Deep Visuals – Opening up your digital archive

Alan Payne
Director/CEO, Deep Visuals Limited

Heather Lane
Librarian and Keeper of Collections, Scott Polar Research Institute
Agenda
 Introduction
 EEDA project
 SPRI/Polar museum
 Freeze frame demo
 Limitations
 Browse vs search (Researcher vs general visitor)
 Browse - exploration/discovery
 DVL
 Browse by relationships
 Demo
 Advantages
 How it works
 User response
 Future work
 Summary
EEDA Project
 “A Personalised Experience For The Museum Visitor”
SPRI
Freeze Frame project
20,000 photos digitised with textual descriptions
“Traditional” keyword searching
Browsing by category
Slide shows
Limitations of Freeze Frame
Search provides just a narrow slice of the collection
Users need to know what they are looking for (what to
enter in the search box !)
Browsing options reveal more of collection, but still so
much is left unexplored by most users.
Deep Visuals Application
The system provides a way to browse the photographic
collection without the need for any specialised
knowledge
Essentially - you don’t need to know any keywords
You don’t need to know what is in the collection
before you start – the images guide you
You can just enjoy the images, moving around them in
an easy way which you determine for yourself
User responses
“It’s a great way into exploring the collections”
– Suzy Antoniw, Education and Outreach Officer, SPRI
“A blooming marvellous machine” – Museum visitor
Browsing by relationships
Novel manipulation of Images

16
So how did we get into applying this to Museum
collections ?
British Arctic Air Route Expedition
1930-31
 The aim of this expedition (led by H.G. Watkins) was to investigate possible air
routes between Britain and Canada via the Arctic, avoiding a long and
dangerous sea crossing.
 The expedition consisted of 14 members who sailed on Quest in July 1930.
 The expedition met and worked with indigenous peoples in the area in which
they studied.
 Augustine Courtauld spent five months alone undertaking meteorological
measurements. He was snowed in and unable to leave his ice cap station,
having left his spade outside. He had plenty of food supplies but only a little
fuel and spent much time in the dark.
 This expedition formed a new method of surveying, combining land, coastal
and aerial surveying techniques to give a fuller picture.

 Demo
Advantages
Access to whole collection
User creates their own, personal journey
Entirely led by images (no text input required)
System can be trained
How it works
• Takes existing metadata
 No need to create any new information

• Extracts concepts from textual descriptions

• Calculates similarities between all items

Future Work
Audio
Adaptation
Educational elements
Summary
We have created a new way to interact with digital
archives

This is suitable for any digital media, not limited to

photographs
– as long as there are textual descriptions to work with