I have been wrestling with my concepts for an interesting project, trying to make it happen through all the nuts and bolts of collecting a data set, cleaning it up, etc., when it finally occurred to me that I was attempting to do too much, as far as sample size goes.  Watching Lev Manovich’s workshop last week on ImageJ and ImagePlot, ImageMontage and ImageSlice, I realized that his image sets and most especially the corresponding data files took months to assemble and organize, and the work was done manually by a team of paid volunteers.  So I began to relax about my lame attempts to do the same thing with my images and data.  Now my simple goal is to take a comparatively small sample of artifacts and get something to work.  Then, later on perhaps, with help and/or funding, I could expand the project to include truly large and more representative samples and make it more WOW.  For now, I’ll be ecstatic with IT WORKS.  So, back to the drawing board, more coffee and cross my fingers.