Over the weekend I gave a brief technical presentation at National History Day about developing History websites to a group of high schoolers and their teachers. From now on, whenever I give a talk I’ll try to post my slides to slideshare so others can view and download it (after being inspired by Karin). Here’s my first stab at it:
I covered the basics of using a WYSIWYG editor and templates to structure your site, and then explored a few ways to embed content into your pages. While preparing the slides, I stumbled upon a great website called CommunityWalk that offers a simple interface for creating embed-able Google Maps. It appends small advertisements to your markers but it’s still worth checking out.
The photograph above is marked up by Polar Rose, a Firefox toolbar that does facial recognition on photos loaded in your browser. Polar Rose automatically detected three faces in the photograph based upon patterns and compared the images to a database of faces stored on their servers. Had someone already tagged a particular face or person, Polar Rose would have told me who appeared in the photo. Although their database is currently seeded with mostly celebrities and politicians, there’s something going on with Polar Rose that historians and digital archivists should take notice of.
At the heart of my excitement is the possibility of making photograph-to-photograph connections that would otherwise have remained undiscovered. Thinking particularly about collections of family photos, where some have persons labeled and others do not, the ability to automate the identification of individuals in photos goes far in understanding the relationship between these digital objects. The concept of tagging the faces of people in photos, rather than writing a short description accompanying a photo, has become popular in Facebook. There, an individual’s profile aggregates all photos they’ve been tagged in, and presents that corpus for public browsing.. Facebook only expands upon the uses of that information in a limited way, by allowing you to see photos including yourself and another specific person.
Polar Rose is not the only company investing and innovating in visual search. Facial recognition and visual search are slowly being integrated into pre-existing services. MyHeritage’s celebrity face recognition allows you to upload a photo of yourself and see what celebrities you resemble. Like.com offers the ability to see items that are visually similar to the ones you’re shopping for online. And the big gorilla of them all, Google, has quietly implemented facial recognition into their image search. Try this: append &imgtype=face to the url of a image search query, you’ll see with those key words only those images that Google identifies as facelike. The first search I tried was for “digital history“, and I wasn’t impressed. However, when adding &imgtype=face to the query, I happily saw the faces of Roy, Dan, and Bill. Here’s without appending the text, and after. A world of a difference.
I’m breaking this post into two parts. Part 2 will be posted soon and will discuss how facial recognition could improve metadata for digital images and help researchers wade through the seas of digitized images.
[original photo of Northern Pacific Railroad workers from TrainNet]
Posted in Firefox
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Tagged Firefox, PolarRose
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I’m back from an exciting weekend at THATCamp, working through with a wide range of digital humanists. Among us there was shared excitement and pleasure to engage in the type of informal dialogue that a BarCamp-style unconference like THATCamp affords. And given the interest in it, we’ll be doing THATCamp again next year so pay attention here and on the THATCamp blog for further information later in the year.
Jeremy and I will be recording a new episode of THATPodcast that looks at how we organized THATCamp, and discuss how others could use a similar approach for an untraditional conference. Until then, I’d encourage you to browse the website for a full list of campers, the schedule that we made on the day of the conference, and the community blog that campers posted their sessions on before Day 1. Here are some photos from THATCamp below the fold, among others on Flickr.
Building THAT Schedule
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