Speaker: Taylor Arnold, Lauren Tilton and Justin Wigard
Affiliation: Linguistics Program, Carole Weinstein International Center, 211 Richmond Way, Richmond, VA 23173, U.S.A; Rhetoric & Communication Studies, 231 Richmond Way, Richmond, VA 23173, U.S.A
Title: Automatic Identification and Classification of Portraits in a Corpus of Historical Photographs
Abstract: There have been recent calls for an increased focus on the application of computer vision to the study and curation of digitised cultural heritage materials. In this short paper, we present an approach to bridge the gap between existing algorithms and humanistically driven annotations through a case study in which we create an algorithm to detect and and classify portrait photography. We apply this method to a collection of about 40,000 photographs and present a preliminary analysis of the constructed data. The work is part of the larger ongoing study that applies computer vision to the computational analysis of over a million U.S. documentary photographs from the early twentieth century.
