This Was Paris in 1970

Faculty Fellow: Catherine Clark, Associate Professor of History and French Studies

Category

Faculty Fellowships
Year

Fall 2020

In 1970’s Paris, a photography competition, hosted to capture the city before rapid industrial change altered it permanently, received 100,000 submissions. How can we leverage the perspective that computers bring to such a substantial visual dataset with such a quantity of images? How can they help to facilitate rich historical and formal readings not just of a single photo, but of images numbering in the tens of thousands? Catherine Clark, Associate Professor of History and French Studies, and the DH Lab are working together to enhance our understanding of the "This was Paris in 1970" digital archive and realize the potential of computer vision and machine learning techniques in the study of photography.