Yale Students Get Funding for Photogrammar Project

If Yale graduate students Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold have anything to do with it, then some 160,000 Depression-era images taken by photographers from the U.S. government are headed to a new and innovative place in “the cloud”.

Interactive vs. Static Online Repository
Yale's Professor Laura Wexler and its Office of Digital Humanities has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. According to the YaleNews “The start-up grant will specifically fund the Photogrammar Project, which will make the historic Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) photographs taken between 1935 and 1943 accessible to a new generation of scholars.”

Shahn, Ben 1898-1969. "Harvest hand on the Virgil 

Thaxton farm near Mechanicsburg, Ohio." 1938 Summer.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html

Tilton and Arnold devised the program under the direction of Wexler. While the Library of Congress website is a static online repository with few features to help the viewer navigate through its massive collections, the proposed Photogrammar Project will offer interactive access to both students and the general public.

Photography and Memory
Professer Wexler is no stranger to picture taking, having admitted learning about photography in the 60's and 70's, during a 2008 interview with Huang Yuhan, while lecturing in China. It was in that same conversation Professor Wexler so eloquently made the case for why the role of photography plays such a key part in how we piece together our understanding of our culture and the world we live in.

Wexler commented, “...it’s significant in itself as an art form and a form of communication, but my interest as a scholar is in how photography is evidence, how to use it as evidence, as document, as material for the writing of history and the understanding of society. That’s who I am as a scholar, so that’s what I’m trying to teach you in different frameworks, for looking at photography as historical work.”

A few years later these words would become the underpinnings for Dr. Wexler and her Yale team as they look to develop new concepts with interactive web-based open source visualization platforms that contain tens of thousands of photographs combined with user's tools to be able to construct statistical graphics and visualizations from the data associated with those pictures in an instant.

New Ideas & Compelling Innovative Formats
Armed with this grant and funded by the Office of Digital Humanities at Yale, this project, under the direction of Professor Wexler and its enthusiastic graduate students, like Tilton and Arnold will no doubt capitalize on the creative potential, and new media resources available surrounding them. The results they produce may very likely present cultural heritage materials in compelling and innovative new formats. 

You’ll want to be sure to put the Photogrammar Project on your watch list so you can check back in on its progress during the upcoming year.

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