Faces offer an instant connection to history, reminding us that the past is full of people. People like us, but different. People with their own lives and stories. People we might only know through a picture, a few documentary fragments, or a newspaper article.
Eyes on the Past is an experimental interface, built in a weekend. I’m exploring whether faces can provide a way to explore more than 120 million newspaper articles available on Trove.
This collection of tweets tells the story of its development.
There’s some details about the software used in the site’s about page. You can view the harvest/detection and the website code on GitHub.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
[…] on my earlier work using facial detection technology as a means of archival intervention, it opens up questions about the lives embedded within our collections — we see them differently, we feel […]