Encoding the Image - Distant Viewing with Lauren Tilton

Encoding the Image: How does AI affect the Future of Photo History? is a conference presented by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, in partnership with pictorIA and High Vision.

This session is led by Lauren Tilton and titled Distant Viewing.

Abstract
How do computers view? How can we harness AI to view images at scale? Distant viewing offers a theory and method for the large scale analysis of images using computer vision. The talk will introduce the concept than turn to specific AI methods for the analysis of images. Specifically, I will look at documentary photography from the United States, and how distant viewing offers methods for access, discovery, and visual culture analysis. The talk draws on Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images with co-author Taylor Arnold and available open access through MIT Press.

Bio
Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond. She specializes in computational approaches to studying 20th and 21st century visual culture. Her most recent co-authored books include Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (Open Access, MIT Press), Humanities Data in R 2nd Edition (Springer), and Computational Humanities (Open Access, University of Minnesota Press). Her award-winning projects such as Photogrammar.org have received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon. She is Editor-in-Chief of Computational Humanities,an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the scholarly association for digital humanities in the United States, and President-Elect of the Association of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO), the global DH association. She received her PhD in American Studies from Yale University.