Photogrammar is a DH project that really intrigued me because I like to discover the context of old art and photography. The site presents old photographs taken from American photographers with the timespan 1935 and 1944, displaying them geologically accross America. It displays a rich account of the Great Depresion through photography throughout every single state in America.
Sources
This DH project gathers the photographs and data from archives with direction from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI).
Processes
To organize and process this data, every single picture is assigned different data lables that give information about the photograph. For example, each picture is assigned a photographer, a creation date, a location, and a caption. Some photographs also include tags that further sort the photos to make them more searchable.
Presentation
To present the catogorized data, there are a number of visual models this site uses. The first presentation of the data the user is presented with is a large map that geographically presents the data based on location. Purple density indicators display where there are higher consentrations of data from a certain county / city. There is also a timeline which displays the amount and timespan in which each photographer on the website took their photos. A search function is another way the data is presented, as users can search through tags, captions, themes, etc. Finally, there is a treemap of the themes that are shown within the pictures that can allow the user to sort through a specific theme.
Questions?
A new question I have from breaking down the digital project is: is it useful to have a the theme page with a treemap when the user can already search through the photos by theme in the search bar? I can infer that this may be to bring more attention to this part of the site, or to bring more character and explination to what the themes are when they are presented with a visual treemap.
Academic Fields? Target audience?
The academic fields this DH is involved with is history and art, as historians can trace back history using the data, and artists could analyze the photographs for their artistic and historical qualities.I think the target audience is the broader public, but specialists who may be interested in the history and art behind the photographs could also benefit from this cite.
