Distant Viewing: Analysing Large Visual Corpora

In this brown bag lunch meeting, Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold demonstrate their pioneering work on distant viewing: the use of computer vision techniques to analyse visual culture on a large scale. While Digital Humanities scholarship has been predominantly text-oriented, Tilton and Arnold endeavour to develop a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of large collections of (audio)visual materials, like television, film and photography. Their Distant Viewing Lab produces tools, methods, and datasets, which can be re-used by other researchers. The lab engages closely with critical and data studies, aiming to make explicit the interpretative act of algorithmic logic. For more information, see: http://www.distantviewing.org.

Lauren Tilton is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century U.S. visual culture.

Taylor Arnold is Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Richmond. He is specialized in the application of statistical computing to large text and image corpora.

Besides the Distant Viewing Lab, Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold are the directors of Photogrammar, a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs taken by the U.S. Federal government from 1935 to 1942. They are the authors of Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images and Texts (Springer, 2015). Their scholarships has appeared in journals such as Journal of Cultural Analytics, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

This brown bag lunch event is organized by Tim van der Heijden.