To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2024, I created two new colouring-in illustrations of notable Women in STEM – author and codebreaker Irene Jessie Brown, and geologist Charlotte Murchison. I also discuss AI enhancement tools and vision loss challenges associated with my design process.
Ada Lovelace Day
On Tuesday 8th October 2024, the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services team celebrated Ada Lovelace Day 2024 which is an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
Irene Jessie Brown (1919 – 2017)
Irene Young was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and graduate of the University of Edinburgh (UoE).
My colouring-in illustration of Irene is based on a 1944 photograph from the University of Edinburgh’s collections.
- Creator: Photographer unknown
- Collection Name: Roslin Institute
- Collection/Item Reference: Coll-1657
Permission granted by “The University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections”.
Irene Brown UoE collection URL
Charlotte Murchison (1788 – 1869)
Charlotte Murchison was a British geologist and pioneer of geological research and fossil hunting.
Charlotte Murchison Wikipedia article
My colouring-in illustration of Charlotte is based primarily on the public domain photograph of her from 1860.
Bristol Channel and Jura
It also incorporates a interpretation of the drawing by Charlotte depicting a cross-section of land, lying between the Bristol Channel and Jura.
- Title: Murchison 6
- Work Record ID: 0055375
- Holding Institution: University of Edinburgh
- Catalogue Number: Coll-51/3/3
Murchison drawing – UoE catalogue entry
Naming Spaces After Inspirational Women
On International Women’s Day 2023, the University of Edinburgh renamed a lecture theatre at its King’s Buildings campus after Charlotte in recognition of her contribution to earth sciences.
The Information Services Group have named many University spaces, both digital and physical, after inspirational women who were part of our community.
Naming Spaces After Inspirational Women
New challenges
AI enhancement tools
The only image of Charlotte Murchison that is in the public domain is very low-resolution (320 x 400 pixels). This makes my iPad tracing procedure within the iOS app ‘Procreate’ particularly challenging.
One approach I used was to experiment with Adobe Photoshop’s new AI filters. Specifically the neural filter called ‘Photo Restoration’ which does an excellent job of improving the resolution of archive photographs (2000 x 2500 pixels).
Neural filters use machine learning powered by Adobe Sensei, their cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) service.
Drag the green slider horizontally to comparison Charlotte’s original face with what enhancements the AI filter achieved.
Disability factors
I haven’t created any illustrations since losing my sight loss last year, but was determined to challenge myself to keep creating them for special events like Ada Lovelace Day.
Life Got Dark (17 November 2023)
As with almost all tasks since I lost my left eye, it takes substantially more time, planning and adaptations to perform simple activities.
For tracing these photographs I like to use my iPad and Apple Pencil to keep the lines fluid, with a strong hand-drawn aesthetic. The Procreate app allows you to pinch and zoom quite easily, but even then I struggled to see any details.
My home office has multiple magnifications aids, including angle-poised, handheld and desktop solutions. The portable USB powered desktop magnifier was the most convenient, I could position it closely over my iPad and see facial features and environmental textures unavailable to me before.
It took a lot of effort to create these new illustrations, but I was 100% committed to contribute these open-educational resources (OERs) to my university’s Ada Lovelace Day.
My friend and colleague Jackie commented on how they still retained my own personal style. This was very heart-warming and gave me some assurance about staying creative in my sight loss journey.
Further resources
We have over 30 illustrated portraits of Women in STEM that are open-licenced (attribution only). All of them have a strong connection with the University of Edinburgh, past or present.
Flickr album (slideshow)
Copyright and licence
The text, images and interactives published within this post are all intended to be shared, reused and remixed. In order to encourage this I’ve applied a Creative Commons open licence to my own content where the only requirement is to include the following attribution.
Copyright © Stewart Lamb Cromar, The University of Edinburgh 2024 CC BY.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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