Eycon project
Recent digitisation efforts of historical photographs by archival institutions have often been done in silo. This is an issue for researchers and archivists, but it also raises the question of public uses of history when it comes to contemporary perspectives on colonial/imperial warfare. Indeed, disconnected visual repositories reinforce deeply entrenched notions of national exceptionalism in France, Britain and in other states with a history of international interventionism and expansionism. Drawing on advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, EyCon aims at connecting, analysing and commenting on these divided repositories to increase the discoverability and usability of overlooked and scattered material on colonial, imperial and international armed conflicts up to 1918. EyCon (Visual AI and Early Conflict Photography) brings together Humanities scholars, technical experts, archivists and other stakeholders to produce innovative research at the juncture of computer science, archival studies and history. It will also make digitised records more accessible to a wide range of users. EyCon’s primary objective is to assess the usefulness of computation to visualise, navigate and analyse large visual corpora. EyCon aims at harnessing and questioning computation as well as testing new approaches to visualisation when it is applied to historical investigation. In doing so, it addresses the ethical and epistemological issues raised by the application of AI tools to controversial pasts. EyCon has two specific objectives:
1 – The aggregation of data into a thematic collection on early conflict photography. A wide array of photographic material from disconnected repositories will be aggregated into a thematic collection on early conflict photography (1890-1918) with a focus on non-European theatres of war. Image extraction scripts will be used to enrich the database with photo-engravings from digitised published material. The collection will be interoperable and consistent with the IIIF framework.
2 – The development of AI techniques for historical enquiry and data enrichment of a large visual corpus of historical photographs. EyCon aims at providing researchers and other users with integrated computational tools to apply distant vision to its visual database and solutions to augment their close reading capacities. The project team will use AI-reliant tools:
- To compare and search images for similarities
- To visualise of a large visual corpus thanks to image embeddings, topic modeling and clustering
- To isolate photographic tropes, subgenres as well as significant “anomalies” in the database
- To retrain existing datasets on early conflict photographs
The Team
Dr Lise Jaillant was awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (2017-18) for her project “After the Digital Revolution,” which was followed by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2018-20) to work on the born-digital records of the poetry publisher Carcanet Press. Jaillant has extensive experience of international research networks. Since 2020, she has led several AHRC-funded projects including AURA (Archives in the UK/ Republic of Ireland and AI: Bringing together Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists & stakeholders to unlock cultural assets) and AEOLIAN (UK/ US: AI for Cultural Organisations). Recent publications include the edited collection “Archives, Access and AI” (to be published open access in 2022), and articles such as “More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives” (accepted for publication in the world-leading journal American Archivist).
Dr Julien Schuh has led several funded digital humanities projects (ModOAP and BaOIA, development of machine learning tools for the humanities) and the digital components of projects funded by the French National Research Agency (in particular the Numapresse project, aiming to write a history of the French press since 1800 from digitised collections, with the creation of databases and digital tools for automatic analysis). He is also a specialist in the history of the illustrated press at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Prof. Daniel Foliard is a historian whose core interest is on modern European imperialisms. His first book Dislocating the Orient. British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921,” was published by the University of Chicago Press. Combattre, punir, photographier. Empires coloniaux, 1890-1914, his second monograph, was published in French by La Découverte in 2020. It focuses on photography and colonial conflicts. It will be published in English by Manchester University Press in 2022. Foliard has developed a robust expertise in the historical exploration of sensitive material documenting colonial and imperial contexts.
Marina Giardinetti – Marina Giardinetti is a research assistant/data architect specialized in creating digital tools for humanities researchers at the LARCA (CNRS, Université Paris-Cité). She is in charge of the data architecture of the EyCon project. She was previously research assistant within the Boîte à outils d’intelligence artificielle project, she was developing tools for collecting and analyzing corpora. She is also lecturer at Paris Nanterre University.
Soumik Mallick – Soumik Mallick is a research engineer at LARCA (CNRS, Université Paris-Cité). He is in charge of developing deep learning algorithms to support historical and archival investigations for the EyCon project. He is implementing methods to extract relevant information from early war pictures and help to understand their content. He was also a former research engineer at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, ENSTA Paris, and ENSICAEN. His research interests mainly focus on computer vision, deep learning, object detection, and natural language processing.
Katie Aske - Katie Aske currently works as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the digital humanities projects EyCon and AEOLIAN at Loughborough University. She is also an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant for Northumbria University. After completing her PhD in eighteenth-century literature at Loughborough University in 2015, Aske undertook a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Université de Bretagne Occidentale in 2016, working on the ‘DIGITENS: Digital Encyclopaedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century' project. She has since held several academic positions in teaching, digital humanities, cultural heritage, and transcription. Her individual research focusses on female beauty, skincare and proto-dermatology in the long eighteenth century. She has recently received a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants award for her project 'Skincare in Popular and Medical Culture, 1660–1800'. She is currently working on her first monograph, Being Pretty in the Eighteenth Century: A Cultural History of Female Beauty (Bloomsbury).
Dr. Jonathan Dentler received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California, where he also earned a graduate certificate in Visual Studies. He has a background in digital humanities through the Mellon-Humanities in a Digital World program at USC. His dissertation, entitled “Wired Images: Visual Telecommunications, News Agencies, and the Invention of the World Picture, 1917—1955,” is a global history of wire photography services.
Dr Camille Kurtz – Camille Kurtz obtained the PhD in Computer Sciences from the Université de Strasbourg, France, in 2012. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, CA, USA, between 2012 and 2013. He is now an Associate Professor at Université de Paris, France and a member of the SIP research group (Systèmes Intelligents de Perception) at LIPADE Lab. His scientific interests include pattern recognition, AI, computer vision, medical imaging, remote sensing and document image analysis. From a methodological point of view, he addresses both structural models (graph or grid of pixels) and statistical models (distributions) by endeavoring to integrate external knowledge into the image analysis workflow (e.g. additional textual information). Within the framework of content-based image retrieval, the recognition of complex shapes, the indexing and the selection of features can characterize his research activities. See more: www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~ckurtz/
Florence Cloppet – Florence Cloppet obtained the PhD in computer sciences à René Descartes University in 1996 and her professorial thesis in 2016. She is currently deputy director at LIPADE at Paris-Cité Université and member of the SIP research team (‘Systèmes Intelligents de Perception’). Her scientific interests include computer vision, pattern recognition with a particular interest to the knowledge integration to the analysis and image interpretation processes. In this goal, her research topics involve Artificial Intelligence approches (Machine Learning, Multi-Agent Systems into deciding architectures based on argumentation) in the context of biomedical images or documents’ images analysis. Personal website: http://www.mi.parisdescartes.fr/~cloppet/
Devika Mehra - Dr Devika Mehra works as a postdoctoral research associate on the digital humanities project, EyCon, at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University. She is also an associate lecturer in the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She is the current recipient of the Inclusion, Participation, and Engagement fellowship grant (School of Advanced Study, University of London) for a research project investigating the role of children’s literature archives, children's archive centres and libraries in promoting diversity. She was a postdoctoral research associate on the British Academy-funded project at Newcastle University that combined two interconnected strands: exploring the importance of Black British children's literature archives and the role of young people's voices in increasing representation in children's prize culture. Her areas of interest include twentieth-century middle-grade children's fiction (British, American and South Asian), Indian and global children's cinema, Black British children’s literature, children's publishing in India, children's literature archives and digital humanities methods, and digital texts for children. She has presented internationally and published in these areas.