publications

2023

1. Introduction

   Ann Rigney, and Thomas Smits

   In The Visual Memory of Protest, 2023
2. The Visual Memory of Protest

   Ann Rigney, and Thomas (eds.) Smits

   2023

   Abs

   Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms in on the role of photography in this memory-activism nexus. How do iconographic conventions shape images of protest? Why do some images keep movements in the public eye, while others are quickly forgotten? What role do images play in linking different protests, movements, and generations of activists? Have the affordances of digital media made it easier for activists to use images in their memory politics, or has the digital production and massive online exchange of images made it harder to identify and remember a movement via a single powerful image? Bringing together experts in visual culture, cultural memory, social movements, and digital humanities, this collection presents new empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights into the visual memory of protest.

3. 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.

4. Review: Electric News in Colonial Algeria

   Thomas Smits

   Media History, Jul 2023
5. 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.

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

   Thomas Smits

   Media History, Jun 2023

   Abs

   Roundtable of my book The European Illustrated Press in Media History)

7. 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, Jun 2023

2022

1. The Agency of Computer Vision Models as Optical Instruments.

   Thomas Smits, and Melvin Wevers

   Visual Communication, Jun 2022

   Abs

   Industry and governments have deployed computer vision models to make high-stake decisions in society. While they are often presented as neutral and objective, scholars have recognized that bias in these models might lead to the reproduction of racial, social, cultural and economic inequity. A growing body of work situates the provenance of bias in the collection and annotation of datasets that are needed to train computer vision models. This article moves from studying bias in computer vision models to the agency that is commonly attributed to them: the fact that they are universally seen as being able to make biased decisions. Building on the work of Bruno Latour and Jonathan Crary, the authors discuss computer vision models as agential optical instruments in the production of contemporary visuality. They analyse five interconnected research steps – task selection, category selection, data collection, data labelling and evaluation – of six widely cited benchmark datasets, published during a critical stage in the development of the field (2004–2020): Caltech 101, Caltech 256, PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, MS COCO and Google Open Images. They found that, despite all sorts of justifications, the selection of categories is not based on any general notion of visuality, but depends heavily upon perceived practical applications, the availability of downloadable images and, in conjunction with data collection, favours categories that can be unambiguously described by text. Second, the reliance on Flickr for data collection introduces a temporal bias in computer vision datasets. Third, by comparing aggregate accuracy rates and ‘human’ performance, the dataset papers introduce a false dichotomy between the agency of computer vision models and human observers. In general, the authors argue that the agency of datasets is produced by obscuring the power and subjective choices of its creators and the countless hours of highly disciplined labour of crowd workers.

2. The Great Unseen. Photojournalism and the Archive: From Analogue to Digital

   Thomas Smits, and Saskia Asser

   TMG Journal for Media History, Jun 2022

   Abs

   This special issue of TMG Journal for Media History examines what happens to pictures of the news and the way(s) we can see them when they are moved from the analogue to the digital realm. What do researchers of photojournalism gain and lose when the photographs we study are made accessible in a digital form? What kind of questions can we ask in and of the digital photojournalistic archive? Can computational techniques provide new kinds of access to and identify visual patterns in digitised photojournalistic collections? How does this change our understanding of the history of photojournalism?

3. Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 1)

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

   Programming Historian, Aug 2022
4. Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 2)

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

   Programming Historian, Aug 2022

2021

1. 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
2. A Network of Photographs: The Visual Public Memory of the Dutch Provo Movement, 1967–2016

   Thomas Smits

   Memory Studies, Sep 2021

   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. 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

2020

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

   Thomas Smits

   Oct 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.

2. 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
3. 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.

4. The Visual Digital Turn. Using Neural Networks to Study Historical Images

   Melvin Wevers, and Thomas Smits

   Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Nov 2020

   Abs

   Digital humanities research has focused primarily on the analysis of texts. This emphasis stems from the availability of technology to study digitized text. Optical character recognition allows researchers to use keywords to search and analyze digitized texts. However, archives of digitized sources also contain large numbers of images. This article shows how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to categorize and analyze digitized historical visual sources. We present three different approaches to using CNNs for gaining a deeper understanding of visual trends in an archive of digitized Dutch newspapers. These include detecting medium-specific features (separating photographs from illustrations), querying images based on abstract visual aspects (clustering visually similar advertisements), and training a neural network based on visual categories developed by domain experts. We argue that CNNs allow researchers to explore the visual side of the digital turn. They allow archivists and researchers to classify and spot trends in large collections of digitized visual sources in radically new ways.

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. 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.

3. Review: 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

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, Jul 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, Jul 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 tijdschrift\-studies/ 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 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