Emmanuel Iduma

This project uses the Distant Viewing toolkit to computationally analyse thousands of early 20th century colonial photographs by N. W. Thomas, exploring how computer vision can support the interpretation of ethnographic archives at scale. The photographs were taken in a 55-month period between 1909 and 1915, during fieldwork by Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The Distant Viewing framework is a theory and method developed by Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton, proposing a workflow of computational interpretation. The theory advances a rationale for an ‘explicit code system’ by which semantic information within a digital image may be extracted and interpreted. Following the 4-stage method of Distant Viewing, this project will I) create annotated data using computer vision, II) aggregate the annotations and combine it with the metadata of the archive, III) address areas of enquiry, and IV) communicate results. Grounded in visual culture studies, computational humanities, and archive theory, Computational Entanglements probes the tension between computer vision and colonial photographic legacies.