publications

2024

1. Stochastic Remembering and Distributed Mnemonic Agency: Recalling Twentieth Century Activists with ChatGPT

   Rik Smit, Thomas Smits, and Samuel Merrill

   Memory Studies Review, Nov 2024

   Publisher: Brill

   Abs

   Abstract This paper introduces the concept of stochastic remembering and uses two prompt engineering techniques to critically examine the text generated by ai chatbots. These techniques – step-by-step prompting and chain of thought reasoning – are then experimentally applied to understand how ChatGPT, the most commonly used ai chatbot, shapes how we remember historical activists. This experiment suggests that hegemonic forms of memory influence the data on which these chatbots are trained and underlines how stochastic patterns affect how humans and ai systems collectively remember the past. Humans and ai systems prompt each other to remember. In conclusion, the paper argues that ai chatbots are a new kind of mnemonic actor that, in interaction with users, renders a probabilistic past. Methodologically, the paper introduces, in an explorative way, an experimental method that can reveal the dynamics of stochastic remembering.

2. Projecting the world. The mediated geography of the projection lantern in Belgium c.1900-c.1920

   Margo Buelens-Terryn, and Thomas Smits

   Journal of Historical Geography, Dec 2024

   Abs

   This article studies the virtual world(s) that Belgian audiences encountered through the multimodal mass medium of the projection lantern in the early twentieth century. In contrast to previous work, we move from studying the visual representation of a single place in a small number of projection slides to examining the virtual world(s) that the lantern medium enabled. To achieve this overview, we produce and analyze a database of announcements and reviews of 5673 unique lectures lantern lectures published in Antwerp and Brussels newspapers in three sample periods (1902–1904, 1914–1918, and 1922–1924). Oscillating between distant reading the database and close reading individual announcements, we chart the virtual world(s) of this multimodal mass medium in Belgium: the parts of the globe that became visible – be it in a positive or negative projection light – and the parts that remained underexposed. We show that in this virtual world, the Belgian colony of Congo was relatively close, while it was almost impossible to visit South America. While previous research has underlined the representation of far-away and exotic places, our research demonstrates that audiences most prominently used the projection lantern to take trips in their own country. By analyzing the virtual geography on multiple scales —continents, countries, and cities— we show how Belgian audiences experienced the world through the lens of a particular medium, uncovering the complex interplay between technology, media, and geographical imagination.

3. Coloring in the world of others: color use in visual orientalism, 1890–1920

   Thomas Smits, and Melvin Wevers

   Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Oct 2024

   Publisher: Palgrave

   Abs

   This study investigates the impact of media on color sense: our ability to see different colors and use them to interpret the world. Specifically, we examine the role of color in the cultural construction of the Orient—an ‘imagined geography’ used to justify colonial domination—in two turn-of-the-twentieth-century types of color(ed) photographs: photochromes, where a printer added color, and autochromes, where colors were captured during exposure. While most research on visual Orientalism has focused on content, we use machine learning methods to study the most important formal element of visual Orientalism: color. After using K-means clustering to extract sixteen dominant colors from each photograph in our dataset, we train three different random forest classification algorithms to make a distinction between (A) the two color media (B) photochromes of the Orient and the Occident; and (C) autochromes of the Orient and the Occident. Subsequently, we apply Shapley Additive Explanations, an explainable AI method, to interpret the output of the classifiers. This allows us to examine how specific features (colors) impacted the classifiers’ predictions. While the algorithm can easily separate photochromes from autochromes (0.95) and Oriental from Occidental photochromes (0.93), it struggles with the same task in the autochrome collection (0.68). These findings support three interconnected conclusions: (1) color sense became mediated in the late nineteenth century, (2) in photochromes, the presence and absence of specific colors was a vital aspect of visual Orientalism, (3) the autochrome, where color was derived from light, provided a more objective picture of countries in the near and middle East than the photochrome.

4. Revisiting the Kahn collection: multimodal artificial intelligence and visual patterns of presence and absence in the Archives de la Planète, 1909–1931

   Thomas Smits

   Visual Studies, Aug 2024

   Publisher: Routledge

   Abs

   Financed by the French banker Albert Kahn, the Archives of the Planet is one of the most important collections of early photography. Produced between 1909 and 1931, its 72,000 autochromes show a wo...

2023

1. A multimodal turn in Digital Humanities. Using contrastive machine learning models to explore, enrich, and analyze digital visual historical collections

   Thomas Smits, and Melvin Wevers

   Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Mar 2023

   Abs

   Until recently, most research in the Digital Humanities (DH) was monomodal, meaning that the object of analysis was either textual or visual. Seeking to integrate multimodality theory into the DH, this article demonstrates that recently developed multimodal deep learning models, such as Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), offer new possibilities to explore and analyze image–text combinations at scale. These models, which are trained on image and text pairs, can be applied to a wide range of text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-text prediction tasks. Moreover, multimodal models show high accuracy in zero-shot classification, i.e. predicting unseen categories across heterogeneous datasets. Based on three exploratory case studies, we argue that this zero-shot capability opens up the way for a multimodal turn in DH research. Moreover, multimodal models allow scholars to move past the artificial separation of text and images that was dominant in the field and analyze multimodal meaning at scale. However, we also need to be aware of the specific (historical) bias of multimodal deep learning that stems from biases in the training data used to train these models.

2. Electric News in Colonial Algeria

   Thomas Smits

   Media History, Jul 2023

   Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2023.2235199
3. Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs

   Thomas Smits, and Ruben Ros

   New Media & Society, Dec 2023

   Publisher: SAGE Publications

   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.

4. Introduction

   Ann Rigney, and Thomas Smits

   In The Visual Memory of Protest, Dec 2023
5. The Visual Memory of Protest

   Dec 2023
6. Space and Place in Online Visual Memory: The Tank Man in Hong Kong, 2013–2020

   Thomas Smits, and Ruben Ros

   In The Visual Memory of Protest, Dec 2023
7. Roundtable: The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual News Culture, 1842–1870

   Thomas Smits

   Media History, Jun 2023

   Publisher: Routledge

   Abs

   Published in Media History (Ahead of Print, 2023)

2022

1. The Great Unseen. Photojournalism and the archive: from analogue to digital

   Thomas Smits, and Saskia Asser

   TMG Journal for Media History, Jun 2022
2. Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 2)

   Daniel van Strien, Kaspar Beelen, Melvin Wevers, Thomas Smits, and Katherine McDonough

   Programming Historian, Aug 2022
3. Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 1)

   Daniel van Strien, Kaspar Beelen, Melvin Wevers, Thomas Smits, and Katherine McDonough

   Programming Historian, Aug 2022
4. The Agency of Computer Vision Models as Optical Instruments.

   Thomas Smits, and Melvin Wevers

   Visual Communication, Aug 2022

2021

1. Piracy, Copyright, and the Transnational Trade in Illustrations of News in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

   Thomas Smits

   Circulation and Control. Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century, Oct 2021

   Publisher: Open Book Publishers

   Abs

   We publish high-quality, open access academic research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Read all our books for free online.

2. A network of photographs: The visual public memory of the Dutch Provo movement, 1967–2016

   Thomas Smits

   Memory Studies, Sep 2021

   Publisher: SAGE Publications

   Abs

   This article builds on efforts to connect visual culture, social movements, and memory studies. It introduces the concept of visual public memory through a study of the circulation of photographs of the Dutch anarchist movement Provo between 1967 and 2016. It demonstrates that the visual public memory of a movement can be captured in a network composed of carriers of memory (newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, books), memorata (the remembered events), and mnemonic actors (actors that circulate the carriers of memory). Based on a qualitative interpretation of this network, the article follows four routes through it, uncovering the role of seemingly a-political mnemonic actors, such as municipal governments and museums, in the visual public memory of Provo. Showing how photographs are uniquely able to carry political possibility into memory, this article argues that visual representation plays a crucial role in how social movements are remembered.

3. Towards Multimodal Computational Humanities. Using CLIP to Analyze Late-Nineteenth Century Magic Lantern Slides

   Thomas Smits, and Mike Kestemont

   In Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Humanities Research 2021, Nov 2021

   ISSN: 1613-0073

2020

1. Quantifying Iconicity in 940K Online Circulations of 26 Iconic Photographs

   Thomas Smits, and Ruben Ros

   In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR 2020), Nov 2020
2. The Visual Digital Turn. Using Neural Networks to Study Historical Images

   Melvin Wevers, and Thomas Smits

   Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Nov 2020
3. The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870

   Thomas Smits

   Nov 2020

   OCLC: 1137813279
4. Detecting Faces, Visual Medium Types, and Gender in Historical Advertisements, 1950–1995

   Melvin Wevers, and Thomas Smits

   In Computer Vision – ECCV 2020 Workshops, Nov 2020

   Abs

   Libraries, museums, and other heritage institutions are digitizing large parts of their archives. Computer vision techniques enable scholars to query, analyze, and enrich the visual sources in these archives. However, it remains unclear how well algorithms trained on modern photographs perform on historical material. This study evaluates and adapts existing algorithms. We show that we can detect faces, visual media types, and gender with high accuracy in historical advertisements. It remains difficult to detect gender when faces are either of low quality or relatively small or large. Further optimization of scaling might solve the latter issue, while the former might be ameliorated using upscaling. We show how computer vision can produce meta-data information, which can enrich historical collections. This information can be used for further analysis of the historical representation of gender.

5. Assessing the impact of OCR quality on downstream NLP tasks

   D. Strien, K. Beelen, M. C. Ardanuy, K. Hosseini, B. McGillivray, and G. Colavizza

   Nov 2020

   Abs

   A growing volume of heritage data is being digitized and made available as text via optical character recognition (OCR). Scholars and libraries are increasingly using OCR-generated text for retrieval and analysis. However, the process of creating text through OCR introduces varying degrees of error to the text. The impact of these errors on natural language processing (NLP) tasks has only been partially studied. We perform a series of extrinsic assessment tasks — sentence segmentation, named entity recognition, dependency parsing, information retrieval, topic modelling and neural language model fine-tuning — using popular, out-of-the-box tools in order to quantify the impact of OCR quality on these tasks. We find a consistent impact resulting from OCR errors on our downstream tasks with some tasks more irredeemably harmed by OCR errors. Based on these results, we offer some preliminary guidelines for working with text produced through OCR.

2019

1. Three perspectives on a collaborative attempt to use computer vision techniques to automatically classify historical newspaper images.

   Martijn Kleppe, Thomas Smits, and Willem Jan Faber

   In Proceedings of the Twin Talks Workshop at DHN 2019, co-located with Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, Nov 2019

2018

1. Berichten van het thuisfront. Orolog, media, en mediageschiedenis

   Thomas Smits

   Leidschrift, Nov 2018

2017

1. Looking for The Illustrated London News in Australian Digital Newspapers

   Thomas Smits

   Media History, Nov 2017

   Abs

   This article will demonstrate that digital newspaper archives can be used to shed new light on the historical readership of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. The digital newspaper archive of Australia (Trove) was used to study the distribution and reception of the renowned Illustrated London News (ILN) in the Australian colonies between 1842 and 1872. As a result of this research, this article shows that around 17,000 copies of the magazine reached the Australian colonies by each mail in 1862. This corresponds to 8?11% of the total circulation of the ILN at that time so making it the most widely read British publication in the Australian colonies. By means of a case study into the colonial readership of the ILN, this article will argue that the magazine was an important building block in the formation of the imagined communities both of Britain and its dominions in the period between 1842 and 1872.

2. Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture ed. by Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins (review)

   Thomas Smits

   Victorian Periodicals Review, Jul 2017
3. Review of Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (2015)

   Thomas Smits

   Journal of European Periodical Studies, Jun 2017

   Abs

   Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 205 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-3298-8.

2016

1. Making the News National: Using Digitized Newspapers to Study the Distribution of the Queen’s Speech by W. H. Smith & Son, 1846–1858

   Thomas Smits

   Victorian Periodicals Review, Jun 2016

   Abs

   the second part of this article uses W. H. Smith’s nineteenth-century distribution network as a springboard for discussing how the present-day distribution of British digitized newspapers is shaped by the commercial interests of two large publishers and how this system shapes research in media history.

2015

1. Hidden gems and pointing fingers

   Thomas Smits

   TS. Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies, Jun 2015

2014

1. Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street. A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain.

   Thomas Smits

   TS. Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies, Dec 2014

   Abs

   TS·> Tijdschrift voor tijdschrift­studies/ TS·> Journal for the Study of Periodical Media is a bilingual (English/Dutch), interdisciplinary, peer reviewed academic journal. It focuses on every aspect of periodicals and periodical media, such as newspapers, magazines, periodicals, blogs, etc., from the Early Modern period to the present.TS·> wishes to keep researchers and those interested in recent developments in periodical research updated on developments in the field. It also aims to stimulate research into periodical media.

2. Problems and possibilities of digital newspaper and periodical archives

   Thomas Smits

   TS. Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies, Dec 2014

2013

1. Snelweg naar Rome. Een nieuwe
generatie historici over het verleden

   Dec 2013

2012

1. Een problematisch symbool van vooruitgang . De representatie van de spoorwegen in De Hollandsche Illustratie ( 1864-1884 )

   Thomas Smits

   TS. Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies, Dec 2012