PHAROS: A digital research space for photo archives

Abstract

The PHAROS consortium of fourteen international art historical photo archives is digitizing the over 20 million images (with accompanying documentation) in its combined collections and has begun to construct a common access platform using Linked Open Data and the ResearchSpace software. In addition to resulting in a rich and substantial database of images for art-historical research, the PHAROS initiative supports the development of shared standards for mapping and sharing photo archive metadata, as well as for best practices for working with large digital image collections and conducting computational image analysis. Moreover, alongside their digitization efforts, PHAROS member institutions are considering the kinds of art-historical questions the resulting database of images could be used to research. This article indicates some of the prospective research directions stimulated by modern technologies, with the aim of exploring the epistemological potential of photographic archives and challenging the boundaries between the analogue and the digital.

BackTrace: A Human-AI Collaborative Approach to Discovering Studio Backdrops in Historical Photographs

“…The issue of missing metadata is frequently cited as a key problem in the curation of rapidly growing cultural heritage image collections (Cordell 2020), with many computer vision (CV) techniques applied towards solving it (Mohanty et al 2019;Chumachenko et al 2020;Zeitlyn, Coto, and Zisserman 2021;Caraffa et al 2020;Resig 2014). One aspect of this problem is inadequate artist or photographer information in visual collections.…”

“…CV has great potential to aid in populating metadata by speeding up the analysis of visual data, while ensuring that inconsistencies in metadata do not obscure objects of interest. Prior works have successfully used pattern matching and iterative refinement to group similar photos (Caraffa et al 2020;Crissaff et al 2017; and even photos with similar backgrounds (Zeitlyn, Coto, and Zisserman 2021). However, none of these approaches computationally isolates and analyzes backdrops as a distinct feature.…”

Linked Open Images: Visual similarity for the Semantic Web

“…Various conferences, symposia, and workshops have been organized over the years to explore the usefulness of applying Computer Vision (CV) technology to the arts. 1 Although this paper provides a report on some CV APIs and their applicability to the cultural heritage domain, its main focus is to provide a report on a Semantic Web application that enables institutions to link artworks across collections and generate canonical URIs for each work. The platform makes these tools available to non-technical users and provides open access to artwork similarity data through a SPARQL endpoint for interpretation and reuse.…”

“…Institutions that held these archives have sought to digitize and catalog these images, providing valuable insights into the histories of these objects. Historical data pertaining to conservation, provenance, copies, and preparatory studies is contained on the backs of the photographs in the form of annotations written but scholars over last century and more [1]. Art historians have a long tradition of writing about images, one could say, transcribing a visual language to a textual one.…”

Building a Knowledge Graph of Chinese Kung Fu Masters From Heterogeneous Bilingual Data

“…Interdisciplinary researchers have embraced this concept to enrich CH and ICH studies by conceptualising cultural entities using semantic standards. Concurrently, ontological engineering has been increasingly used in structuring cultural materials into programmatic structures, enabling data representation relating tangible and intangible identities detected from textual (Dou, Qin, Jin, & Li, 2018), visual (Caraffa, Pugh, Stuber, & Ruby, 2020), iconographical (Carboni & De Luca, 2019) and audiovisual (Meghini, Bartalesi, & Metilli, 2021) features in diverse contexts. 4 Despite these existing efforts, humans have not been adequately represented as informative nodes, even though they consistently play a traceable role in interconnecting knowledge exchanges and communications.…”