Digital Humanities: 3D Printing

No charge, but students have to submit designs that are then selected for printing;

Z Corp Spectrum Z510, 3D Systems ZPrinter 650, MakerBot Replicator 2X

[News piece about University of Nevada, Engineering Library] "Earlier this year, the building's DeLaMare Science and Engineering Library became one of the first academic libraries in the United States to provide 3D scanning and printing to all students and faculty, as well as the public. The move is part of a plan by director Tod Colegrove to transform the facility from a typical library that promotes knowledge through books to one that also encourages creative thought and discussion via hands-on technology."

"Colleges and universities are finding more and more uses for 3-D-printing technology, which has grown in sophistication and fallen in price in recent years. Some proponents argue that nearly every discipline could benefit from the ability to easily create objects from customized designs. "We want this for humanities, for social sciences, for bio people, for law school, so what's interesting about 3-D printing is that it touches on all these areas," says Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering and of computing and information science at Cornell University, who is creating a 3-D-printing course for nonengineers."

The article highlights the advantages that make three-dimensional (3D) printing attractive for making mathematical models. It mentions that the difficulty in producing objects having intricate internal structures can be mitigated with the additive procedure of 3D printing. It states that 3D printing does not have big initial setup costs, in contrast to the procedure of casting from a mould.

"A natural extension of drawing in two dimensions is drawing in three dimensions. In this direction, we have been using 3D printing as an aid to visualising mathematical objects. We design sculptures that help us and others to understand the mathematics better. Also, these sculptures are beautiful in their own right!"

Abstract. 3D printing technology can help to visualize proofs in mathematics. In this document we aim to illustrate how 3D printing can help to visualize concepts and mathematical proofs. As already known to educators
in ancient Greece, models allow to bring mathematics closer to the public. The new 3D printing technology makes the realization of such tools more accessible than ever

Three-dimensional (3D) printing has the potential to transform science and technology by creating bespoke, low-cost appliances that previously required dedicated facilities to make. An attractive, but unexplored, application is to use a 3D printer to initiate chemical reactions by printing the reagents directly into a 3D reactionware matrix, and so put reactionware design, construction and operation under digital control. Here, using a low-cost 3D printer and open-source design software we produced reactionware for organic and inorganic synthesis, which included printed-in catalysts and other architectures with printed-in components for electrochemical and spectroscopic analysis. This enabled reactions to be monitored in situ so that different reactionware architectures could be screened for their efficacy for a given process, with a digital feedback mechanism for device optimization. Furthermore, solely by modifying reactionware architecture, reaction outcomes can be altered. Taken together, this approach constitutes a relatively cheap, automated and reconfigurable chemical discovery platform that makes techniques from chemical engineering accessible to typical synthetic laboratories

[Provides lots of examples for types of models to be used.] Physical models are an important form of hands-on active learning that is increasingly being replaced by virtual simulations. In this paper I propose that rapid prototyping technology has the potential to reverse this trend, and reap the educational benefits while eliminating many of the logistic difficulties that have lead to it. Moreover, the use of rapid prototyping can offer new opportunities to enhance accessibility to physical teaching models and customize them for specific personal learning needs, thereby opening new educational possibilities.

"This whitepaper does not directly answer the piracy question. 3D printing is a tool and, like any tool, can be used for productive and not-so-productive purposes... Instead, this paper is an attempt to answer the unvoiced question that comes before concerns about piracy: is this object protected by copyright in the first place?" More here: http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/so-what-deal-copyright-and-3d-printing