The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images.

Digital humanities research has focused primarily on the analysis of texts. This emphasis stems from the availability of technology to study digitized text. Optical character recognition allows researchers to use keywords to search and analyze digitized texts. However, archives of digitized sources...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 194 - 208
Main Authors: Wevers, Melvin, Smits, Thomas
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Apr2020
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=142636785&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: hlh
    uiTerm: 142636785
    longDbName: Humanities International Complete
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        2055768X
        JEO9
      jtl: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
      issn: 2055768X
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: Apr2020
      vid: 35
      iid: 1
      pid: 622
      pub: Oxford University Press / USA
    artinfo:
      ui:
        142636785
        10.1093/llc/fqy085
      ppf: 194
      ppct: 14
      formats:
        fmt:
          – @attributes:
              type: T
          – @attributes:
              type: P
              size: 870KB
      tig:
        atl: The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images.
      aug:
        au:
          Wevers, Melvin
          Smits, Thomas
        affil:
          DHLab, KNAW Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
          Department of Cultural Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
      su:
        Artificial neural networks
        Optical character recognition
        History
        Historical source material
        Keyword searching
        Fusiform gyrus
      sug:
        subj:
          Artificial neural networks
          Optical character recognition
          History
          Historical source material
          Keyword searching
          Fusiform gyrus
      ab: Digital humanities research has focused primarily on the analysis of texts. This emphasis stems from the availability of technology to study digitized text. Optical character recognition allows researchers to use keywords to search and analyze digitized texts. However, archives of digitized sources also contain large numbers of images. This article shows how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to categorize and analyze digitized historical visual sources. We present three different approaches to using CNNs for gaining a deeper understanding of visual trends in an archive of digitized Dutch newspapers. These include detecting medium-specific features (separating photographs from illustrations), querying images based on abstract visual aspects (clustering visually similar advertisements), and training a neural network based on visual categories developed by domain experts. We argue that CNNs allow researchers to explore the visual side of the digital turn. They allow archivists and researchers to classify and spot trends in large collections of digitized visual sources in radically new ways.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
    refInfo:
    copyright:
      @attributes:
        flag: Y
      custom: © 2019 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities.
      item: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
      holder: Oxford University Press / USA
      dt:
        @attributes:
          year: 2020
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N