Zixi Chen
Mr. Ippolito
Forensics
26 March 2018
Current Event 20
Brown, Patricia Leigh. “They Died Near the Border. Art Students Hope to Bring Them Back.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/arts/design/new-york-academy-of-art-arizona-border.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FForensic%2BScience&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection.
This article named “They Died Near the Border. Art Students Hope to Bring Them Back” written by Patricia Leigh Brown is about a group of art students who studies at the New York Academy of Art. These students were very interested in the case of immigrants who lost their lives in the Amazon desert because the true identities of these border crossers were never discovered. Joe Mullins is the forensic artist who taught this class and explored in the field of facial reconstruction with the students. They got copied skulls of the deceased people and used clay, marble (for eyes), and black sharpies for the reconstructions. The author said, “To a trained eye, the complex structure of the human skull offers a blueprint to the facial features of the deceased”. For Mr. Mullins, the shape of the skull can offer a lot of clues about how the person’s face looked like. Some of the clues includes ‘the thickness of the lips, the shape and placement of the eyes, nose and chin, the earlobes, even the curve of the eyebrows”. According to Mr. Mullins, the purpose of facial reconstruction is to give back to the dead their identities.
This article is relevant to today’s society because the technique that the author focused on- facial reconstruction- can be useful in a lot of cases. In cases such as a fire or a terrible car accident, the face of the victims may be very hard to identify, and if the technique of facial reconstruction using the shape of the skull can improve and become more accurate, many confusions would be clear in a lot of cases.
I believe the author of this article, Patricia Leigh Brown, did a very nice job in giving the background of the case to the readers and introducing all of the experts and teachers who participated in this investigation. Brown also used a lot of quotes from the experts to explain the technique to the readers. However, Brown did not give a lot of details about how the facial reconstruction worked. It would have been very nice if she can give the readers some examples of previous experiments about this technique and talk more about the possible usage of this technique.
1 comment:
Andy Goldbaum CE 20 3/26/18 D Even
Brown, Patricia Leigh. “They Died Near the Border. Art Students Hope to Bring Them Back.” The New York Times, © 2018 The New York Times Company, 2 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/arts/design/new-york-academy-of-art-arizona-border.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FForensic%2BScience&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics%C2%AEion&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection.
Cixi Chen wrote a well-written, well-organized review of “They DIed Near the Border. Art Students Hope to Bring Them Back.”, an article written for the New York Times by Patricia Leigh Brown. Firstly, her summary of the article was structured in a way that allowed the reader to get the gist of what the article was about without getting into too much detail for a summary. She included the substance of the article, such as explaining why the author and the students thought this work of facial reconstruction was important, essential information for the reader to know about facial reconstruction so that it makes sense, like the how forensic anthropologists can reconstruct an entire face from seemingly nothing (how the skull is viewed by a trained eye and what features are important) and some basic details about how the skull was designed, and a sentence on what the problem this class is trying to solve is (bringing closure to the families of unidentified immigrants who died while crossing the border into the US) without too many details like exactly how many immigrants died, how exactly they died, or the various experts and agencies that are helping with the project. A second well-written aspect of Chen’s article was that she actually made a relevant and thoughtful connection to how facial reconstruction is used practically to solve cases where more than just closure to the families is at stake, such as who was immediately killed in a tragic event like a car crash or a fire. Most of these reviews just restate what the article said was important about the topic to society, but Chen actually gave a forensic/societal use of her own. Thirdly, she gave a nuanced suggestion for how the article could be improved that ties into the article’s forensics relevance: because the article is supposed to relate to an interesting forensics topic and not just a touching story, some information about why this story is relevant to the field of facial reconstruction, such as what has changed since the past and how the usage of it has expanded over the years, would have completed the article.
One aspect of the review that could be improved was that the summary would have been even more complete if it referred to how the author says the clay is layered to reflect different muscles and soft tissue of the face and how plastic straws were used to mark tissue depth because this would have given a major insight to the most relevant topic about forensics in the article: how the facial reconstruction worked. A second aspect that could be improved about the review was that examples could have been used to describe what she liked about the article background and how expert opinions were discussed. For example, what particular background was the most interesting/relevant?
After reading this article and learning about just how complex facial reconstruction is, with precise layers to represent even the smallest of facial muscles and tissues, sometimes I wonder how the reconstruction artists know that they are getting the face correct just simply from the skulls alone and how one applies such layers to precisely match facial muscles, knowing how imprecise clay often can be from art class as a kid. This makes me want to know hot facial reconstruction progressed over time to accomplish these feats.
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