This was Paris in 1970 is a project by the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities in collaboration with our Fall 2020 Faculty Fellow, Catherine Clark, Associate Professor of History and French Studies at MIT.
The project will focus on the analysis of photographs of Paris in May 1970 taken by the some 15,000 amateur photographers who participated in the photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970” or “This was Paris in 1970.” The project aims to consider both what these photographers captured (what Paris looked like) and how they saw it. Even though the project looks at a subset of the contest’s 100,000 submissions, it is still impossible to carry out a complete analysis of content or form by hand. Therefore, this project will make use of Machine Learning techniques, such as Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks, and Support Vector Machines to recognize patterns that will assist in answering questions like: How do pictures influence the production of new forms of knowledge? What is their role in representing the world?