Midi du Pôle Image
Mardi 16 mai 2017
The Photogrammar project – Taylor Arnold (Yale University)
Between 1935 and 1945, the U.S. Federal Government employed a group of photographers to help build support for New Deal programs and U.S. entry into World War II. The group created a corpus of over 170 thousand documentary photographs showing daily life from all of the then 48 states. The collection, known as the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) archive for the two government agencies that housed the photographers, is now a common source of historical evidence for scholars of 20th century America. It has been digitized by the Library of Congress; as a work of the federal government, these digitized images are in the public domain. Photogrammar, which I helped found and currently serve as the co-director of, is a project for analyzing and visualizing the FSA-OWI collection. The web-based portion of the project (photogrammar.yale.edu) visualizes the photographs over historical maps, by historical classification schemes, and through an analysis of color composition. Computational techniques, predominantly from computer vision, have been used to infer and reconstruct metadata that is also displayed on the site. Details of some of these techniques are described in the DHQ article “Uncovering Latent Metadata in the FSA-OWI Photographic Archive”.
Photogrammar is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council for Learned Societies, and has been very well-received since the website’s launch in 2014. We have been invited to present our work at over a dozen institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. The site has attracted nearly 1 million unique visitors and over 6 million page views over the past 12 months. It has received coverage from various media outlets, including the BBC, Atlantic, Slate, Le Monde, and NPR.
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Les midis du Pôle Image, qu’est-ce que c’est ?
Une présentation par mois de midi à 13h sur des thèmes variés.
Ouvert à tous vous pouvez y assister et proposer une présentation en nous contactant pole.image[at]univ-paris-diderot.fr.
Consultez les présentations passées ou le programme complet des midis sur Calenda.