Context-Aware Querying, Geolocalization, and Rephotography of Historical Newspaper Images

Abstract

Newspapers contain a wealth of historical information in the form of articles and illustrations. Libraries and cultural heritage institutions have been digitizing their collections for decades to enable web-based access to and retrieval of information. A number of challenges arise when dealing with digitized collections, such as those of KBR, the Royal Library of Brussels (used in this study), which contain only page-level metadata, making it difficult to extract information from specific contexts. A context-aware search relies heavily on metadata enhancement. Therefore, when using metadata at the page level, it is even more challenging to geolocalize less-known landmarks. To overcome this challenge, we have developed a pipeline for geolocalization and visualization of historical photographs. The first step of this pipeline consists of converting page-level metadata to article-level metadata. In the next step, all articles with building images were classified based on image classification algorithms. Moreover, to correctly geolocalize historical photographs, we propose a hybrid approach that uses both textual metadata and image features. We conclude this research paper by addressing the challenge of visualizing historical content in a way that adds value to humanities research. It is noteworthy that a number of historical urban scenes are visualized using rephotography, which is notoriously challenging to get right. This study serves as an important step towards enriching historical metadata and facilitating cross-collection linkages, geolocalization, and the visualization of historical newspaper images. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is generic and can be used to process untagged photographs from social media, including Flickr and Instagram.