photogrammar – Digital Maps, Space and Place

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

The website Photogrammar, a digital collection of 170,000 photographs from the Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information, provides an excellent example for publishing a large digitized photograph collection and making it easy for the public to use. Additionally, the site offers unique insights into the data by presenting the collection as a digital map. For those who are interested in presenting a collection similar to Photogrammar, refer to The Look section below for information about the format of this website; for those interested in United States history and the digital humanities, refer to The Information.

The Look

A team of historians, statisticians, digital media and technology experts from Yale University turned a collection of old photographs into the digital humanities project, Photogrammar, and created a website that is clean, easy and fun to use. The main page streamlines the data into three options: an abstract about the history of the collection, a map that compresses the collection and organizes it by state and year, and an interactive feature that lets you explore the photographs from California in depth and search photographs via a subject of interest. With the first tab, About the Collection, the user can read an informative synopsis of the history of the collection. Having a separate tab for textual information makes the entire site more aesthetically pleasing and allows the visual aspects of the website to stand out. With the second tab, Interactive Map, the user can manipulate the presentation of the collection and organize it by a shaded map that indicates the number of photographs per county or a dotted map that indicates the location of particular photographers. Additionally, the map includes a slide feature that allows the user to select specific time periods for when the photographs were taken. The third tab, Photogrammer Labs, allows the user to explore subject headings and sub-headings of photographs using Treemap (for example, the category of ‘Work’ can be narrowed down to the specific sub-heading ‘Maple,’ which contains around fifty photographs of maple tree harvesting) and offers a way to analyze the photographs in California by photographer, topic, year and location using the Metadata Dashboard.

The website is unique because of the variety of ways that the user can sort through the collection: by date, by photographer, by location, and by subject. It is also unique in its accessibility; it does not organize the photographs by words but by visuals, such as the Interactive Map and the Treemap. My only complaint is that once you choose either a location (through the Interactive Map) or a subject (through Treemap) the site does not let you organize the photographs further. For example, once the subject category of ‘Husbands and Wives’ is selected, the photographs in that sub-heading cannot be sorted further by location, photographer or date. However, overall, the Photogrammar provides a useful access point and allows the user to sift through the photographs more precisely using the aforementioned visual search functions.

The Information

The pictures featured on this website document the era of United States history between the years 1935 and 1945 and record the relief work projects that occurred from the time of the Great Depression to WWII. In addition to organizing the photographs in the collection, I believe that Photogrammar uses the collection to create an entirely new entities like the Interactive Map. Like Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell argue in ’Developing Things: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities, the technology of the digital humanities is an act of scholarship and can itself become an argument or theory. In the case of Photogrammar, the website is a prototype for how digital collections should be organized and is an argument for what about a photography collection is important, namely, the photographer, location, date and subject of the photographs. Additionally, Photogrammar engages in thick mapping, which HyperCities defines as “collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data,” by placing categorical information about the photographs on top of a map of the United States and making a new entity that is an extension of the original collection. As an example of thick mapping, the layers of data in the Interactive Map add not only space-specific data (i.e. where the photograph was taken) but also time-specific data (i.e. when it was taken). In conclusion, the website does not merely organize photographic media sources, it builds a new media source with thick-map layering and organizational arguments.

In the terms of the representing the narratives of each picture, Photogrammar falls short by leaving the photographs to tell the narrative of this federal government project by themselves. As briefly summarized in the About the Collection, the federal government sponsored the widespread photography project featured on this website in order to introduce America to Americans and the spread support for the New Deal relief programs; thus, the entirety of this collecting is intended to highlight poverty and the effectiveness of work programs. As Nedra Reynolds point outs, all maps are made by subjective authors and are not accurate mirrors of reality; similarly, the photographs in the collection and the entire digital project of Photogrammar must be qualified by the subjective views of the photographers and creators. Despite the fact that the interface Photogrammar does not tell the complete story of these photographs, it remains a useful tool for researchers interested in the period and a good platform for others to use as an example for a digital collection.

This graphic shows the ‘Photographer’ option for the Interactive Map.

The Metadata Dashboard for California can be seen in the graphic above.

Photogrammar is a digital cartography project that maps upwards of 170,000 photos taken by photographers for the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935 to 1945. This ‘Great Depression to World War II’ time period has given birth to some of the most recognizable photographs in United States history. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the map comes to us from a team at Yale University.

The counties are highlighted with in green. The darker green represents a county with more photos. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/ — Photographs by county. The counties are highlighted in green. The darker green represents a county with more photos. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/

The map is easy to navigate with a straightforward narrative, which I address below. Progressing forward isn’t so much of a journey that the user would feel discouraged to back out and select another location. The visual aspects of the map give a sense of technological success without feeling intimidating. The user literally receives a visual of the past in a way that is familiar (use of a map) yet completely different than traditional ways of studying history.

This project clearly states two things due to how we must interact with the map. It argues that photography is an important way to document history, and the best way to look at these pictures is by location. The location or space has meaning because of the particular event or action captured in the photograph. There are two ways to view the map: by county (as shown above); darker green counties contain larger amounts of photographs, or by photographer; each photographer has a colored dot assigned to them in a particular county. On top of that, the user can narrow change the timeframe, search for a picture, and even view a classification tree of the photographs in the Labs section. In chapter 2 of Mobile Stories Brett Oppegaard and Dene Grigar talk about a narrative structure that “functions as a basic cognitive means of organizing human experience and making sense of it…” (Oppegaard and Grigar, 28). Photogrammar successfully carries out this narrative structure defined by Oppegaard and Grigar.

The interactive map looks like a Mercator style projection. Even though this style makes Alaska, which is not shown in the above picture due to the initial zoom of the map when the page opens, look much larger than the continental United States, I feel that this projection is suitable for this type of project. The intent of the map isn’t to show the correct proportions of the states, but instead, it’s intent is to show the prevalence of images that define United States history during this particular time period. Off of that point, this project would agree with Henri Lefebvre’s idea in “The Production of Space” that space is constructed by what people put there and by how people think of what is in the space (Lefebvre, 12-13). These images convey a message about people and space during this time period.

Furthermore, this project shows the uniqueness of digitizing information. The user can jump from year to year and location to location to see into the past. In “Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference”, Nedra Reynolds mentions that technology is helpful, yet is distances us from our own mental map because we come to rely on it too much (Reynolds, 82). I know that Reynolds is specifically referring to certain situations when she proposed her idea, but I would counter-argue that a map like Photogrammar does the exact opposite of distancing us; it allows us to connect locations that are important to us with images that are important in history.

I am impressed with the statement that this project gives to the user as well as how the user receives this statement; the ease of use due to simple actions and familiarity makes this an effective tool. Users ranging from middle school students to historians could find this map valuable. I would combine the Labs section with the actual map rather than having them separate; I don’t think it would be too much of an extra layer considering that the current layers of the map are few.

Tag: photogrammar

Photogrammar: A Better Way to Digitize Collections

Digital Cartography Review: Photogrammar