Toward a Holistic Approach to the Socio-historical Analysis of Vernacular Photos

Although one of the most popular practices in photography since the end of the 19th century, an increase in scholarly interest in family photo albums dates back to the early 1980s. Such collections of photos may reveal sociological and historical insights regarding specific cultures and times. They are, however, in most cases scattered among private homes and only available on paper or photographic film, thus making their collection and analysis by historians, socio-cultural anthropologists, and cultural theorists very cumbersome. Computer-based methodologies could aid such a process in various ways, speeding up the cataloging step, for example, with the use of modern computer vision techniques. We here investigate such an approach, introducing the design and development of a multimedia application that may automatically catalog vernacular pictures drawn from family photo albums. To this aim, we introduce the IMAGO dataset, which is composed of photos belonging to family albums assembled at the University of Bologna's Rimini campus since 2004. Exploiting the proposed application, IMAGO has offered the opportunity of experimenting with photos taken between the years 1845 and 2009. In particular, it has been possible to estimate their socio-historical content, i.e., the dates and contexts of the images, without resorting to any other sources of information. Exceeding our initial expectations, such an approach has revealed its merit not only in terms of performance but also in terms of the foreseeable implications for the benefit of socio-historical research. To the best of our knowledge, this contribution is among the few that move along this path at the intersection of socio-historical studies, multimedia computing, and artificial intelligence.