Thomas Smits

Hi there! I am an Assistant Professor of Digital History & AI at the University of Amsterdam. My work is centered on modern visual (news) culture and is located at the intersection of the digital humanities (history, memory, and visual culture studies) and social sciences (media and social movement studies). It has been published in top-ranking journals and recognized with travel grants, invited lectures, fellowships, and a book prize for my first monograph. Fascinated by the increasingly visual nature of modern societies, I pioneered the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze large collections of historical digitized images. Convinced of the benefits of interdisciplinary exchange, I have used critical insights from the SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) to further the development of culturally-responsive AI.

Projects

Currently, my own work focuses on using multimodal AI models (CLIP) to cluster large collections of historical photographs.
I'm always working on something with Melvin Wevers.
With Paul Fyfe, Ben Lee, and Julia Thomas, I'm exploring how we can use multimodal machine learning to explore the illustrated world(s) of the nineteenth-century press (funded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals).
With Samuel Merrill and Rik Smit, I'm examining how Large Language Models influence social/cultural memory.
With Wouter Haverals, Mike Kestemont, Loren Verreyen, and Mona Allaert, I'm exploring the potential of computational methods in analyzing vast corpora of historical picture postcards.
Together with Melvin Wevers, Willem-Jan Faber, and Simon Kemper, I'm applying open-source LLMs to improve access to digital collections.
I'm mapping the (imagined) geograhpy of the magic lantern medium with Margo Buelens-Terryn.
I'm proud to supervise the wonderful PhD projects of Eleonora Paklons and Loren Verreyen.

news

Jun 10, 2024	An open-access and fully searchable dataset of the Illustrated London News (1842-1889)
Jan 27, 2024	Online meeting - using ML to extract images from periodicals and newspaper
Dec 1, 2023	Review of Digitised Newspapers – A New Eldorado for Historians? (2023) published in Media History
Nov 23, 2023	Paper published in the proceedings of Computational Humanities Research 2023
Oct 31, 2023	Starting today as Assistant Professor of Digital History and AI at the University of Amsterdam

selected publications

2023

Distant Reading 940,000 Online Circulations of 26 Iconic Photographs

Thomas Smits, and Ruben Ros

New Media & Society, Dec 2023

Abs

How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? Recent studies have suggested that online circulation, especially in a memeified form, might lead to the erosion, fracturing, or collapsing of the original contextual meaning of iconic pictures. Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. The article demonstrates that constantly changing configurations of contextual imagetexts, self-referential image-texts, and non-referential image/texts shape the online live of iconic photographs: ebbs and flows of slowly disappearing, suddenly resurfacing, and newly found meanings. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say.

2020

The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870

Thomas Smits

Dec 2020

Abs

This book looks at the roots of a global visual news culture: the trade in illustrations of the news between European illustrated newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. In the age of nationalism, we might suspect these publications to be filled with nationally produced content, supporting a national imagined community. However, the large-scale transnational trade in illustrations, which this book uncovers, points out that nineteenth-century news consumers already looked at the same world. By exchanging images, European illustrated newspapers provided them with a shared, transnational, experience.