In this article we establish a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of large collections of visual materials. Our framework, distant viewing, is distinguished from other approaches by making explicit the interpretive nature of extracting semantic metadata from images. In other words, one must 'view' visual materials before studying them. We illustrate the need for the interpretive process of viewing by simultaneously drawing on theories of visual semiotics, photography, and computer vision. Two illustrative applications of the distant viewing framework to our own research are draw upon to explicate the potential and breadth of the approach. A study of television series shows how facial detection is used to compare the role of actors within the narrative arcs across two competing series. An analysis of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information corpus of documentary photography is used to establish how photographic style compared and differed amongst those photographers involved with the collection. We then aim to show how our framework engages with current methodological and theoretical conversations occurring within the digital humanities.
In this article we establish a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of large collections of visual materials. Our framework, distant viewing, is distinguished from other approaches by making explicit the interpretive nature of extracting semantic metadata from images. In other words, one must ‘view’ visual materials before studying them. We illustrate the need for the interpretive process of viewing by simultaneously drawing on theories of visual semiotics, photography, and computer vision. Two illustrative applications of the distant viewing framework to our own research are draw upon to explicate the potential and breadth of the approach. A study of television series shows how facial detection is used to compare the role of actors within the narrative arcs across two competing series. An analysis of the Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information corpus of documentary photography is used to establish how photographic style compared and differed amongst those photographers involved with the collection. We then aim to show how our framework engages with current methodological and theoretical conversations occurring within the digital humanities.
In this chapter, several methods for extracting meaning from a collection of parsed textual documents are presented. Examples include information retrieval, topic modeling, and stylometrics. Particular focus is placed on how to use these methods for constructing visualizations of textual corpora and a high-level categorization of some narrative trends.
The way materials are archived and organized shapes knowledge production (Derrida, J. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Vancouver: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Foucault, M. L'archéologie du savoir. Paris, France: É ditions Gallimard, 1969; Kramer, M. Going meta on metadata. Journal of Digital Humanities, 3(2), 2014; Hart, T. How do you archive the sky? Archive Journal, 5, 2015; Taylor, D. Save As. e-misférica, 9, 2012). We argue that recommender systems offer an opportunity to discover new humanistic interpretative possibilities. We can do so by building new metadata from text and images for recommender systems to reorganize and reshape the archive. In the process, we can remix and reframe the archive allowing users to mine the archive in multiple ways while making visible the organizing logics that shape interpretation. To show how recommender systems can shape the digital humanities, we will look closely at how they are used in digital media and then applied to the digital humanities by focusing on the Photogrammar project, a Web platform showcasing US government photography from 1935 to 1945.
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