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The circulation of the image of Clicko “the wild dancing bushman” between French, British and American archives.

By Aude Dumont

Thanks to the Eycon project’s partnership with the Service historique de la Défense (SHD) in Vincennes, we have been able to digitise the fond Victor Forbin, an archive that contains about 55 000 photographs from all over the world dating from approximately 1880 to 1920. Forbin collected images from Cameroon, Palestine, Turkey, and South Africa, among other locations. Although it is not easy to trace the history of the circulation of these photographs, many of them were published in the British press, and often have stamps on the verso from the Daily Mirror or the Illustrations Bureau. Such stamps make it possible to trace their circulation at least partially. The collection at the SHD was acquired from Forbin’s home in Clamart, in the Paris suburbs, and the fond’s boxes are classified by country.

      Here we will focus on file 2K247 on South Africa, and on one photograph in particular that you can see below.

Photography held at the Service historique de la Défense, in Vincennes. SHD GR 2K247 11: “Fonds Rumpf, Archives photographiques de Victor Forbin”

On the right picture: The pencil caption at the top state, “Capt Courténay d’Esterre with the wild Dancing Bushman which he brought from S. Africa.” We then have Victor Forbin’s signature below, a measurement written in blue, unidentified numbers at the bottom left. There is also a stamp of the British Press illustration office.

There seems to be no information regarding the photographer’s identity. Similarly, Captain Courténay d’Esterre does not appear to be well known in other archives. He was certainly an English missionary in charge of documenting indigenous South African traditions and bringing people back to England to be exhibited in human zoos or universal exhibitions. This is the case with this man on the right, whose identity is unknown and is simply called the “wild dancing bushman”. We know only that he was brought back to England. Regarding the photograph’s date, it was certainly made around the beginning of the twentieth century, when English missions became increasingly numerous after the colonisation of this territory following the victory in the Boer wars. This can also be determined by the photograph’s varnish aspect, which is beginning to crack slightly, but also by a light yellowish or brown shade. The technique used was probably an old baryta silver print, also known as gelatino-chloro-silver bromide paper print, a process widely used from 1880 until 1930.

      One thing that is immediately obvious is the white outline that has been added over the image. The addition of this outline can be seen, as embossed on the reverse side of the image. Closer examination reveals that hints of white colour have been added to the two individuals to increase the figures’ contrast. It is likely that this addition of white paint was intended to make the two protagonists more visible once the photograph was published in smaller print. The stamp of the Illustrations Bureau on the back confirms this hypothesis of publication in the British press. The image is then divided into two parts. There is the background, rather dull and without any real importance. While the foreground looks like a staged scene in which the English missionary wants to show off his finding, with a man at his side who, to a British audience, would have appeared much smaller than average. This staging of difference, emphasised by the comparison between the missionary and the dancer, is part of a widespread phenomenon at the time of Europeans measuring physical differences between human populations, and turning these differences into spectacles through the press, or universal exhibitions. He is also shown shirtless with an animal skin around his waist. Underneath their feet is a wild beast skin, highlighted by white outlining, as if to give a more exotic feel to the captain’s mission.

Unfortunately, much information that would help to trace the photograph’s history and the story of its circulation in the press is missing. It is not known, for example, who added the white outline. Was it the photographer himself, or was it the newsroom artists of a British newspaper in which this photograph was published? Are there several copies of this photograph, and perhaps an original without the white line? To write this photograph’s history in a more complete form, to understand whether the man on the right was forced to pose for this photo or not, and to know what happened to him, it is necessary to try to connect this archive to other archives, to have access to other points of view on this moment.

From the name of Captain Courténay D’Esterre, it was only possible to find one newspaper clipping. This is the Daily Mirror of January 16, 1913 – available below and in the British Newspaper Archive website – in which we can find exactly the same photograph without the white outline, as well as three other photographs of this “wild dancing bushman.” In the other three figures, as well as in the caption, this man is presented almost as an animal, or at least as a subhuman who only dances and sleeps. He and his “tribe” are presented sometimes as hunters, dancers, and he is sometimes a person “in his wild state.” His height, which is the main object of curiosity here, is mentioned as “4ft. 1in.” The different angles from which the person is shot and the accompanying caption demonstrate how the press popularized scientific racism. It should also be noted that the real name of the captain is Courteney D’Esterre and not Courténay D’Esterre as written by Victor Forbin on the back of our archive.

“Wild bushman who sleeps in the day and dances at night” Daily Mirror, January 16, 1913

      After attempting to trace the history of this photograph from the time it was taken in South Africa to its publication in the Daily Mirror in England, a new challenge emerges. How to trace the history of the photographed subject so as to give him a name, to understand the history of his life, and to ensure he does not remain a static picture or an unknown “wild dancing bushman”? Firstly, we now know that the SHD photo dates from around 1913, as it was published in that year, and that this South African man was brought back to England around the same time.

“Clico Wild Dancing, South African Bushman,” unknown photographer, United States at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, circa 1928

Based on the vague term “wild dancing bushman”, it is possible to find a man named Clicko, sometimes spelled Clico, who also went by the name Franz Taaibosch. This man turns out to be the same as the one in our photograph. This can be seen from his facial features and the lump on his right arm – see the picture above. He was first “brought” back to Europe, as written in the Daily Mirror where he performed dances in Paris, London, but also in Spain and Germany between 1912 and 1913. Then he moved to Havana in 1916 to join the Cuban circus, Santos Artigas Gran Circo before arriving in New York in 1917 at Brooklyn’s Coney Island amusement park.[1] He joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Company formed in 1919 from the fusion of Ringling Bros with Barnum & Bailey. This company was familiar at that time with “freak shows” throughout the United States, i.e. the presentation of animals and people with abnormal physiognomy to amaze the American audience. The photo above mentions the name of this circus in which he took part. His name is often accompanied by the short description “wild dancing bushman” because his role in this circus was essentially to perform a traditional Korana dance, the ethnic group to which he belonged. It is important to mention that he was Korana, a tribe of the Khoekhoe ethnic group, and not a Bushman, which refers to another ethnic group, the San. The only academic book to treat this little-known history was written by Neil Parsons and published in 2010.[2] Thanks to this more detailed study, it is possible to question the veracity of Clicko’s description in the Daily Mirror. Indeed, Parsons wrote that he was probably born around 1870, which means that he would have been about 43 years old in 1913 and not around 60 to 70 years old as written in the newspaper clipping.

The intention to make him appear older than he really was in this newspaper was deliberate in order to attract public curiosity about him, and it was not just a mistake.

“He was billed as the “first specimen of the most primitive race ever brought before the public”, that he could dance for eight hours continuously and that he was more than one hundred years old. To attract paying audiences the unusual, the exotic, “a unique specimen of human nature”, had to be emphasized.”[3]

However, at no time did Neil Parsons mention Captain Courteney d’Esterre, and it is not possible to find any other trace of the four photographs published in the Daily Mirror, except for the one on the top right where he is in a tree which became a publicity postcard distributed in England in 1913 as seen in Bernth Lindfors’ book.[4] The card is composed of this picture and a writing in white paint saying “Yours faithfully, The Wild Dancing Bushman.”

      It was also possible to find evidence that Captain Courteney d’Esterre may not have been the first European to meet him before he left for Europe. In a small booklet available at the Milner Library of Illinois State University,[5] an Irishman named Captain Maurice Patrick (Paddy) Hepston, also known as Morris Epstein in Ireland, claimed to have found a Bushman who was Franz Taaibosch, in the Kalahari Desert while hunting ostriches. Bushmen were then considered an extinct race by Europeans who searched for them in vain. This man lived on a farm near Kimberley and he was a gold miner, farmer and diamond digger. He refers to himself in the third person and boasts about his discovery that Dr Livingstone spent years trying to make in the same desert with no result. He speaks of Franz as an animal, or as a “specimen” sometimes “docile” and compares him to the ostriches he was hunting.

It was the same Paddy Hepston whom Franz followed to Ireland and Havana and who pushed him to perform in circuses. Hepston wanted to escape from the Aborigines Protection Society in London, which was pursuing him because of his mistreatment towards Franz.

Hepston then did everything possible to keep track of him and continued to exploit him in circuses. One of the pieces of evidence is found in the United States, in a photograph taken by the famous photographer Charles Eisenmann, who produced cabinet card pictures or views of human oddities from the Barnum and Bailey circus. On the verso of one of his 1930 portraits of Franz, held at Syracuse University in the State of New York, it is written “Clicko the bushman actually captured from head hunters by Capt. Hepston 1930 with Ringling Circus.”[6]

      Nevertheless, this story of a discovery in the Kalahari Desert seems romanticised, and only served to add to the mystery of the Bushmen people, who were hard to be found. It is more likely that Hepston met Franz in Kimberley when he was already in the company of a certain Christiaan Willem Roberts, who kept sheep in Middleburg, and who employed Franz. They travelled to Kimbereley where Paddy Hepston later hired him in a local circus. Captain Courteney d’Esterre may also have met him in Kimberley. Neil Parsons himself admits that this year of Franz’s life, which corresponds to the year of our photograph and its publication in the Daily Mirror, remains unclear.

“The biggest gap in the known biography of Franz Taaibosh is the eleven months between July 1912, when Paddy Hepston was given official permission at Kimberley to take on “Bushman W.D.” as his servant, and June 1913, when the Wild Dancing Bushman made his first appearance in a London theatre.”[7]

      Since there is little historical evidence of Franz Taaibosch entering a local circus in Kimberley, it is difficult to know whether he was forced to join Paddy Hepston, or whether he did so voluntarily, to earn money. This requires a deeper understanding of the social and economic context of the Khoekhoe and San (Bushmen) ethnic groups at that time to determine if there was a proletarianization, and some form of indirect coercion of their labour.[8] Similarly, Captain Courteney d’Esterre claimed to have “brought” him to England, as if Franz had simply followed him without having the choice. We do not know if this statement is true. But we also know that he chose to stay with the Cook family in the United States. Tracing the history of his life choices or possible coercion is therefore difficult since there is no direct testimony from him. Furthermore, Neil Parsons’ book relies heavily on the testimony of Evelyn Cook, who herself may have had a biased view of Franz’s life, between choice and coercion.

      If we have finally been able to put a name on this face, then rehabilitating his memory and the story of his life cannot be done only through the prism of European or American sources, as with the Daily Mirror’s cut or Neil Parsons’ book. It is important to know his story from the point of view of his descendants – if he has any – or at least from the point of view of people of the same or a close ethnicity, who may have a different view of the racial discrimination he suffered in his time. They can tell us more about his life before he left South Africa, about everything that Franz himself could not convey to us and that we only know through European protagonists who told his story for him. It is important that his story is not only narrated here by Europeans and Americans, even though it took place on three continents. Only a connective and polyphonic history allows for a comprehensive view of Clicko’s life.

      In fact, among the few works on his life, a fairly detailed podcast has caught our attention. It was produced by Shaldon Ferris, a Khoisan and Indigenous Rights Radio Coordinator. The speaker talking about Franz/Clicko is Letitia Timas Peterson, an advocate for Indigenous African descent rights in South Africa. The podcast was published one year ago on the Cultural Survival website.[9] This organisation wants to give a voice to cultures and ethnicities oppressed by various states around the world, including South Africa. The podcast was produced on the occasion of the International Day For People Of African Descent, a celebration created by the United Nations in 2021. The Cultural Survival organization was created in 1972 by David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis a British anthropologist, ethnologist, and an activist for indigenous peoples’ human rights.

Here is an interview conducted in February 2023 with Letitia Timas Peterson and Shaldon Ferris about Clicko/Franz Taaibosch.

Aude Dumont: How did you get so much information about Franz Taaibosch, whom you were able to present in your podcast, when so little historical work has been done on him?

Letitia T. Peterson and Shaldon Ferris: He is one of our ancestors, not direct ancestor but one from our ethnicity. Most of the information we have about Franz Taaibosch comes from the information Neil Parsons collected. But there are also oral testimonies circulating in his ethnic group, as indirect descendants are still with us so that this story will not be forgotten. I don’t have their contact. But these accounts tell of his life as a house servant in Kimberley before he left South Africa, and then of the possible mistreatments he received in the United States.

These oral testimonies are certainly based on Parsons’ book and other archives as it was certainly difficult, if not impossible, for Franz to have a direct contact with his family. Indeed, he died in the United States without ever having returned to South Africa. His grave is in Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, New York, with that of the Sullivan-Cook family, whom he stayed living with. It was this family, and in particular Evelyn Cook, who was able to give so much information about Franz to Neil Parsons. Not returning to South Africa was his choice, he was not forced and considered the Sullivan-Cook as his family. We also know that he was fluent in Afrikaans and perhaps his relatives were too, although this is difficult to know. However, he was a prisoner of the circus he worked for, where it was easier for the show to pass him off as an “ignorant savage” which may have prevented him from communicating. He also knew some English for example, but never spoke it.

A.D.: Do you know how to write exactly the tribal name of Franz?

L.T.P: The tribal name of Franz was !Gaub. He was from the clan called !Gaibe or Taaibosch !Korana, Korana or !Ora people.[10]

A.D.: Do you know something about the descendants of Franz Taaibosch? 

L.T.P and S.F.: There are many with the same surname, one will have to investigate to find out if he had children, and then we have to figure out who was directly linked to him. There is Taaibos, and Taaibosch, which has a Dutch spin on it.

For Neil Parsons, “There is at least one Taibos or Taaibosch family still living today in the town of Middleburg, close to Haydon on the northern edge of the Sneeubergen.”

A.D.: Did he talk about his life in America and the stereotypes and racism he possibly faced?

L.T.P and S.F.: We don’t really know sorry. Perhaps there is more information about this in the book of Neil Parsons.

A.D.: Why were you interested in the story of Franz Taaibosch?

L.T.P: I was first interested in the story of Sarah Baartman in 2002. You know this is the woman who was taken to England to be exhibited in human zoos because of her unusual appearance. She was called by Europeans the “Hottentot Venus”[11]. She was then exhibited for years in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris after her death. Cuvier had dissected her and then reconstructed her statue and skeleton for exhibition. If I was working on this subject in the early 2000s, it was because we had requested, with the support of the South African state, the restitution of her skeleton so that she could be buried according to our customs. After an initial refusal by the French state, we were finally able to repatriate her body in 2002. I was there for the burial. It was while making research on her that I heard about Franz Taaibosch, so I was able to make a podcast about him to tell all the things I discovered.

A.D: I could find you through the podcast you made about Franz Taaibosch on the Cultural Survival website. Why did you make a podcast about him on the Cultural Survival website? Can you tell us about the purpose of Cultural Survival?

L.T.P and S.F.: Even in the context of commemorations such as International Day for People of African descent (which is a new commemoration by the way), it is very seldom that people will talk about Indigenous peoples. Franz’s story is an international one, and one that is seldom heard. It is important to let the world know the history of Indigenous South Africans. Cultural Survival advocates for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and supports Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures and political resilience since 1972. Here is a link to the homepage of our website for all the people who are interested: cs.org.

A.D: What do you think of the archive from Vincennes I sent you? What was your reaction? Are you surprised to know that it is in France?

S.F.: Yes indeed. I think archives as well as artefacts should be returned one day. Why is it in Europe when it is our relatives? Europeans in the past have studied all that they can, for the sake of their own narrowmindedness, so they can return it now.

This research is taking place in the context of the claim of artefacts by various African states to European museums, be they statues, bodies such as that of Sarah Baartman, or cult objects. Besides, the digitisation of these archives that we have carried out with the Eycon project allows easier access for anyone in the world, not just a European audience. But in the case of our photograph, it is complicated to argue that it should be returned to South Africa or not, as this would imply that the material object itself belongs to South Africans. But, as we said earlier, the photo was probably taken by an English missionary. The issue here should then be considered differently. It is not the possession of the material object that is in question. Instead, the question is who owns the content of the picture, i.e. the representation of the person who was photographed, in this case Franz Taaibosch. It is difficult to guess whether he was forced to pose for this photo and the others that were published in the Daily Mirror. But if so, can we consider that his image is stolen?

A.D.: Do you know Captain Courtenay D’Esterre? Have you ever seen this photograph that I found in Vincennes?

L.T.P: No, never, I’m sorry.

A.D: I feel that there is a lack of historical works on Franz Taaibosch and maybe on other people from this ethnicity in general. What can you tell me about this? Do you feel the same way in South Africa? Do you think more historians should work on such subjects?

S.F: Yes, we have not learnt anything about Franz, or Sarah Baartman or Dawid Stuurman in school. The ones who write history, writes their own versions. Now, it should be us who research and tell these stories.

      This interview may be published later by Shaldon Ferris on the Cultural Survival website as a follow-up to the podcast on Franz Taaibosch.

References:

Neil Parsons, Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman, University of Chicago Press, December 2010

Neil Parsons: Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman. Review by: Sheridan Griswold. Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 42 (2010), pp. 192-194

Lindfors, Bernth: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington Cape Town: Indiana University Press, 1999

Capt. M. P. Hepston: The wild dancing bushman, his history and story of his discovery in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa. Dreamland Circus Sideshow (Coney Island, N. Y.), 1917/1918. Special Collections at Milner Library, Illinois State University (Circus and Allied Arts Collection), https://digital.library.illinoisstate.edu/digital/collection/CircusSelects/id/3

Becker, Ronald G.: “Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs”, 1836-1960. Box 14: 1123-115. Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/b/becker_eisenmann.htm

Wilmsen, Edwin: Herders, Warriors, and Traders, Pastoralism in Africa. Chapter “Pastoro-Foragers to “Bushmen”: Transformations in Kalahari Relations of Property, Production and Labor”. Routledge, 1991

Good, Kenneth: Bushmen and Diamonds (Un)Civil Society in Botswana. Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003

Shaldon Ferris and Letitia Timas Peterson: Cultural Survival podcast about Franz Taaibosch, https://rights.culturalsurvival.org/international-day-people-african-descent


[1] Neil Parsons: Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman. Review by: Sheridan Griswold. Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 42 (2010), pp. 192-194

[2] Neil Parsons, Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman, University of Chicago Press, December 2010. About the age of Franz Taaibosch, see also the review of Sheridan Griswold.

[3] Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman by Neil Parsons. Review by: Sheridan Griswold. Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 42 (2010), pp. 192-194

[4] Lindfors, Bernth: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington Cape Town: Indiana University Press, 1999. Chapter 8: ““Clicko”: Franz Taaibosch, South African Bushman Enterntainer in England, France, Cuba, and the United States, 1908-1940” p. 203

[5] Capt. M. P. Hepston: The wild dancing bushman, his history and story of his discovery in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa. Dreamland Circus Sideshow (Coney Island, N. Y.), 1917/1918. Special Collections at Milner Library, Illinois State University (Circus and Allied Arts Collection), https://digital.library.illinoisstate.edu/digital/collection/CircusSelects/id/3

[6] Becker, Ronald G.: “Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs”, 1836-1960. Box 14: 1123-115. Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/b/becker_eisenmann.htm

[7] Parsons, Neil: chapter 4: “Disappearance to Australasia or the Far East”

[8] On the changing labour market in the Kalahari, including the emergence of gold and diamond mines, see: Wilmsen, Edwin: Herders, Warriors, and Traders, Pastoralism in Africa. Chapter “Pastoro-Foragers to “Bushmen”: Transformations in Kalahari Relations of Property, Production and Labor”. Routledge, 1991

Good, Kenneth: Bushmen and Diamonds (Un)Civil Society in Botswana. Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003.

[9] https://rights.culturalsurvival.org/international-day-people-african-descent

[10] The “!” symbol refers to the click sound. The nickname Clico also comes from the clicking sound of his native language.

[11] « Hottentot » was used by early Dutch settlers to talk about Khoekhoe people, and probably meant stutterers.

EyCon Workshop 2: ‘Using Visual AI applied to Digital Archives’, Imperial War Museum (London) – 8 June 2023-9 June 2023 

We are pleased to announce the programme for the second EyCon workshop, “Using Visual AI Applied to Digital Archives” organised in partnership with Imperial War Museums (IWM) Institute, IWM’s research and knowledge exchange hub. The EyCon (The Early Conflict Photography 1890-1918 and Visual AI) project is co-funded by the AHRC/Labex Past in the Present led by Dr Lise Jaillant (Loughborough University) and Dr Julien Schuh (Paris Nanterre University), in partnership with the University of Paris Cité and Prof Daniel Foliard. The EyCon project aims at harnessing AI-reliant tools to analyse a large corpus of colonial photographs. EyCon’s database will include thousands of historical photographs documenting armed violence. The project is partnering with a network of archival institutions in France and in the UK.

The workshop will provide a forum to address the huge challenges that academics, archivists and other professionals are facing when dealing with a very large amount of visual data (particularly sensitive data). The workshop will be a combination of presentations (Day 1) and interactive sessions (Day 2) that will allow close engagement with French and UK cultural institutions impacted by the challenges of sensitive digitised archives.

 Day 1

Thursday, 8 June (10:00 to 16:15)

10:00 – 10:30 EyCon Team and Imperial War Museums Team: Welcoming remarks and general workshop introduction/ Tea and coffee

SESSION 1 – Using Computational Methods to Explore Illustrations in Digital Visual Collections

10:30 – 11:00 Professor Julia Thomas (Cardiff University) and Irene Testini (Cardiff University) – Getting the Picture: Developing Computational Methods to Interrogate Large Datasets of Historical Book Illustrations

The talk will introduce the methods of computational analysis that we have used to interrogate a big dataset of around a million illustrations from books spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries and covering diverse subject matter, including literature, history, geography, and philosophy. This work has been developed in the context of two major AHRC-funded projects: the first led to the creation of the largest online searchable resource dedicated to book illustrations: The Illustration Archive (https://illustrationarchive.org.uk); and the second project uses computer vision tools to analyse the images in this dataset in terms of their specific representation of places and the people associated with them. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which we have made these images searchable using a variety of methods from crowdsourcing to caption capture and computer vision. These methods have revealed culturally sensitive images, especially those relating to the historical representation of people and racial and ethnic groups. The focus of our latest project, ‘Finding a Place’, is to use computational methods to actively explore these problematic illustrations and to identify how these images proliferate and circulate and how the ‘stereotype’ (which is itself, of course, a printing term) is constructed.

11:00 – 11:30 Dr Thomas Smits (Universiteit Antwerpen) Using multimodal machine learning to study the visual representation of war

Most research in Digital Humanities is monomodal, meaning that the object of analysis is either textual or visual. Recently developed multimodal deep learning models, offer new possibilities to explore, analyze, and enrich multimodal historical collections at scale. Trained to predict which images and texts belong together, these models can be applied to a wide variety of text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-text prediction tasks without the need to train them for a specific task or on specific data. I’ll showcase the possibilities of multimodal machine learning by applying it to a collection of 26,000 digitized photographs of the Dutch Army Information Service, which were made during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949). Previous research suggests that this collection presents a highly sanitized and ‘bloodless’ image of this war. Can we use multimodal machine learning to uncover patterns in the visual representation of violence in this collection? On a more general level, I’ll argue that multimodal machine learning enables us to move past the hyper-focus on a small number of ‘iconic’ war photographs and study the visual representation of armed conflict at scale. 

11:30 – 11:45 Q & A

11:45 – 12:00 Break

SESSION 2 – New Models of Accessing Digital Archives using Visual AI

12:00 – 12:30 Eléonore Plantard, and Véronique Pontillon-Valedon (ECPAD) – The New ECPAD Digital Platform: When Workflows Question the Communication of Archives

The origin of the digital platform project of the Establishment of Communication and Audiovisual Production of Defence (ECPAD), launched in the mid 2010’s, stems primarily from the need to accelerate the availability of the institution’s archives to the public. Combining a new archiving system, improved archival processing and dissemination on the Internet, ImagesDéfense project is an opportunity for the ECPAD to completely redesign and rethink its workflow by developing new tools offered by digital resources. A new conceptual data model and different interfaces are set up, allowing each processing step: from the transfer through a module of collecting archives, to the dissemination in the website, imagesdefense.gouv.fr, including the preservation, transcoding and even the marketing of these archives. These new and partially automated workflows distinguish the analog images from the digital archives, guarantee that the archiving complies with time requirements, but also induce both human control and new questions about the communication and dissemination of archives. In this matter, the institution must take into consideration the heritage code, the intellectual property code and the defence code. The various interfaces and softwares for accessing images, in the media library in situ or on the Internet, must make it possible to differentiate on the one hand the rules for the communicability of images, on the other hand their classification levels and finally allow them to be editorialized according to their sensitivity.

12:30 – 13:00 Giacomo Alliata (EPFL-CDH-DHI-eM+) Augmenting the Archival Experience of Embodied Knowledge Through Visual AI: a Computational Framework  

With the burgeoning use of digital technologies in safeguarding intangible and living heritage, memory institutions have produced a significant body of material, yet to be made available to the public. The quest for new ways to unlock these massive collections has intensified, especially the knowledge embedded in complex data formats, such as audiovisual and motion capture recordings. Aiming to address the gap between the living heritage archive and embodied knowledge experience, this work inspects a computational pipeline incorporating machine intelligence, archival science, and digital museology. By reflecting on how embodied knowledge is sustained and potentially valorised, we devise approaches primarily based on vision-based extraction and estimation, movement analysis, aesthetic visual reconstruction and machine learning. The goal is to augment the archival experience with new modes of exploration, representation, and embodiment. This presentation will report the procedures and computational tools inspected through two use cases. In the first case, datafication enhancement is employed to allow archival exploration via embodied cues in the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive, a multimodal archive that leverages state-of-the-art motion capture tools to document the living practices of martial arts. In another experimentation with the Prix de Lausanne archive, a collection of 50 years of video recordings of dance performances from the internationally renowned competition Prix de Lausanne, we augment the visual representation of the dancers’ movements through a range of aesthetic expressions and visual metaphors. Though holding different application purposes, both projects operate on the proposed framework and extract archive-specific features to create meaningful representations, which reveals the versatile applications that computational capacities can achieve. The practices also represent a model of interdisciplinary involvement where the archivists, computists, artists and knowledge holders join hands to renew strategies for archival exploration and heritage interpretation in a new light.

13:00 – 13:15 Q & A

13:15 – 14:15 Lunch Break

SESSION 3 – Visual AI, Digital Archives and GLAM institutions: Challenges and Future Outputs

14:15 – 14:45 Geoffrey Browell (King’s College London) – Back to basics: why technology alone is not enough to unlock the potential of visual archives  

Drawing on practical examples from King’s College London Archives’ holdings of nineteenth and twentieth century military and medical history, this talk will explore some of the challenges in acquiring, handling, describing, and facilitating access to often sensitive legacy visual collections, and their digital surrogates. These include mountainous cataloguing backlogs, a pressing shortage of professional conservators, the absence of specialist cultural or historical knowledge to identify and contextualise collections and institutional caution and inertia when confronted with collections that have been identified as controversial or deemed politically ‘difficult’. It will argue that technology is not enough: for high-tech approaches, including AI, to make a meaningful contribution to problem-solving, they need to work with the grain of professional practice, audience expectations, funding constraints and employers’ appetite for risk. Ideally, they should provide short cuts for hard-pressed archivists, teachers, and interpreters of visual history, rather than another complex layer of technology that is difficult to understand, implement and use.  The talk will explore the ways in which standalone digital humanities projects can be built into sustainable and durable services to find new uses for visual archives, and how the best examples facilitate cultural change that enables the breaking down of professional silos and encourages meaningful co-working by archivists, scholars, and technologists.     

14:45 – 15:15 Dr Christiane Sibille (ETH-Bibliothek, Zurich) and Nicole Graf (ETH-Bibliothek, Zurich) – Collections as Data in the Context of Visual AI

High-quality metadata has always been essential for the use of collections in GLAMs. The use of machine learning methods opens numerous new possibilities in this context, but also poses new challenges for cultural heritage institutions. The image archive of the ETH Library in Zurich addresses this situation by generating and curating not only one but multiple metadata layers. The basis is formed by classic manual archive and library cataloguing. In addition, a group of external volunteers assists the Image Archive (https://ba.e-pics.ethz.ch) in enriching sparse or missing metadata (approx. 20,000 items per year). 35’000 images per year are georeferenced on a three-dimensional globe using the crowdsourcing platform sMapshot (https://smapshot.heig-vd.ch/owner/ethz). In the past months, the Image Archive started to include machine learning tools in its portfolio to broaden its experience in this field. First, key metadata fields were converted into English with the help of automatic translations. In addition, commercial software was used to recognize and label the nearly one million digitized images. The resulting keywords were integrated into the search interface, so far without manual post-processing, as a public pilot. In our paper, we would like to take a closer look at the work with these different levels, analyze the resulting challenges and provide an outlook on future activities. In doing so, we would like to contribute to the question of how archives can implement the idea of collections as data in the context of visual AI. We are particularly interested in how GLAM institutions can overcome data silos and create a data cycle that is characterized by the principles of FAIR and ideally generates added value for all stakeholders involved.

15:15 – 15:30 Q & A

15:30– 15:45 Break

15:4516:45 Gallery Tour (Imperial War Museums team) – Second World War galleries by IWM colleagues

Day 2

Friday, 9 June (09:00 to 13:45)

09:00 – 09:30 Welcome to Day 2/Tea and coffee

09:30 – 10:30 Alan Wakefield (Imperial War Museums) and Helen Mavin (Imperial War Museums) – Developing the Photograph Archive at Imperial War Museums

Alan will lead a discussion around the formation and development of the photograph collection following the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in 1917, with a focus on imagery documenting conflict and British military activity in India and across Africa during the period 1900-1929. Examples from the collection will be used to highlight sensitivities that are commonly encountered and how his team are strategically working with the collection to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the histories they represent. Helen will present on projects recently undertaken at IWM with external collaboration to review and reconsider how collections, particularly photographs and film, are accessed and described, and by who. Helen will share findings from recent AHRC funded projects.

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 – 12:45 AI tools practical session by Dr Julien Schuh (EyCon project French Co-I) and team (2 hours) – Visual AI for the EyCon Project, Sensitive Images, and the EyCon Database

The aim of this session is to present some of the tools developed in the context of the EyCon project.

– Image segmentation: In order to be able to analyse the circulation of images in the press and in the albums of the time, we must first be able to extract these illustrations. We will present the protocols developed to produce a corpus of press illustrations.

– Image processing and similarity detection: The quality of the photographs differs greatly between the original negatives and prints and the press reproductions. In order to be able to apply object recognition or similarity algorithms on these images, we re-train models with images modified to mimic the transformations produced by photomechanical reproduction. This improves similarity recognition results, both for identifying duplicate images and for aggregating images with similar content.

– Sensitive pictures and texts recognition: we will discuss the solutions envisaged to identify sensitive contents, both in terms of visual contents and of captions and period descriptions.

– Pose estimation: The automatic recognition of people’s poses in photographs allows us to identify evolutions in the staging of bodies in the photography of violence.

– Database: The presentation of the EyCon database will allow us to get to grips with the site and to explore these corpora.

12:45 – 13:45 Lunch Break