Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.
To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 2 April 2024.
9 April 2024 – 3pm BST
Remote – Via Microsoft Teams
Melvin Wevers (University of Amsterdam, Examining temporality in historical photographs
Abstract
In this talk, Dr Melvin Wevers explores the capacity of computer vision models to discern temporal information in visual content, focusing specifically on historical photographs. He investigates the dating of images using OpenCLIP, an open-source implementation of CLIP, a multi-modal language and vision model. The experiment consists of three steps: zero-shot classification, fine-tuning, and analysis of visual content. Dr Melvin Wevers is currently expanding this study with a deeper examination of the role that people and their fashion play in conveying temporal information. During the talk, he will showcase the most recent results and run through the codebase used for this study.
Bio
Dr Melvin Wevers is an Assistant Professor in Digital History at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the application of computational methods to model historical processes. He does this by combining insights from the philosophy of history with the affordances of modelling techniques, such as time series analysis, Bayesian statistics, deep/machine learning, and information theory. Dr Melvin Wevers is also one of the founding members of the Computational Humanities Research Conference.
