Rediscovering the lost photographs of the Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society

Stephen Brown
2016 Études Photographiques  
This paper describes a successful attempt to link together hitherto disconnected historical photographic records owned by different institutions using just textual record information, in order to identify images that have been missing from important photographic exhibition catalogues for over 100 years. The context for this research is the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded FuzzyPhoto project that has developed a finding aid for researchers interested in identifying pictures in
more » ... m online collections even when the records are incomplete, imprecise and incorrect. It describes the challenges of working with historical museum records and the approach developed to deal with them. This new approach is based on semantic matching techniques and fuzzy logic based algorithms that reflect the kinds of choices made by human decision makers when carrying out such tasks. Results are presented and the significance of this research is discussed for cultural heritage institutions and more widely.
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