Extracting, Assimilating, and Sharing the Results of Image Analysis on the FSA/OWI Photography Collection

This paper reports on the continued work on image analysis of the Farm Security Administration -- Office of War Information Photography Collection team, supported through an XSEDE grant (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) and Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS). The team is refining existing algorithms, developing new algorithms and executing them on the Comet supercomputer to analyze the FSA-OWI corpus from 1935-1944, held by the Library of Congress (LOC). The project spans many fields within the humanities and beyond, including photography, art, visual rhetoric, linguistics, American history, anthropology, and geography, as well as appealing to the general public. Progress includes refining image, metadata, and lexical semantics analysis, as well as developing a search, retrieval, and sorting interface through Clowder, which will serve as the public portal. Methods and tool refinement for this project are suitable for use on other large image corpora.