In Part One I wrote about Polar Rose, a Firefox toolbar that performs facial recognition on photos loaded in your browser. Polar Rose programmatically creates associations between individual’s faces that you could have easily overlooked, and opens new possibilities for how we organize and search digital photographs. Equally as important, Polar Rose is free, built partially on open source software, and uses crowd sourcing to seed their database of recognized faces (read Part One for an overview of other emerging tools). What’s significant to digital humanities is that it breaks from the text-based search paradigm that dictates our research process by using visual patterns to query images, rather than search text querying metatext.
When first approaching the tool, my instinct was that Polar Rose – or an abstraction of it, could be useful to digital archivists. In the age of Google Books and with increasing pressure from patrons to see digital copies of archival content, archival objects that have already been organized and described in a finding aid at the collection-level are thrown into an item-level digital archive on the web. How do I search that content? How are those objects described for me, as the researcher, to discover them? When finding aid keywords become item-level tags, how accurate are my searches going to be about the specific image that I’m viewing? That can vary. Polar Rose and its ability to recognize individuals in photos begins to describe the “ofness” of a photo, in contrast to larger categorical key words that describe the “aboutness” of a photo and may be in a finding aid. Simply put, it provides a different form of description — one that is unique at the item-level that may be useful to researchers. The fact that Polar Rose performs actions automatically could begin to free up time for archivists and augment the information used to search those digital objects.
Polar Rose isn’t only useful to digital archivists though. It’s easy to see its practical application in small collections of photos — even on a consumer-level. Local historians would likely have luck with this type of tool as well, if there were enough reoccurring faces for Polar Rose to recognize. Family photos? I’d love to have software than can automatically keep track of the faces of my extended family. Best of all, Polar Rose is built on top of some open source tools, although it’s unclear how much of it could be useful for creating a more generalized application.
The integration of visual search into archives may still be a ways off, and I’m not suggesting that Polar Rose is by any means perfect right now, but I’d be interested in what my colleagues think about visual search and its potential. Similar to how text-mining can help us get “inside” written works, visual search may be able to do the same for images, while allowing us to search based upon images themselves rather than text.