SleuthTalk: Identifying Historical Photos with Intelligent Shortlists, Private Collaboration, and Structured Feedback

Abstract

Identifying people in photographs is an important task in many fields, including history, journalism, genealogy, and collecting, but accurate person identification remains challenging. Researchers especially struggle with the "last-mile proble"of historical person identification, where they must make a selection among a small number of highly similar candidates. We present SleuthTalk, a web-based collaboration tool integrated into the public website Civil War Photo Sleuth which addresses the last-mile problem in historical person identification by providing support for shortlisting potential candidates from face recognition results, private collaborative workspaces, and structured feedback.