can be used to evaluate the historical accuracy of modern historically-inspired patterns

A Multilingual Scrabble Game using the Googletrans Library in Python

The classic board game Scrabble is currently available in 22 different languages. The goal of this project is to write an online version of Scrabble with vastly expanded multilingual support. Googletrans is a Python library that implements the Google Translate API. This program will use the detect language feature of Googletrans to check the validity of a player’s Scrabble word in the desired language. Other aspects of this project include designing the Scrabble board, creating letter tiles to represent the characters of the different supported languages, and implementing the games mechanics in a point-and-click fashion. The final version of the game will be available online