Legalized Plagiarism? Activity 2, Digital Scanning

The title somehow describes the activity we did today. Plagiarism, as I understand it is using an idea and making it appear as your own. It is best known as copying a line, sentence or paragraph and pasting it on your own work and not citing the source. The activity we did today was to reconstruct a hand drawn graph. Technically, it is not plagiarism since we did not just copy and paste a graph and make it our own. It certainly wasn't that easy either. I will also be citing the source of the graph I tried to replicate later. I should. Hopefully I remember. So now, it turns out that the title is misleading. Well, at least I hope it got your attention.

First, I looked for a hand drawn graph. I found two good ones in a book I'm supposed to be reading for my research. It is entitled Building Scientific Apparatus by Moore, Davis, Coplan published by the Addison-Wesley Publishing Company in 1983. The first one is the one used here, found in page 54 in the chapter working with glass. The first image is the raw scan.

Then I cropped it using Photoshop.

This is another graph I found but it looked too complicated so I didn't use it.

Next, I noted the pixel coordinates of the tick marks from the x-axis and plotted it in Excel. From here, I noticed that the x-axis is in the logarithmic scale. Plotting the pixel coordinate as a function of the variable on the x-axis which is wavelength, the result is an exponential. The equation of the line is is 87.658exp(0.0111x) with a pretty good R squared value

Similarly, I did the same thing for the y-axis and found that it had a linear relationship with an equation of y = -0.4808x + 104.71 and an R squared value of 1.

Next, I took the pixel coordinates of some points on the graph. I applied the transformation from pixel location to actual values namely to percent transmission as a function of the wavelength. I plotted it and placed the original scan at the back and we get the image below. Personally, I think I was able to reconstruct the graph pretty well. I give myself a 9.