My experience volunteering at museums and cataloging artifacts drew me to the Picturing Michigan’s Past project. This project is sourced using the the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography, ultimately gathering photographs and having the audience process them, before posting these photos in batches. I think this project is so interesting because the processes and presentation are so intertwined. The service that the project ultimately provides is to organize the photographs and transcribe them, but it uses crowdsourcing to involve the audience in this project. In that way, visitors to the site get to closely view the photographs of the project while they type out the words written within them.
The data being used is all from postcards and photographs, but it shows an interesting perspective about what objects, places and events people found noteworthy from the 1840s-1950s. The transcription taking place allows for even more data to become accessible because, theoretically, it will eventually lead to the text within the photographs being searchable. This definitely helps the public because it will allow people to search for different names and places while doing research.
Another interesting aspect of this project is that I think the current audience is a bit different than what the final audience will be. I think the audience for the current stage of this project is for history nerds and students. The people who would be interested in transcribing these artifacts are people who generally enjoy history on a broad scale, or they’re people who stand to learn something from the process. However, once it’s done, I think the project can help a broader audience by making the text searchable on the Internet. For example, people searching up their family history will be able to read the postcards that their relatives had written in the past, simply by doing some Googling with their name.
I’m interested to see how the transcriptions will be displayed. Will this open up new ways to automate the organization of these photographs? Could we use the terms within the postcards to sort them into collections?
2 thoughts on “Lab 2- Analyzing “Picturing Michigan’s Past””
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Amazing presentation of this lab! I always find photography projects such as these so interesting, they allow us to see what the period was like when these photos were taken. The questions at the end of your project are fascinating especially the one about the automation process of photography. I feel like this will open up more avenues in the future for more automated photo processing. But I also feel like this process is already around, it may just not be implemented in this project. Other than that this is an amazing project .
This is a really interesting project! I’m also curious how the information from the captions will be organized. I wonder if they will go through the captions to try and pick out similar ones in order to create the most accurate representation of the photographs. The project is very creative though and is a great way to involve the audience.