For this weeks blog post, I decided to explore the project Photogrammar. Photogrammar takes the collection of photographs from the Farm Security Administration- Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) and organizes them in several ways such as photographer, location, classification, and date. It then presents the data collected in the form of a Map, a Treemap and a Metadata dashboard.
The source of this digital project is 170,000 photos taken between 1935 and 1946 by the Farm Security Administration- Office of War Information that are now housed in the Library of Congress. They were taken to document the US and demonstrate that the administration of relief services has been successful. Most of them come from the Farm Security Administration collection and the Office of War Information collection from both the Domestic Operations Branch and the Overseas Operations Branch. Also included are photos from the Office of Emergency Management-Office of War Information Collection, the American at War Collection, and the Portrait of America Collection.
The main processing method is digitization through scanning the photos. They have also been organized in various ways. In 1942, Paul Vanderbilt created the Lot Number system and Classification Tags system. The Lot Number system assigns a lot number to a set of photographs that are organized around a shooting assignment. The Classification Tags system assigns pictures tags such as “The Land.” This system has 12 main headings and 1300 sub-headings. Both of these systems are included Photogrammars organization of the photos. Photogrammar also organizes the photos based on photographer, data, and geocodes them based on location.
Photogrammar presents the photographs in two main ways: mapping and visualization. The map has two different ways of displaying the photographic data. The first maps the photos by the county in which it was taken. The darker the county, the more pictures were taken there. The second way maps the photos based on who took the actual photo. This is particularly interesting because you can see the routes that photographers must have taken while photographing the country. The map was created with CartoDB and leaflet mapping technology. The second way that Photogrammar presents the data is by creating a Treemap based on Paul Vanderbilts Classification Tags system. One starts with the top level or main heading such as “Social and Personal Activity” and then selects a sub level and sub-sub level where one can find all related photographs. By presenting the data in this fashion, the Classification Tags system illistrates how that aspect of life looked across the US from 1935-1946. The last way that Photogrammar presents the data is through a Metadata Dashboard. This allows you to select a county and then see who was photographing what, when. At this moment in time, California is the only state that is presented in this fashion but it still provides a very interesting look at the intersection between all the photographic data provided.
Excellent point about how you can see the different routes the photographers took when taking pictures across the country, I didn’t realize this when I was reverse engineering photogrammar as well. Going back, it is interesting to see the routes of specific photographers like Jack Delano, who has a very noticeable trail from Chicago to Los Angeles. By selecting those photos, you can really get a feel for the photographer’s journey, and the despair that was felt truly around the whole country, in a way that a simple photo catalog could not illuminate.
You make a good observation when you break out the different types of mapping available on the site. I went through it pretty quickly anddidn’t realize that photos could be mapped based on the photographer. I went back in after reading your analysis and was able to track movement of photographers around the country. What was most interesting were the pockets of concentration in unexpected locations such as western Oregon or rural Utah, all taken prior to the advent of the interstate highway systems, making traveling to and from locations a particularly arduous and difficult task. Based on your analysis, I went back into the site and re-investigated the meta-dashboard. I was able to track and isolate different areas of California and my hometown in different periods, learning who was working there and what kind of work they were producing. Good analysis.