Welcome to my blog! 🙂 This is the first activity that we did in my Applied Physics 186 class and is my first entry. The class was made to reconstruct any hand-drawn plot that can be found in old journals using the modern day spreadsheet. I tried finding plots on journals in the library but I found it difficult to obtain the graph (having no scanner and photocopier at the moment). And so I decided to just look in the internet. Thanks to IEEE and UP’s free access to their site, I found a plot from one of their journals titled ‘Spectrum Analysis of Transient Response Curves‘ by Samulon, A.H. (Volume 39, Issue 2 ) which was published in the year 1951.
Figure 1. The header/title of the study
The plot was obtained from the PDF file using Snipping tool and was saved as PNG image file.
Figure 2. The hand-drawn plot obtained from an old journal
The plot was opened through paint. From there the pixel locations of several points in the graph were obtained and tabulated in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Relating the pixel location to the x and y physical quantities in the graph, I found out that 53 pixels correspond to 1/2(fc) in the x-axis while 27 pixels correspond to 0.10 Au in the y-axis. By ratio and proportion I derived an equation for interpolating the rest of the points in the graph. Plotting the newly calculated points, the reconstructed plot below was made.
Figure 3. The reconstructed graph of the hand-drawn plot
To be able to closely compare the two plots, they were superimposed. The original plot was cropped so that only the plot area remains. It served as the background.
Figure 4. Plot area of original graph
Superimposing the original and reconstructed plots gives the figure below. At first glance it looks like it fits but looking closely it can be observed that some of the grids and plot itself is a little bit off. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty accurate.
Figure 3. The superimposed plots of the original and reconstructed graphs
I can say that this method is an effective way of reconstructing plots. It’s just quite a tedious process. And you’re not that sure either that the reconstruction will exactly fit the original because hand-drawn plots may not be perfectly drawn with accuracy as compared to the computer-generated ones. Also, there are far more complicated-looking plots than the one that I used and it would be more difficult to reconstruct those. More complex or complicated programs should be used for that matter. But in this case, after seeing the new plot resembling (if not looking exactly the same as) the original plot, is already rewarding. 😀
I have understood the concept well and I think my reconstructed plot is 96%-98% accurate.
For this activity I give myself a score of 10 🙂
VenKaye's AP186 blog 