[thomaspsmits]

2023 RSVP Field Development Grant for our project ‘Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press. ’

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals awarded the 2023 Field Development Grant to our project ‘Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press. ’

We will apply state-of-the-art multimodal machine learning to explore the illustrated world(s) of the nineteenth-century press!

Excited to work on this project with Paul Fyfe, Ben Lee, and Julia Thomas!

More info in the RSVP newsletter

[thomaspsmits]

Roundtable on The European Illustrated Press in Media History.

Happy to announce that a roundtable on my book The European Illustrated Press (2020) was published in Media History! Grateful for the thoughtful reviews of Peter Sinnema: https://lnkd.in/e86U-hbb Marguérite Corporaal https://lnkd.in/eAbGDX8J and Michael de Nie https://lnkd.in/exp_frMp I hope to have addressed their points in my response. https://lnkd.in/erzBqsjS

[thomaspsmits]

Article in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: A multimodal turn in Digital Humanities. Using contrastive machine learning models to explore, enrich, and analyze digital visual historical collections

Seeking to integrate multimodality theory into the DH, this article demonstrates that recently developed multimodal deep learning models, such as Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), offer new possibilities to explore and analyze image–text combinations at scale. Based on three exploratory case studies, we argue that this zero-shot capability opens up the way for a multimodal turn in DH research. Moreover, multimodal models allow scholars to move past the artificial separation of text and images that was dominant in the field and analyze multimodal meaning at scale. However, we also need to be aware of the specific (historical) bias of multimodal deep learning that stems from biases in the training data used to train these models.

https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqad008/7078540?searchresult=1

[thomaspsmits]

Special Issue: Photojournalism and the archive: from analogue to digital

Together with Saskia Asser I edited a special issue of the Journal for Media History that examines what happens to pictures of the news and the way(s) we can see them when they are moved from the analogue to the digital realm. What do researchers of photojournalism gain and lose when the photographs we study are made accessible in a digital form? What kind of questions can we ask in and of the digital photojournalistic archive? Can computational techniques provide new kinds of access to and identify visual patterns in digitised photojournalistic collections? How does this change our understanding of the history of photojournalism?

https://www.tmgonline.nl/article/10.18146/tmg.829/

[thomaspsmits]

Paper: Towards Multimodal Computational Humanities. Using CLIP to Analyze Late-Nineteenth Century Magic Lantern Slides

This paper examines whether CLIP can be fruitfully applied to a (binary) classification task in the Humanities. We focus on a historical collection of late-nineteenth century magic lantern slides from the Lucerna database. Based on the available metadata, we evaluate CLIP’s performance on classifying slide images into ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ categories. We compare the performance of several textual prompts for CLIP to two conventional mono-modal models (textual and visual) which we train and evaluate on the same stratified set of 5,244 magic lantern slides and their captions.

ceur-ws.org/Vol-2989/short_paper23.pdf

[thomaspsmits]

Article in New Media & Society: Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs.

How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? .Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448211049459

[thomaspsmits]

New Article: A network of photographs: The visual public memory of the Dutch Provo movement, 1967–2016

Excited for my new article in Memory Studies. I chart the circulation of photographs of the Dutch Provo movement between 1967 and 2016 to introduce the concept of visual public memory.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17506980211037282

[thomaspsmits]

New Article: Does transnational contention lead to transnational memory? The online visual memory of the February 2003 anti-Iraq War protests

New article with Ruben Ros in Social Movement Studies. We distant read 1746 online circulations of 25 photographs of the 2003 anti-Iraq War protests to study if transnational contention leads to transnational forms of memory (spoiler: it doens't).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742837.2021.1967736

[thomaspsmits]

New Job at the University of Antwerp

I joined the Understanding Ideological Bias through Data-Driven Methods project at the Univeristy of Antwerp.

[thomaspsmits]

New Article: The agency of computer vision models as optical instruments

New article with Melvin Wevers for Visual Communication. We discuss Computer Vision models as optical instruments in the production of contemporary visuality. What can #CV models see and what can humans see through them? 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470357221992097

[thomaspsmits]

The European Illustrated Press won the 2020 Robert and Veneta Colby Scholarly Book Prize!

Read the report of the prize committee here: http://rs4vp.org/awards/colby-prize/

[thomaspsmits]

Blog: Delacroix in Hong Kong: Activism, Memory and Visual Representation

Why does a Delacroix painting from 1830 pop up a @WorldPressPhoto award winning photograph of the Hong Kong protests? I wrote a blog on the connection between activism, memory and visual representation

[thomaspsmits]

Publication of book: The European Illustrated Press.

Happy with the publication of my first book with Routledge. Find it via WorldCat

[thomaspsmits]

Short residency at CESTA, Stanford (December 2019)

[thomaspsmits]

Invited lecture at Fantastic Futures. AI and Cultural Heritage conference. Stanford.

https://library.stanford.edu/projects/fantastic-futures

[thomaspsmits]

Wat kunnen bibliotheken aan #ComputerVision hebben? Ik vertelde er iets over aan Bieb a Palooza

[thomaspsmits]

Hoofdstuk in De Krant. Een Cultuurgschiedenis

Mijn hoofdstuk “Een Explosie van Beeld, 1840-1930″ gepubliceerd in De Krant. Een cultuurgeschiedenis.