The project that I explored was Photogrammar because I love photography and so my eyes where immediately drawn to it because of its name.
The project is a collection of pictures from the economic crisis of 29 and World War II period as they were taken by photographers under the “…direction of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI)…” these pictures portray one of the most extensive databases for how the united states was during those times. The team behind photogrammar decided that the immensity of pictures that there are needed to be better shown which is how they created this interactive map which provides users the ability to see all the pictures that were taken in the different parts of the United States of America as well as be able to search by the tags that were created for the pictures in ’45.
Sources used: The Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration photography collection
Processes: the project is hosted on a website, this involves the use of HTML, CSS and potentially JavaScript as a language to run the various scripts that the website uses, however there are a couple other languages that could do this and from an inspection of the website I am not sure how to tell.
There is bound to be a database system, potentially a relational one since it has pictures that are associated with cities and counties, however the speed at which the search is being done leads me to believe that it might actually a NoSQL database that has the same information just stored differently which makes it faster (there is more nuanced to how they work but that is enough, stored differently makes it faster in some cases).
Use: the main use is to display these wonderful pictures to the broader public with ease both as a historical part of the United States of America, but also so that people can be fascinated at how big the effort to document these images was by the sheer amount of pictures there are.
Now that I have broken down this wonderful project I was left with one question from my inspection of the HTML code, how does the <g> tag work? Because I looked at it for 20 minutes while I tested different inputs and it still confuses me.
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I also love photography! Although I didn’t explore this website much, it looks like photogrammar has a very interactive interface and interesting data visualizations. I find it amazing that you were able to sort of deduce or get an idea of the database system used here through your exploration of the site and the fascination you found in this project.