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Category: photography

Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

Centropa. org features video photo montages that combine Jewish family photographs with oral history. I found my way to Centropa from the Time.com article Old Nazi News Makes Headlines in Germany which includes Kristallnacht in Words and Photographs from Centropa, but Centropa’s mission reaches beyond recalling the Holocaust. Centropa bills itself as “an interactive database of Jewish memory”.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”.  Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

Jewish New Year 5769: Images and Words from the Past

Flickr LOC: Praying on the Brooklyn BridgeThe Jewish year of 5769 began at sunset of September 29th, 2008. The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) is a very reflective holiday, one in which individuals are encouraged to consider their own actions from the past year. It made me wonder what materials are available online to let us glimpse the celebration of Rosh Hashanahs long past.

A search in the Flickr Commons yielded this lovely Library of Congress image of women praying on the Brooklyn Bridge (likely participating in the ritual of Tashlikh).

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Collections & Archives has photos about Rosh Hashanah – including this optimistic card depicting a couple from the Fuerth displaced persons camp flying to Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem has pulled together selections relating to Rosh Hashanah in an online collection called Marking the New Year.

I also found an assortment of treasures on the Internet Archive:

Rosh Hashanah Poem (1898)

 

These examples only scratch the surface of the archives and collections that include Jewish records. If this has peaked your interest, here are a few other websites to explore:

Know of others I missed – please add them in the comments below!

These sites are from suggestions in the comments:

Flickr Terms of Service, Unwritten Guidelines and Safety Levels

Flickr: Free Click by fikra (Sami Ben Gharbia)As more cultural heritage institutions add photos to Flickr, such as these sets added by the Smithsonian, an AP article discussing freedom of expression in online public spaces identifies some some issues that deserve attention. In ‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights, Anick Jesdanun highlights a number of scenarios in which service providers (such as the Yahoo! owned Flickr) clash with their users, including this one (italics my own):

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that – far from promoting smoking – the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

This image on Flickr gives more details about the photo being removed – and this is the reinstated photo in question. The article points out “Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.” It makes me wonder if the ‘unwritten guidelines’ are applied evenly across Flickr. With the creation of The Commons area, it would be easy to create two standards – one for the general public and another for ‘blessed’ institutions. Images that are acceptable from the Brooklyn Museum (consider this set of Behind The Scenes photos of the Ron Mueck exhibition) might not be accepted from the average person. In my research I discovered a set of Public Domain photos from the National Archives. Some of the photos included in this set are historically valuable images that I would not necessarily want a child to see. Does this mean they shouldn’t be on Flickr? I don’t think so, but that certainly isn’t up to me.

Here are the relevant passages of the Yahoo! Terms of Service:

You agree to not use the Service to:

  1. upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
  2. harm minors in any way;

You acknowledge that Yahoo! may or may not pre-screen Content, but that Yahoo! and its designees shall have the right (but not the obligation) in their sole discretion to pre-screen, refuse, or remove any Content that is available via the Service. Without limiting the foregoing, Yahoo! and its designees shall have the right to remove any Content that violates the TOS or is otherwise objectionable.

That bit about ‘otherwise objectionable’ could be used to cover removal of anything. Being subject to the terms of service of Internet service providers is nothing new, but as archives, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions look for ways to increase their revenue streams and explore innovative ways to bring more eyes to their materials it will become more import to understand these guidelines.

I understand (as the author of the article that inspired this post also points out) that Yahoo! is a business. Their priorities are not always going to be the same as those of the National Archives or the Brooklyn Museum. There are definitely images from history and the world of art that are only appropriate for adults, but isn’t that what Flickr’s content filter feature, named SafeSearch, is all about? These are the three ‘safety levels’ available on Flickr:

  • Safe – Content suitable for a global, public audience
  • Moderate – If you’re not sure whether your content is suitable for a global, public audience but you think that it doesn’t need to be restricted per se, this category is for you
  • Restricted – This is content you probably wouldn’t show to your mum, and definitely shouldn’t be seen by kids

It is interesting that Flickr has it’s own separate list of Community Guidelines, independent of Yahoo!’s terms of service. This is the passage from these guidelines about filtering content:

Take the opportunity to filter your content responsibly. If you would hesitate to show your photos or videos to a child, your mum, or Uncle Bob, that means it needs to be filtered. So, ask yourself that question as you upload your content and moderate accordingly. If you don’t, it’s likely that one of two things will happen. Your account will be reviewed then either moderated or terminated by Flickr staff.

I am still not sure what safety level I would use for a photo showing rows of dead in a concentration camp. I guess given the choices, ‘restricted’ is the best option – but that still doesn’t sit right with me somehow. I did an advanced Flickr search for ‘concentration camp’ with SafeSearch on – and those photos are not currently being marked as restricted. Who is it that we expect to be protecting using SafeSearch? From Flickr’s definition above it is supposed to at least be kids (and maybe your mom and Uncle Bob).

I think the question of the moment is how to know which images are appropriate to upload if some of the guidelines are unwritten. Flickr is a community and understanding the community is essential to success within that community. Once you believe your images are appropriate to include, then you must decide the right ‘safety level’. It is not clear to me how to tell the difference between an image that is not appropriate to be uploaded to Flickr and an image that is okay but needs to be marked with a safety level of ‘restricted’. I am very interested to see how this category of ‘appropriate but restricted’ evolves. For now, I am going to keep a watch on how the Flickr Commons grows and what range of content is included. The final answer for some of these images may be to only provide them via the institutions’ web sites rather than via service providers such as Flickr.

Image credit: Free Click by fikra (Sami Ben Gharbia) via Flickr

Clustering Data: Generating Organization from the Ground Up

Flickr: water tag clustersMy trip to the 2008 Information Architecture Summit (IA Summit) down in Miami has me thinking a lot about helping people find information. In this post I am going to examine clustering data.

Flickr Tag Clusters
Tag clusters are not new on Flickr – they were announced way back in August of 2005. The best way to understand tag clusters is to look at a few. Some of my favorites are the water clusters (shown in the image above). From this page you can view the reflection/nature/green cluster, the sky/lake/river cluster, the blue/beach/sun cluster or the sea/sand/waves cluster.

So what is going on here? Basically Flickr is analyzing groupings of tags assigned to Flickr images and identifying common clusters of tags. In our water example above – they found four different sets of tags that occurred together and distinctly apart from other sets of tags. The proof is in the pudding – the groupings make sense. They get at very subtle differences even though the mass of data being analyzed is from many different individuals with many different perspectives.

Tag clusters are very powerful and quite different from tag clouds. Tag clouds, by their nature, are a blunt instrument. They only show you the most popular tags. Take a look at the tag cloud for the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr. I do learn something from this. I get a sense of the broad brush topics, time periods and locations. But if you look at the full list of Library of Congress Flickr tags you see what a small percentage the top 150 really are (and yes.. that page does takes a while to load). Who else is now itching to ask Flickr to generate clusters within the LOC tag set?

Steve.Museum
Another example of cultural heritage images being tagged is the Steve Museum Art Museum Social Tagging Project which lets individuals tag objects from museums via Steve Tagger. It resembles the Library of Congress on Flickr project in that it includes existing metadata with each image and permits users to add any tags they deem appropriate. I think it would be fascinating to contrast the traffic of image taggers on Steve.Museum vs Flickr for a common set of images. Is it better to build a custom interface that users must seek out but where you have complete control over the user experience and collected data? Or is it better to put images in the already existing path of users familiar with tagging images? I have no answers of course. All I know is I wish I could see the tag clusters one could generate off the Steve.Museum tag database. Perhaps someday we will!

Del.icio.us Tags
del.icio.us related tagsDel.icio.us, a web service for storing and tagging your bookmarks online, supports what they call ‘related tags’ and ‘tag bundles’. If you view the page for the tag ‘archives’ – you will see to the far right a list of related tags like those shown in the image here. What is interesting is that if I look at my own personal tag page for archives I see a much longer list of related tags (big surprise that I have a lot of links tagged archives!) and I am given the option of selecting additional tags to filter my list of links via a combination of tags.

Del.icio.us’s ‘tag bundles’ let me create my own named groupings of tags – but I must assemble these groups manually rather than have them generated or suggested. On the plus side, Del.icio.us is very open about publishing its data via APIs and therefore supporting third party tools. I think my favorite off that list for now has to be MySQLicious which mirrors your del.icio.us bookmarks into a MySQL database. Once those tags are in a database, all you need are the right queries to generate the clusters I want to see.

Clusty: Clustered Search Results
Clusty: clusters screen shotAn example of what this might look like for search results can be seen via the search engine Clusty.com from the folks over at Vivisimo. For example – try a search on the term archives. This is one of those search terms for which general web searching is usually just infuriating. Clusty starts us with the same top 2 results as a search for archives on Google does, but it also gives us a list of clusters on the left sidebar. You can click on any of those clusters to filter the search results.

Those groups don’t look good to you? Click the ‘remix’ link in the upper right hand corner of the cluster list and you get a new list of clusters. In a blog post titled Introducing Clustering 2.0 Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez explains what happens when you click remix:

With a single click, remix clustering answers the question: What other, subtler topics are there? It works by clustering again the same search results, but with an added input: ignore the topics that the user just saw. Typically, the user will then see new major topics that didn’t quite make the final cut at the last round, but may still be interesting.

I played for a while.. clicking remix over and over. It was as if it was slicing and dicing the facets for me – picking new common threads to highlight. I liked that I wasn’t stuck with what someone else thought was the right way to group things. It gave me the control to explore other groupings.

Ontology is Overrated
Clay Shirky’s talk Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags from the spring of 2005 ties a lot of these ideas together in a way that makes a lot of sense to me. I highly recommend you go read it through – but I am going to give away the conclusion here:

It’s all dependent on human context. This is what we’re starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don’t recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we’re dealing with a significant break — by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we’re going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

I currently spend my days working with controlled vocabularies for websites, so please don’t think I am suggesting we throw it all away. And yes, you do need a lot of information to reach the critical mass needed to support the generation of useful clusters. But there is something here that can have a real and positive impact on users of cultural heritage materials actually finding and exploring information. We can’t know how everyone will approach our records. We can’t know what aspects of them they will find interesting.

There Is No Box
Archivists already know that much of the value of records is in the picture they paint as a group. A group of records share a context and gives the individual records meaning. Librarians and catalogers have long lived in a world of shelves. A book must be assigned a single physical location. Much has been made (both in the Clay Shirky talk and elsewhere) that on the web there is no shelf.

What if we take the analogy a step further and say that for an online archives there is no box? Of course, just as with books, we still need our metadata telling us who created this record originally (and when and why and which record comes before it and after it) – but picture a world where a single record can be virtually grouped many times over. Computer programs are only going to get better at generating clusters, be they of user assigned tags or search results or other metdata. From where I sit, the opportunity for leveraging clustering to do interesting things with archival records seems very high indeed.

LOC + Flickr equals Crowdsourced Tagging

Flickr/LOC: Lily Smith between 1910 and 1915 (LC-B2- 2350-8)It is no surprise that the Library of Congress announcing the publication of images on Flickr is news both in mainstream news outlets and in the blogosphere. From librarian.net‘s short and cheery LoC goes 2.0! post to ArchivesNext‘s pondering Is Flickr “legitimate” for archives now that LOC is there?, I have seen a lot of discussion of LoC and Flickr in my RSS feeds.

What is it all about?

In case you have missed the details, the Library of Congress has published two photo collections on Flickr in a new subsection of the website called The Commons. The two collections are:

  • 1930s-40s in Color: 1615 photos taken by photographers working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) and covering “rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working between 1939 and 1944.”
  • News in the 1910s: 1500 photos taken by photographers who worked for the Bain News Service. Topics include “sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, with a special emphasis on life in New York City.”

I enjoyed reading Flickr’s own blog post on the subject, Many hands make light work. It gave me a glimpse of their vision. For them, these two collections from the Library of Congress make up a pilot project – this is just the first step.

On their page for The Commons they first talk about their goals for the project:

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

On the homepage for the Library of Congress Flickr pilot I found this introduction:

The Library of Congress invites you to explore history visually by looking at interesting photos from our collections. Please add tags and comments, too! More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.

So, here we have a project between two large and well known organizations, with their goals carefully aligned. Let’s get more people looking at the amazing photos from the Library of Congress. Let’s also harness the curiosity and enthusiasm of those who want to be more involved and want to tag content. I love it!

Considering the Tags

So then I started looking at photos and the tags they have. I wish (being my database geek self) that I could see the groupings in which tags were added (ie, that one person added tags 3 through 10). They don’t seem to be displayed alphabetically – but rather in the order in which they were added to the photo.

I considered this photo from the 1930s-40s in Color collection:

LOC Woman Airplane Photo

The list below shows all the tags that were assigned to it, in the order in which the tags are displayed beside the photo above on Flickr (listed separated by commas to preserve space). The ‘Library of Congress’ tag has already been assigned to every photo in the collections upon upload, and therefore always appears first:

Library of Congress, Long Beach, california, 1942, october, WW2, USA, aircraft, douglas, Palmer, WWII, women, manufacturing, yellow, stripes, overalls, engine, Douglas Aircraft, engine installation, military aviation, World War II, women at work, historical photographs, slide film, 4×5, large format, LF, transparency, transparencies, world war 2, technology

In a world with no controlled vocabulary, there seems to be a theory at work of covering all your bases. Rather than noticing that someone had tagged this photo ‘WW2’, it was also later tagged with ‘WWII’, ‘World War II’ and ‘world war 2’. On another photo in the collection I know I saw the tag ‘wwii’. As long as there is no ‘offical’ version for this tag, I see the wisdom in tagging it with all of them – just to be sure.

The official description of the photo is: “Women are trained to do precise and vital engine installation detail in Douglas Aircraft Company plants, Long Beach, Calif. (1942 Oct)”. The metadata provided by the Library of Congress also includes information about the format of the film itself.

These are the subject headings assigned by the Library of Congress catalogers:

  • Douglas Aircraft Company

  • Airplane industry

  • Women–Employment

  • World War, 1939-1945

  • Assembly-line methods

  • United States–California–Long Beach

It is interesting to note that the main things that the independent taggers have captured that the professional catalogers haven’t are either non-topical aspects of the image (‘yellow’ and ‘overalls’) as well as broader more general ideas (‘military aviation’ and ‘technology’).

Does the tag ‘women at work’ tell you more than the LOC subject heading ‘Women–Employment’? Maybe, maybe not – but if you view all the images tagged ‘women at work’ across Flickr, now you can see these women from the 1940s at work beside photos such as three vendors and Bozo village life. Now this is something different. This is knitting threads from the ivory tower of libraries and archives into the communal tapestry that is Flickr. Not only might the addition of the ‘women at work’ tag make these images more accessible to the average person looking for Library of Congress photos – but it also puts these photos in the everyday path of many more people. It brings us firmly back to Flickr’s goal stated above of giving more people a “taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection”.

Copyright

Flickr has this to say on The Commons’ home page about copyright:

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

I am with ArchivesNext in hoping that this move by the Library of Congress will give archivists and librarians on the ground in other institutions a bit more ammunition with which to fight for posting their images on Flickr. Copyright is one of the issues that seems to give so many organizations pause – so it is interesting to see this new category having been created specifically for cultural institutions. I like that they link back to the Library of Congress’s official answer about what it means if the catalog record notes ‘No known restrictions on publication’. Flickr also explicitly mentions that “If the pilot works – or, when it works! – we’ll look to allow other interested cultural institutions the opportunity to extend the application of “no known restrictions” to their catalogues.” So clearly “no known copyright restrictions” has been created with cultural institutions in mind.

Final Thoughts

I am intrigued to see how this progresses. If nothing else is accomplished, more people will certainly see images from the Library of Congress collections than they would have had none of these photos been published on Flickr. Some will even surf back to the Library of Congress website to learn more about their photo collecitons. For the example photo I selected above, there were already subject headings assigned – but for most of the Bain News Service photos all that is available are bits of “unverified data provided by the Bain News Service on the negatives or caption cards”. Every tag that is added improves the chances that an interested party may find the photo they need.

I have posted before about the potential of crowdsourcing. I am in favor of it. Yes, all the tags won’t be perfect. Yes, there will be seven different ways of tagging for World War II. But when all is said and done, more people will find more photos. More eyes will see the treasures that once were only available to those who could get inside temperature and humidity controlled vaults. And more people will have the opportunity to learn a tiny bit more about why cultural institutions like the Library of Congress are great!