Oliver Croxton, pictured above right, is computer science Assistant Professor Kurt Luther's great-great-great uncle. Photo courtesy of the Ken Turner Collection.
Posted on 03/06/2019 11:05:44 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Kurt Luther, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science, has developed a free software platform that uses crowdsourcing to significantly increase the ability of algorithms to identify faces in photos.
Through the software platform, called Photo Sleuth, Luther seeks to uncover the mysteries of the nearly 4 million photographs of Civil War-era images that may exist in the historical record.
Luther will present his research surrounding the Photo Sleuth platform on March 19 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Los Angeles, California. He will also demonstrate Photo Sleuth at the grand opening of the expanded American Civil War Museum, in Richmond, Virginia, on May 4, 2019.
Luther, a history buff himself, was inspired to develop the software for Civil War Photo Sleuth in 2013 while visiting the Heinz History Center's exhibit called "Pennsylvania's Civil War" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he stumbled upon a Civil War-era portrait of Oliver Croxton, his great-great-great uncle who served in Company E of the 134th Pennsylvania, clad in a corporal's uniform.
"Seeing my distant relative staring back at me was like traveling through time," said Luther. "Historical photos can tell us a lot about not only our own familial history but also inform the historical record of the time more broadly than just reading about the event in a history book."
(Excerpt) Read more at vtnews.vt.edu ...
From 2010 until last year, as Virginia observed the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, archivists traveled the state in an "Antiques Roadshow" style campaign to unearth the past. Organizers had thought the effort might produce a few hundred new items. They were a little off. It flushed out more than 33,000 pages of letters, diaries, documents and photographs that the library scanned and has made available for study online.
From the attics and shoeboxes of Virginia, a trove of historical gold | Gregory S. Schneider | Washington ComPost | November 6, 2016
The James I. Robertson Jr. Civil War Sesquicentennial Legacy Collection documents the people of our nation and commonwealth during the Civil War era as told through letters, diaries, photographs, and other manuscripts held in private collections. Between 2011 and 2015, Virginians across the commonwealth eagerly shared their historic collections from the Civil War era through a free digitization and worldwide access project established by a partnership of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, Virginia's local Sesquicentennial committees, and the Library of Virginia. Originally known as the Civil War 150 Legacy Project, the collection was renamed at the close of Virginia's 150th commemoration in honor of the noted Civil War scholar and Commission member Dr. James I. Robertson Jr.
James I. Robertson Jr. Civil War Sesquicentennial Legacy Collection
This is cool.
I wholeheartedly agree.
My mom knew all of that stuff even a week until she died at 95 (we were going through all of her photos albums and trying to write stuff down).
I wouldn’t know my great-great-great uncle if he walked up to me on the street and said hi! Perhaps this professor/researcher had been using one of his g-g-g uncle’s photos as a test subject for the last year!?
What a great use of the internet. A fascinating concept.
I hope we are still around in that recognizable related form in another 120 years.
And not just mongrelized into another 3rd world s#ithole.
I believe it is the actor Philip Carey.
No it’s the Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ guy, Kevin McCarthy
My great great great grandfather is the spitting image of my kid brother. When we first saw the picture we thought my brother had had one of those ‘old timey costume’ pictures taken.
It took a few seconds to lock on to Kevin McCarthy.
Classic TZ is great TV.
Guy on the left looks like Ed Norton......................
I have a photo of my great great uncle Bob with my Mom at about age 5. He served in the Civil War. Its so weird to look at that photo and realize my Mom knew someone who was in the war.
In 1938, there were at least 10,000 veterans alive from the Battle of Gettysburg. The federal government paid for their transportation from around the country to Gettysburg trunion.
There is a picture of my father (born 1926) as a child with a neighbor who was with an Ohio infantry unit in the CW.
Yep. When people ask me why emotions still run high over the civil war I tell them its because it wasn’t that long ago.
I was traveling around doing genealogy and happened to run into a guy who was the spitting image of my grandfather. The guy swore up and down the two families in the town with the same last name weren’t related. Sure, whatever. Mighty coincidental.
Bet the government’s facial recognition programs would do a much faster and accurate job than this program.
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