A project from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab), PixPlot uses 21st-century technology to explore a large collection of 19th- and 20th-century images, the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Amassed by Frederick Hill Meserve, "a collector and distributor of photographs from 1897 to his death in 1962," the collection has a bevy of materials highlighting Abraham Lincoln and events around the time of the American Civil War. PixPlot analyzes the 27,000 images in the collections along more than 2,000 dimensions, resulting in a unique visual display that groups like images together. Users can navigate the resource by zooming in and out of clusters of interest or by expanding designated "hotspots" that each begin with a representative image identified by the software (e.g., buttons, gowns, landscapes, or suits). The resource is ever-evolving, and future planned enhancements include layouts based on user-provided metadata, basic search functionality, and text annotations within plots. To see the underlying code, visit the DHLab on GitHub.
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