Class Blog

Origins

Photogrammar is a site created by Yale which seeks to be a digital platform that organizes the 170,000 photographs from 1935-1946 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). These photos were originally taken as method to building trust and support for government programs for the Roosevelt Administration during the Great Depression Era. They were undertaken by the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration as way of documenting the United States at one of its worst periods of time, as well as a way of documenting the successful administration of aid relief.  

In terms of raw navigation the site starts out with a helpful welcome page that lists options for how to begin exploring the collection, finding out about its background, and for finding new experimental tools as well.

Sources:

The collection used to build Photogrammar includes 170,000 overall photographs. 88,000 of these are printed and placed in the office of the FSA-OWI. 77,000 of the photographs were printed by Roy Styker’s Historic Division of the Farm Security Administration. The other 11,000 come from other sources.

In terms of overall collection origins, the database has grown to include six different collections. The majority of the photographs from the Farm Security Administration collection and Office of War Information collection.   The other collections include the Office of Emergency Management-Office of War Information Collection, the American at War Collection, the Portrait of America Collection. All these collections are overall organized and cataloged by the Library of Congress.

Processes:

In terms of data processing, the Photogrammar tool had a lot of help with the fact that the Library of Congress had already digitized the photograph collection for them. The team instead had to to organize the overall data into a database that could then sort out geographic and classification information into an easily searchable format.

Presentations:

The Photogrammar team uses a variety of tools to organize and display the large amount of data that they are using.

In terms of the main visualization used, the Photogrammar site uses two different versions of its mapping visualization to show the photograph locations in county and dot format.

County:

Dot:

One of the tools they use is CartoDB which is used as a database that serves as the primary mapping mechanism for the site due to its scalability and balance of raster and vector data formats.

A second tool that they use is called Leaflet. This is used for its capabilities as an Open-Source JavaScript Library for Mobile-Friendly Interactive Maps. The library provides an excellent general library for creating dynamic graphs.

Another tool they use is a Treemap to serve as visualization of the original classification system designed by Paul Vanderbilt in 1942. 88,000 of the photographs were assigned using this classification system which uses 12 main subject headings and 13000 sub-headings which lead into various sub-sub headings.

A fourth major process/tool used on the Photogrammar site is the Metadata Dashboard. The dashboard is used as an interactive tool to display the relationship between date, county, photographer, and subject in photographs from individual states using the already categorized metadata of the photographs.

Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of Abstract Art as an interactive website accompanying a MoMA exhibition of the same title. Although the physical exhibition was only available from December 23, 2012 to April 15, 2013, the online display continues to educate viewers on the origins of abstraction. By demonstrating the emergence of abstraction in the form of a network connecting modern artists across countries and media, the exhibition relates to the most influential works in the early stage of abstraction in a broad range.

Sources:

Organized by Leah Dickerman, Curator, with Masha Chlenova, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance to draw a cross-media portrait of early abstraction.  The curators selected works of 92 artists who were active during year 1910 to 1925,  and created a spreadsheet consisting the information of all of the aforementioned artists to determine the representative works and social networks on display. The selected artworks were photographed, scanned, transcribed, recorded, restored, shipped, and installed to integrate into the exhibition.  It is revolutionary that wide ranging sources, including early dance films and recordings of poetry and music, are brought into the galleries of early abstraction. The unprecedented collection of American vanguard art works is also groundbreaking to witness.

Processes:

The process of the exhibition was achieved via MoMA staff’ creation (including the curatorial and design team ), as well as the support from the Columbia University Software and Second Story.

On the one hand, the The Artist Network Diagram  was a significant component of both the interactive interface in the website exhibition and the outline of the physical exhibition.  Its creation started from curators   collecting the literal description of selected artists and their relationship. Scholars in the Columbia University then constructed a digital dot-graph based on the original chart. Furthermore, graphic designers sorted out a visually organic improvement on the graph. It was the 1936 MoMA exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art and the now-legendary diagram on the cover of its catalog that offered inspiration. Designers incorporated the Alfred chart (Alfred H. Barr, Jr, the founding director of the MoMA) with the concept of social network. Thus, a comprehensive network graph of early abstraction artists was made.

Second Story, on the other hand, contributed to the process by coding the sources and data into the network frame.  Creating an interactive diagram which enables the viewer to compare, relate and learn the artist information, artwork and conversations, the tech team utilized their mastery in programming to make the virtual exhibition possible.

Presentations:

Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 offers a multimedia visualization of the origins of abstraction. Suggested in a diagram, the spread of abstraction is about relationships and collective participation. The website presents a dynamic, 3D diagram of the connections between the artists, so that as visitors interact with the diagram, they can explore detailed networks, view artist portfolios, and draw their own conclusions about influence, impact, and invention.

The home page offers a brief introduction of the exhibition theme and the diagram to the viewers. By clicking Explore Connections, the viewer will enter the most essential part of the website – connections in between the artists. On the left and right side of the website, there are two  virtual buttons available for control: return to the previous page and a changeable scale. Such designs facilitate users’ experience when switching from different connections.  There are two navigation bars at the top and bottom. The primary navigation includes links to Connections, Artists, Conversations, and Programs & Events, while the secondary navigation leads to About the Exhibition, Network Diagram, Checklist, Publication, Music, Blog, Credits and MoMA.

Clicking the “Artists” link offers viewers an alphabetized list of featured artists, with the essential ones highlighted in red. Clicking on an artist’s portfolio enables viewers to examine detailed information about the artists and his/her artwork.

The Photogrammer project is an online visual and organizational site used to view 170,000 photographs from the 1935-1946 U.S. period.  These photographs were taken across the nation, documenting American life during the later Great Depression and through World War II.  Developed by the U.S. federal government’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information, this photography project was designed to increase domestic support of government relief programs.  Photogrammer includes an interactive map and archive, both of which utilize classifications tags that allow the viewer to search for specific photos within the expansive collection.

The primary source of data for the digital Photogrammer project is the FSA-OWI Collection.  However, it also includes a number of  photographs from the Domestic Operations Branch, Overseas Operations Branch, Office of Emergency Management- Office of War Information Collection, American at War Collection, and the Portrait of America Collection.  On the “About” page, the Library of Congress is also thanked as a source for “maintaining and cataloging the collection”.

After finding sources for the photographs, the Photogrammer team had to process the data.  One major organization process had already been completed by Paul Vanderbilt who developed the “Lot Number system and Classification Tags system”.  This three-tier classification system categorizes photographs by subject (ex: “work”) , activity (ex: “social and personal activity”), area (ex: “The Land”), and more.  More ways of categorization were added for this project, including date, specific location, and photographer.  Besides this, the photographs had to be scanned in order to be viewed digitally.  Also, detailed data on each photograph’s geographical location had to be computed to create the site’s interactive map.

Lastly, Photogrammer is mapped w/ Leaflet and CartoDB attribution.  This interactive map plots geographical information of the photos.  Users can customize their search by selecting a specific photographer, time period, and/or place.  The points on the map can be viewed by county, which is the default, or by dots, which is specific to each artist and their location. 

The county view gives a more holistic, overarching glimpse of number of photographs per location because the counties depict a larger area and specific artists are not taken into account.  Meanwhile, the dots view is much more precise because each dot pinpoints the location of where each particular photographer captured their photographs.  The lab visualizations include Treemap, Metadata Dashboard, and ColorSpace (which is coming soon).  Treemap is an interactive depiction of Paul Vanderbilt’s 1942 tiered classification system.  As the user clicks on each square, the photo search classifications become more and more specific.  The interactive Metadata Dashboard of California uses a 1935-1946 timeline presentation, subject classification bar graph, photographer pie chart, and map of California as another means to search for and see connections between photographs.  Finally, the Photogrammer blog, which gives extra insight into the process and thought behind the project, is powered by WordPress.

The interactive website, Inventing Abstraction, visually represents the connections abstract artists had to other artists, writers, and performers  between 1910-1925. The website is reliant on it’s sources which are the information of each artists represented on the site. These sources are from common histories and research of each of the individuals and on how these individuals were connected or inspired by one another. In order to begin reverse engineering this website, one must consider the goal of the website designer in order to create a user friendly experience for visitors to interact and learn from the page.

I am unsure what specific platform was used to create the site, but it is presented to the viewer much like a sociogram that a communications researcher would create. The programmer would first need to create a template in which multiple nodes could be represented, then begin drawing connections between them. When the user hovers over a name, the name is enlarged along with each of its connections.

The interface of the website is created, as previously stated, as a sociogram in which each individual is represented by a node that states their name. Each name is connected to another node by a line. This creates a complex digram of connections between each artist. When the user clicks on one of the nodes, a new window pops up in which the user can see a more intimate sociogram of connections. In addition to the diagram presented, on the right side of the display screen contains important information to further understanding the artist and the work they produced. This right side display contains the dates the artist was alive, where they were born, where they worked, artists interests, a truncated biography, and examples of their art. When the user clicks on example artwork thumbnail, a new page appears that depicts a larger verison of the work, it’s title, date, and the medium used. This presentation, I believe, is quite successful as art is often a product of influence. Abstract art, as mentioned on the website, began with just a few number of abstract artists who portrayed their world in a completely new way than previously seen, and then quickly expanded into a new art movement. The website fully examines how this expansion occurred through the visualization of connections and therefore inspiration. Because of the influence artists had to one another through geography, time period, or personal connection created what Art Historians now refer to as Modern Art.

Legacies of British Slave-ownership 

Introduction: The DH project I looked at was the “Legacies of British Slave-ownership”. This project was conducted at the UCL (University College of London), and one of the main goals of this project was to identify all slave-owners and estates in the British colonies after the mid-1700s; otherwise known as an “Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners”. This project amassed and analyzed information about the activities, affiliations, and legacies of all British slave-owners on the database.

Sources: In order to create a massive encyclopedia of British slave-owners, this project had to pull information from many sources. They sourced the Slave Compensation Commission, which is a document that managed the distribution of the 20 million pound compensation and provided a census of slave-ownership in Britain in the 1830s. They also utilized different maps to locate the estates of slave-owners, such as OpenStreetMap, Digimap (for specific buildings), Lockie’s Topography of London, “Old to New Street Names”, and Aaron Arrowsmith’s map of 1807. 

Processes: On the home page, there is a section which divides the information of British slave-owners into categories which aids your journey of identifying or finding slave-owners. The categories are: commercial, cultural, historical, imperial, physical, and political. There is also a “Search the Database” and “Estates” tab at the top which allows one to advance search for an individual’s detail or a particular estate. Each category leads you to a different page filled with information and sorted based on the relevant title of the category. For example, the commercial legacy page is organized by name, position, and then location/business name. You can further click on “details” to see notes and sources. According to the lengths this team has gone to allow visitors to find individuals and estates, I believe this website is targeted more for scholars, researchers, and historians. The average person may not find such specific information necessary unless they possibly wanted to delve into their ancestors lives. 

Presentations: Unlike the other DH projects, this one is not as interactive or visually appealing, which further adds to the case that this site is for more educational and research purposes. This project does utilizes maps, however, and you can choose to see either Britain, Jamaica, Barbados, or Grenada. For Jamaica, the map initially displays the location on a map in present time and then slowly fades to present a map produced by James Robertson in 1804 place over the current map. You can see in the image that there is an option to change the transparency of the map, and here I have the transparency set so you can see the current landscape with Robertson’s map slightly visible over the current one. The white circles represent estates of slave-owners, and you can click each circle to get more information about who owned the estate and a timeline of ownership.

Conclusion: Overall this DH project is slightly overwhelming with how much information is provided, and thus the team who created the website probably provided simple tabs and categories to make the excess information a lot less scary. The home page definitely makes the site look friendlier, and I am surprised how they could locate so many slave-owners around the world.

Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 was originally an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that celebrated abstraction as a new and bold style of art. It ran from December 23, 2012 to April 15, 2013. It was then made into a digital project that explores the early history and development of abstraction through presenting a network of modern artists and their productions of art.

The content of the project consists of various sources, such as photographed images, and audio and video recordings, which build up the portfolios of artworks by the featured artists. Brief texts and captions describing the artworks are included, as well as additional audio commentaries by other artists for selected pieces found under the tab “Conversations”. The original artworks were gathered from the Museum of Modern Art and other art institutions, and processed into digital sources for web accessibility. Paintings and sculptures were photographed, while poems and other performances were audio- or video-recorded. Information about abstraction, the artists involved, and their works were put into texts and the artists’ names were organized alphabetically. Relationships between the artists were identified by the connecting vectors on the diagram.

The website was built and designed by Second Story. It firstly provides an introduction to abstraction, and then leads to an interactive diagram with a simple click on “Explore Connections”. The diagram illustrates the connections between the artists who were featured in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for having influenced the development of the new artistic style. These relations are shown through the connecting vectors and the names of the artists with the most connections are highlighted in red. The artists’ biographies, including their works, their birthplace, the places they worked in, and their interests, can be found on a separate page by clicking on their names. In addition to the diagram, the website organizes further information about abstraction and the project into different tabs for easier navigation. While the diagram is a helpful visual that emphasizes the connections between artists, the complete list of the featured artists, along with their information, is also provided under the “Artists” tab on top for a more thorough exploration of the project. The Museum of Modern Art also hosts performances and events, which can be found under “Programs & Events”, in order for viewers to experience abstraction first-hand. The bottom tabs include an overview of the diagram, PDF files of the network diagram and the checklist of all the artworks featured in the exhibition, information about the exhibition and the publication, links to related music and the blog, and the credits for the online project. The intuitive web design produces a user-friendly website and the categorizing of information into various tabs allows viewers to gain deeper insights about the project and its topic.

Week 1 – Inventing Abstraction

Inventing Abstration, 1910-1925 is an online visualization that accompanies a physical exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art. It was displayed at the MOMA from December 23, 2012 to April 15, 2013. The exhibit aimed to capture and understand the beginnings of the abstract art movement. Included in the exhibit were paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance.

Another purpose of the exhibit was to see how the abstract art movement was able to move so quickly between regions and artists. I thought this visual representation was a great way of doing that. The visualization displayed artists as nodes and they connected to other nodes if they had verifiable interaction.

Credit is given to Second Story for the design and development of the project. As stated previously, the exhibit brought together art of many different formats as sources. These art works are then digitized via photographs and scans. Once these works have been processed, they are matched with the respective artists. In terms of the nodes and links, the visualization looks like it was made in the program, Gephi. To construct these visual networks, points of data are inputted into an excel sheet and exported as a csv file. In the excel sheet are most likely categories such as “connections” or “art work.” This allows the artists to be connected via the links.

The network map allows users to click around the various nodes. When a node is clicked, the screen zooms in to the specific node and every node that is connected. This creates a smaller network within the overall network. From here, users can see which artists are associated with one another. In addition to this, this screen shows more details of artists such as their works, birthplace, interests, and more. The zoomed in networks are also a component of Gephi, but additional software was most likely used to add in the descriptions on the side.

As with many network visualizations, it can be a bit overwhelming to look at. I feel that the more heavily weighted artists should have been a different color than red, especially since the links were red. It tends to look a bit messy when scrolling around on the zoomed out view. It is not as bad when zoomed in. However, the website also provides users with another way of viewing the artists. There is an “artists” tab that lets users scroll through in alphabetical order. There are also additional tabs for “conversations” and “programs and events” which go further in depth with the works.

Overall, I found the UI of the project to be pretty self-explanatory. The only thing I would have changed are the colors of the visualization. As far as UX is concerned, I think network maps such as these can be intimidating, and not user-friendly to people unfamiliar with them. I think the project as a whole was quite interesting, and I enjoyed going through it all.

For this week’s blog post, I decided to reverse engineer Photogrammar, which organizes and presents the Library of Congress’s 170,000 photographs taken from 1935-1945 for the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). In order to reverse engineer this project, I will describe the sources, processes, and presentation choices utilized by the Yale research team.

The sources used by the research team were the FSA-OWI File photos held by the Library of Congress. The researchers also utilized the organization system conjured by Paul Vanderbilt, who was part of the FSA-OWI. In order to get these photos into digital form for processing, researchers scanned the images, organized them digitally by county and photographer, and built charts based off the information in the archives. Unlike other projects we’ve looked at, Photogrammar doesn’t appear to have much photo analysis, but rather presents the material in a digital format that makes the material easier for users to interact with.

Upon entry to the site, the home page offers basic information about the project with a large blue “Start Exploring” button that beckons users to enter the site. By using the term exploring, the research appears more approachable for experienced researchers and casual Internet users alike. From this homepage, the site then goes to a map of the United States divided into counties, with those shaded in darker greens indicating more pictures from the collection taken in that county. This map was presented using the programs Leaflet and CartoDB. Users may control what time period of photos they look at through the timeline in the upper corner, which is useful for users looking for photos of a specific era, such as pre-WWII or the Great Depression.

For users with specific research goals, the Search tab and Treemap options are useful tools. The Search tab allows users to find their information by classifications such as Lot Number and Classification Tags, while the Treemap organizes the photos by Paul Vanderbilt’s 1942 organizational system. For casual internet users, these tools are easy to use, but not necessarily as easy to interact with as the maps.

For someone with little digital humanities experience, like myself, the most interesting feature to the site is the Dots map. There you can see where each photographer took his or her pictures. This is particularly compelling for understanding the whereabouts and behaviors of the photographers themselves. For instance, with Jack Delano, his dots mark a clear path he took in March 1943 from southern California to Illinois. On this map, you can see the areas and regions that most inspired these photographers, which leaves room for further research. Then, on the Metadata page under the Labs tab, you can analyze photos from California on multiple plains of information, which shows compelling relationships between the photographers, the geographic locations, and the photo content.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed interacting with this research. It was easy to navigate and explore while packed with information and possible research direction.

I chose to reverse engineer the Photogrammar, a database created by a team of seven digital humanities at Yale University. This website employs multiple digital techniques to reorganize, visualize and analyze the photography collection by several unit photographers to document the political, economic and social life in the U.S. from 1935-1946.

The 170,000 photographs, also collectively known as “The File” or “the FSA-OWI File”, displays the realistic moments during the Great Depression and Second World War in the States in order to support for and justify government programs. From sign and ticket window of a large dance palace in Hollywood (See Photo 1) to Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles, from desert in Arizona to snow scenes in Boston, from political assemblies to children playing on the streets, more than ten thousand images of different subjects in those photographs offer a rich visual history in the U.S. during the chaotic historical period. Originally created by United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI), the collection is now preserved in the Library of Congress. However, this online database offers a more accessible  and interactive approach for the public to view this historical source.

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(Photo 1. Photo courtesy: Russell Lee, April 1942. Photogrammar. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/records/index.php?record=owi2001024138/PP. Accessed Oct 3, 2016)

To process the source, the digital humanists first scanned and digitized the photos.  Then they tagged and categorized the photos by location, by photographer and by date. Since the photo collections have been processed by Paul Vanderbilt from FSA-OWI with his “Lot Number System and Classification Tags System” in the 1940s before scholars at Yale developed the online database the website now incorporate and enrich Vanderbilt’s system when processing the data.

After describing the features of each photo the digital humanists geocoded approximately 90,000 photos on maps of the U.S. counties and made the maps reflect different photographers and changes of the historical period. As one core feature of the website, the map below is one of the maps that indicates different photographers’ routes and activities in different locations of different dates. (See Map 1)

Third, in the “Treemap” button of the “Photogrammer lab” section, photos are classified under different levels by subject matters while “Metadata Dashboard” button analyzes the correlation between date, county, photographer, and subject. Even though this dashboard only provides metadata for one individual state, namely California for now, its development is very promising in terms of examining how different factors participated in the project.

(Map 1. Photogrammar, http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/dots.php. Accessed 3 Oct., 2016.)

This database platform presents the processed the data in a user-friendly manner. Once you read the “About” and understand the purpose of the whole project a wide array of options in “Search” can easily navigate you to your desired contents. Themed by location and authorship, two different map options under the “Maps” button visualize and match the photos with the dates, locations and individual photographers. The homepage (See Homepage 1) also welcome random netizens to begin with the “start exploring” button to the map and to grasp the significance of the database with the three buttons at the lower part.

(Homepage 1, Photogrammar. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/. Accessed by 3 Oct., 2016)

Supported by Leaflet and CartoDB, this database is a stimulating tool for audience especially scholars working in the field of U.S. political history, art history and media studies.