Seeing the Past with Computers

Abstract

We live in a world of seeing computers. From airport security to social media to games, machines that see are embedded in our lives in subtle ways that, ironically, go unseen. For better or worse, face-recognition software and algorithms help law enforcement and security agencies track individuals in crowds; toll road cameras snap photographs of passing license plates to automatically bill the owners; computer imaging helps medical professionals diagnose patients; and smartphone cameras and GPS help game players capture “virtual creatures” in the “real world.” From the mundane to the life-altering, seeing computers are actively helping people see the present. The same technology can also be used to see the past, and in this book we explore the ways in which we can turn their gaze toward the study and communication of history. In late 2014, a group of digital humanists met in Niagara-on-­the-­Lake, Ontario, to discuss how seeing technologies might be harnessed for historical research and teaching. Historians and archaeologists have all wished, at some point, that they could see the past firsthand. The confusion and ambiguity created by fragmentary sources tend to equally excite our doubts and imagination-we worry about the veracity of our sources, and we wonder what might exist in the gaps in our evidence. While that immediate encounter with the past remains a subject for science fiction writers, the scholars in this volume have taken up the challenge of exploring how seeing technologies can add to, and change our understanding of, the practice of history. Seeing the Past with Computers demonstrates new and innovative ways of accessing, understanding, writing about, teaching, and sharing history. We focus on two related forms of seeing technology that are changing how some humanists work, but remain untapped and confusing for most scholars and students: computer vision and augmented reality. Computer vision (CV) is a technology that can access, process, analyze, and understand visual information. Consider, for instance, optical character recognition (OCR), which allows computers to read text from digitized print sources. Whereas scholars used to read a few books deeply (“close reading”), OCR has facilitated what Franco Moretti called “distant reading,” helping us mine and analyze thousands of books across eras, genres, and subjects. Such quantitative approaches to textual analysis have their critics, but they also hold many lessons for those interested in history. Yet history involves more than just the textual evidence historians have traditionally privileged; traces of the past are also embedded in the visual—photographs, paintings, sketches-and material culture. The proliferation of digitized visual sources presents historians with exciting new technical and theoretical problems and opportunities. The scholars in this collection offer ways of thinking about where we might look for source material, and how we might use CV to analyze those sources, in the context of our research or teaching, to ensure broader, deeper, and more representative understandings of the past. Computer vision supports augmented reality (AR), which overlays digital content onto the real-­world objects that a computer sees, thereby “augmenting” our view of our surroundings. AR is also helping us study, see, and share history in compelling new ways. Although historians have long been interested in augmenting the present with the past through plaques and monuments, digital technologies increase the possibilities. For example, AR at museums or historical sites can provide on-the-­spot supplementary information, telling hidden stories or offering lesser-known facts to enhance the visitor’s knowledge of an item or space. Historic photographs, 3D reconstructions, and re-enactments of historic events can be overlaid onto present-day geography, demonstrating how an object or environment has changed over time. And GPS-­linked AR can prompt location-specific historical data, guiding visitors at sites of interest, and increasing their sensory engagement with a place. AR applications can provide a seemingly magical way to tease out the history all around us, allowing nonspecialists to see the past in a manner similar to historians and archaeologists. TS - CrossRef