This is mainly a technical account of the digital archiving of the photo collection of a 128-year old Black-owned newspaper. The nature of the photo materials, the sheer quantity, and the...
This is mainly a technical account of the digital archiving of the photo collection of a 128-year old Black-owned newspaper. The nature of the photo materials, the sheer quantity, and the technology gaps of the time required some clever robotics and machine learning development to create a usable library. The newspaper realized some new revenues from licensing, and historians have access to photos that would otherwise have remained buried and unknown.
While Thomas Smith, the author, spends a considerable amount of space in self-congratulation for the development of the technology used to accomplish the scanning and indexing, it's still a useful account of Afro-American Newspaper's historical importance, community impact, and longevity. Smith contextualizes the newspaper in terms of a "startup", in an attempt to recognize the underappreciated entrepreneurialism in Black communities. This falls a little flat in the face of the mainstream news' historical neglect and mis-characterisation of Black life. Black newspapers were founded as essential community services as much as for exploitation of business opportunities.
The article also espouses facial recognition technology's benefits in indexing and archiving images. While it's hard to argue with the positives Smith found, they don't sufficiently mitigate the relative evils of large facial recognition databases and their flawed, poorly regulated, opaque application.
This is mainly a technical account of the digital archiving of the photo collection of a 128-year old Black-owned newspaper. The nature of the photo materials, the sheer quantity, and the technology gaps of the time required some clever robotics and machine learning development to create a usable library. The newspaper realized some new revenues from licensing, and historians have access to photos that would otherwise have remained buried and unknown.
While Thomas Smith, the author, spends a considerable amount of space in self-congratulation for the development of the technology used to accomplish the scanning and indexing, it's still a useful account of Afro-American Newspaper's historical importance, community impact, and longevity. Smith contextualizes the newspaper in terms of a "startup", in an attempt to recognize the underappreciated entrepreneurialism in Black communities. This falls a little flat in the face of the mainstream news' historical neglect and mis-characterisation of Black life. Black newspapers were founded as essential community services as much as for exploitation of business opportunities.
The article also espouses facial recognition technology's benefits in indexing and archiving images. While it's hard to argue with the positives Smith found, they don't sufficiently mitigate the relative evils of large facial recognition databases and their flawed, poorly regulated, opaque application.