history

History and Motivation for Datamuncher:

The Datamuncher (DM) is a side product of my PhD project at the Universities of Antwerp and Hamburg from 2008 to 2013. Subject of my PhD was the investigation of historical paintings with XRF imaging, and involved, among other things, the development of instrumentation and the evaluation of data.

Most paintings are too large to be imaged in one scan, so that the data set obtained features several sub-parts that all need to be processed with the same model. The software packages available to me in 2008 were AXIL and PyMCA. Both good software for the fitting of XRF spectra, but both focused on the evaluation of single spectra or small data sets.

As, initially, only few paintings were scanned it was not much work to organize the sub-parts and to process the data, starting every batch process manually. The starting point for Datamuncher was, when I discovered in the 7th of 8 sub-data sets that Cr was present in the painting and I had to reprocess the first six. I was frustrated and looked for a solution to have it easier in the future, e.g. not having to check every half an hour if the batch process was finished, crashed or busy.

The first feature was an routine that scanned an folder for XRF data and wrote a list of sub-data sets. The second was a routine that started series of batch scans as indicated on the list. Further, a routine to stitch the sub-scans into one image was added, widgets for adjusting contrast in the results and correcting acquisition artifacts.

The version released here is a cleaned-up version, which was originally for the research group of Prof. Koen Janssens at the University of Antwerp (now part of AXES to continue with my scanner after I left. I decided to release the source code here, as I do not have much time available to maintain it and it might be of some use to other.

Maybe it is worth mentioning, that I am a chemist and largely auto-didactic when it comes to programming. So you might encounter this feeling.