Welcome to the Last House on the Hill

 

Navigate this blog to understand the project, its premises, goals, and methods. It is all work in progress, so please feel free to contribute with your comment.

Highlights:

Premises and Goals 

Database Narratives

Ontology readings

introducing CoDiFi

iPad like interface

Relate anything through roles, events and properties

a search for bead brings up bead photos, specialists, texts

a search for burials

Playing with Faces in Aperture for LHOTH

I am working on reprocessing all of the photos and other media for the Last House on the Hill project with the help of Apples Aperture 3. The jury is still out on whether we can use the app. With 40,000 pictures in the library, the thumbnails, previews and database weighs in at 22GB. However, there are some great benefits to using the app for media management, and some ‘neat’ features, like Faces, which may prove more than novel and actually useful!

Faces in Aperture

By letting my computer grind over the 41,243 pictures in the media database overnight, Aperture produced previews and thumbnails of all media, whether tif, jpeg, raw, movie, very convenient. But it also analyzed the pics for facial features. You begin to build the lineup by clicking on any picture where Aperture has detected a face, and giving it a name.

Confirming Pedja

Once you have added a person, you can click on his/her face and then confirm other pictures of that person. Here I’m going through pix of Pedja. As you confirm or reject pix, the choices improve.

Actual photos including Pedja

The usefulness comes when you switch to the actual photos including the person. We can see a life history of the person in all of their contexts, and since this information is semi-automatically derived, we’re able to build out a person-centric view of the images that would otherwise take hours (likely days) to do.

As I’m going through the pix, Aperture makes it easy to add missing faces as I come across them. Just click on the pic and hit the N key, the dialog comes up and Aperture attempts to find faces in the shot. You can easily add more facial regions, as I’ve done in this example.

Adding missing faces

If a person is in your address book, their details are automagically linked, very handy. You can limit suggestions to a specific project. This is critical if your Aperture library contains many different projects – personal, weddings, trips, work – you can imagine what a mess of faces this would cause.

Kitchen area on Bastille Day, 2001

Archaeological Faces: Of course, it would be fabulous if we could use Aperture to recognize archaeological features automagically. Imagine being able to point Aperture at a set of pictures and have it analyze them for features like fire installations, obsidian caches and the like. Maybe someday.

For now, Aperture is a great tool for humanizing the massive image collection with relative ease. It’ll be another few sessions before I’ll know if the data we get out of Aperture is worth the time it takes to identify Faces (and soon, Places), but so far, it’s looking good.