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New computing tools could save graduate students from thousands of hours spent visually inspecting historical maps, quilts, medieval art, and manuscripts.
Humanities researchers use laborious visual inspection of historical materials to determine authorship and artistic lineage for manuscripts, maps, and quilts. A typical research project could take the time of several graduate students two or more years.
“We are interested in understanding how to support these domain scientists so they are more efficient,” said Peter Bajcsy, principal investigator for the Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship-Related Questions (DID-ARQ) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He added, “We are giving them tools that will automate the visual inspection process.”
Those tools are the product of extensive collaboration between humanities researchers and Bajcsy’s team. To create them, the computer experts engaged in lengthy discussions to determine what questions the humanities researchers seek to answer, and exactly how they would answer them using traditional methods. Their inquiries sought out details such as which image features researchers use – consciously or unconsciously – to identify the author or artist. Then the computer scientists developed algorithms that could rapidly identify those features automatically.
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