[HN Gopher] Does Someone Know My Name?
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Does Someone Know My Name?
Author : Tomte
Score : 216 points
Date : 2022-09-26 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.loc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.loc.gov)
| Semaphor wrote:
| I found the stories of the solved pictures in 2018 to be a great
| read: https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2018/05/hard-won-
| victorie...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I can say definitively that the last photo is of 2 women. They're
| both female. To mee it's plainly obvious, just look closely at
| them, they're women. That should help narrow it down quite a bit,
| after reading the article about that photo they said they can't
| figure that out.
| exabrial wrote:
| If they could provide a bit higher resolution scans that would
| help out tremendously
| akiselev wrote:
| When I saw that this was from the LoC I really hoped to see some
| photography from the Prokudin-Gorskii collection [1] but this
| seems to be mostly "iconic" photos from Western media. I'd be a
| lot more interested to know who the two cossacks were [2] and
| what they thought about at the dawn of the first world war or
| literally anything about the shepherd's boy that randomly stopped
| for a photograph in 1910 [3], not knowing he'd be immortalized as
| the first shepherd caught on a color camera.
|
| The whole collection consists of thousands of (mostly) full color
| photographs of Russia taken on color plates between 1905 and 1915
| by a single man and its well worth a look. When the plates align
| perfectly, the detail in the photographs is nothing short of
| stunning
|
| [1] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=prok
|
| [2] https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsc.03940/?co=prok
|
| [3] https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppem.01541/?co=prok
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if you could attack this from another angle.
|
| Let's assume we can narrow down a photo to "probably somewhere
| near LA because movies" - then if we can roughly estimate the age
| of the person, and when it was taken, we should be able to
| determine the current age of the contemporaries, or current age
| of the youngest person at the time of the photo who would
| recognize them.
|
| So if the photo was taken in the 1960s, and the youngest person
| "on set" would have been 20 at the time, they would now be around
| 80.
|
| So where would LA 80 year olds be who might recognize the photo?
| Put it in front of them (grocery stores posters? HAVE YOU SEEN
| THIS MAN banners at nursing homes?)
| jrussino wrote:
| If shown out of context, I would totally believe that #16 was
| generated by one of the recently-popular text-to-image AIs.
|
| "Baby C-3PO in the fetal position, floating in outer space,
| wearing Beats By Dre headphones. Retro-futurism. Black and white
| photograph"
| jcims wrote:
| Some attempts, started with your prompt then started chasing
| the theme. Image generation process in the captions. Stable
| Diffusion and DALL-E did the best in general (the uploaded
| examples cheated by going two stage, do the starfield first
| then erase the middle and infill). Midjourney thinks of stars
| like you're drawing a children's book:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/pO6JFWH
|
| Makes me think AI image golf would be fun. Start with an image,
| then see who can get to something approximating the finished
| image with minimum prompts. Nearly impossible to accurately
| score but it's a fun process.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...AI image golf would be fun. Start with an image, then
| see who can get to something approximating the finished image
| with minimum prompts....
|
| That would be such a fun game indeed!!!
| aasasd wrote:
| I'm gonna bet that the pic is an interpretation of an image
| from '2001 Space Odyssey'. Basically that child plus Sorayama.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| For asking for help identifying the people, those are very small
| resolution images.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| You can remove resolution from the image URLs to get a slightly
| better version.
|
| However you're right. People hosting this blog clearly are
| still in the dial-up era.
|
| But then again, archival/historical institutions do this all
| the time for some reason, that is not providing original scans.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > You can remove resolution from the image URLs to get a
| slightly better version.
|
| > However you're right. People hosting this blog clearly are
| still in the dial-up era.
|
| Or do they just have their blog software misconfigured? I
| have a feeling the scaling is being done automatically.
| ztgasdf wrote:
| I wouldn't say a resolution from 300x244[0] to 3023x2456[1]
| is "slightly better." All things considered, it's pretty
| standard to use thumbnails in an article, but it definitely
| would be nice if they made the thumbnails directly link to
| the original resolution image.
|
| [0] - https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-
| hear/files/2021/11/48-300x244....
|
| [1] - https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/files/2021/11/48.jpg
| bombcar wrote:
| Very nice! You can clearly see something like "Sesostris
| Temple" on the background award thing and maybe "Honorary
| Big Brother?" Honorary Elk Member"?
|
| That may be an angle for tracking it down, the man seems to
| be behind "his desk" which would mean the award applies to
| him.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| Trying to decode the letter on the desk... The resolution
| is such that it's all guesswork, but it's clearly a "Memo
| to Records" or Recorders[0] which I think of as something
| for a "permanent record". Gov't records, medical records,
| etc.
|
| And possibly the image of the person on the letterhead is
| the signer. So, his company? Gov't Position? Law/Medical
| Practice? I'm bad at this.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/YBFmPTL
| jacobyoder wrote:
| https://www.sesostrisshrine.org/ looks like Nebraska
| area? Perhaps someone at that group might have some idea
| who he is.
|
| Just finding out who made the scary tie-pin might be
| enough to identify this person!
| sowbug wrote:
| Looks like "Honorary Life Member" if my squinting is
| working.
| elwell wrote:
| The caption in the blog says this:
|
| We've been all across the country and back trying to ID
| this man at his desk. Yes, that's a Shriner's certificate
| on the wall behind him. It was issued from the Sesostris
| Shrine located in Lincoln, NE. And his stationary says
| "Memo to Recorders." The folks at the Lincoln Shrine have
| been very helpful to us be we still have not yet been
| able to ID this man.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| Interesting how around his right ear and along the top of
| his head it looks like his picture was cut out at some
| point.
| dn3500 wrote:
| I don't think that's cut & paste, I think it's dodge &
| burn. It's something you do while printing a negative
| that emphasizes the subject, in this case the man, and
| de-emphasizes the background. I was a news photographer
| in the 1970s and we did this all the time.
| datalopers wrote:
| > clearly are still in the dial-up era
|
| Modern web devs should be required to spend a weekend with
| 56Kbps just to experience how terribly bloated the web is
| today.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Meta did this on Tuesdays:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tue
| s...
| adolph wrote:
| If one were to transport these modern web devs to the time
| of 56Kbs they'd find things were just as bloated given the
| capacities of the time. The only question is what novel use
| of <blink> they'd find.
|
| As example, here is A List Apart in 1999 "CODE: Broadband,
| schmoadband. In the real world, we must trick our pages
| into loading faster."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19981212012511/http://alistapar
| t...
| dylan604 wrote:
| A List Apart is one of those sites that just impresses me
| with their content. I'm not a UI guy, and from time to
| time have to remember how to do something I had done
| somewhere else usually something to do with CSS. There's
| a specific example on Taming Lists from them that I refer
| to any time I'm trying to do inline lists that makes them
| play/feel nice other than display:inline.
|
| If I'm ever searching for a CSS something and receive A
| List Apart link, it gets clicked
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Yes, _but_... the best practice today is lazy-loaded
| thumbnails linking to the real deal. Or opening a lightbox
| with a 800-1000px or so image and a full-sized download
| link below it.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Very slightly related: One of the most satisfying interactions
| with a public organization I've ever had was finding an image in
| the LoC collection of Shasta Dam misidentified as Fontana Dam in
| North Carolina. A reverse image search revealed that it had
| apparently been that way for years, and was used in all sorts of
| contexts by third parties as a picture of Fontana Dam, despite
| the presence of a 14,000 foot snow-capped volcano in the
| background, a geographic feature which is notably absent from
| North Carolina.
|
| I emailed the contact address, and not only did they respond
| promptly, they corrected the listing and added a note about the
| previous misidentification and emailed me to let me know that it
| had been corrected.
|
| https://www.loc.gov/item/2011630316/
| woodruffw wrote:
| The National Archives is equally incredible and responsive: I
| made a Twitter bot[1] to automatically post photos from the
| DOCUMERICA project[2], and found handful of missing scans (just
| a few dozen in over 10,000) in the process.
|
| I emailed them to ask about it, and they responded in a handful
| of days[3].
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/dailydocumerica
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documerica
|
| [3]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2021/10/25/A-small-documerica-
| twi...
| lelandfe wrote:
| I emailed the National Archives about the nature of a quote
| from an HN comment ages ago. I spent a lot of time digging
| for sources and got stuck at a "box" somewhere in the
| Archives.
|
| I emailed the Archives and was politely informed that I would
| need to visit in person to ascertain the exact document.
|
| A few days later an Archives staffer emailed me under
| secrecy, saying they were not allowed to be doing this, but
| then provided exact details for what I needed.
|
| It was truly an excellent internet moment for me. Sometimes
| the government is cool!
| sh34r wrote:
| So much of the government relies on staffers discreetly
| working around the kafkaesque bureaucracy, and everyone
| involved turning a blind eye and respecting their need for
| discretion.
| redtexture wrote:
| A story with further details desirable.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Trying to honor the unnamed Archives person's request for
| anonymity :) you can find it in my comment history if you
| search back far enough
| js2 wrote:
| I've been to both these dams. Searching DDG for "Fontana Dam"
| still brings up a bunch of pictures of Shasta Dam. I wonder how
| long the correction will take (if ever?) to work its way
| through the Internet? How long ago did LoC make the correction?
| dhosek wrote:
| I found a similar misidentification (although with less spread
| of a photo which claimed to be Graham Greene but was some
| unknown individual:
|
| https://www.dahosek.com/ceci-nest-pas-graham-greene/
| aagd wrote:
| https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/10/06/actualidad/1570357128_.
| ..
| dhosek wrote:
| Brilliant! Thanks, the Ransom Center people didn't know who
| it was either. They'll be happy to have this info.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The LoC is a great way to fill up your RSS reader with above
| average quality content: https://www.loc.gov/subscribe/#blogs
| qq66 wrote:
| One thing that most people don't have an appreciation for is
| how effective the non-political departments of the US
| Government are, and also how at risk such jewels are for
| backsliding into incompetence and corruption if poorly managed.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| That's right, because many departments have their
| effectiveness undermined by legislation with the intent of
| undermining the existence of those departments altogether.
| conradev wrote:
| The Library of Congress was not doing enough to digitize
| their library: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive
| /2015/06/hirin...
|
| The Internet Archive and Google Books have a significant head
| start over the largest library in the world
| acdha wrote:
| Note that a lot has changed since 2015. The LOC's Strategic
| Plan (https://www.loc.gov/strategic-plan/) and especially
| the digital strategy (https://www.loc.gov/digital-
| strategy/) are trying to address that gap -- under the "We
| will throw open the treasure chest" section:
|
| > The Library's content, programs, and expertise are
| national treasures - we are dedicated to sharing them as
| broadly as possible. The growth of the Library's digital
| content, which includes our collections, has increased
| exponentially every year. We will make that content
| available and accessible to more people, work carefully to
| respect the expectations of the Congress and the rights of
| creators, and support the use of our content in software-
| enabled research, art, exploration, and learning.
|
| > Exponentially grow our collections
|
| > The Library will continue to build a universal and
| enduring source of knowledge and creativity. We will expand
| our digital acquisitions program, as outlined in Collecting
| Digital Content at the Library of Congress; continue our
| aggressive digitization program, which prioritizes the
| Library's unique treasures; and improve search and access
| services that facilitate discovery of materials in both
| physical and digital formats.
|
| > We will expedite the availability of newly acquired or
| created content to the web and on-site access systems. This
| will mean making improvements to the procedures and tools
| we use to move content from acquisition or creation to
| access, which will be critical as we continue to experience
| exponential growth in the size of our digital collection.
| We will also improve tools to make it easier for Library
| staff to enhance content after publication, such as adding
| additional description or information about the
| conservation of objects.
| sh34r wrote:
| You're comparing two very different things there.
| Institutional libraries and government archives have
| records going back centuries, many of which can't be found
| anywhere else. Even your local library might have some
| obscure local newspapers on microfilm from 100 years ago,
| that haven't been digitized yet (we've admittedly made
| progress on this problem over the last decade).
|
| To answer these "who am I" questions posed in the article,
| of unidentified historical photos, we need institutions
| like the Library of Congress digitizing their records,
| uniting them with other institutional datasets, and
| organizing them in a way that we can run facial recognition
| algorithms on them. The answer to "who are these musicians
| circa 1930" probably comes from a local newspaper that
| ended publication 50 years ago.
|
| In case it isn't abundantly clear, this is going to take
| decades to accomplish. These institutions operate on
| timelines measured in centuries, not weeks. They care
| deeply about problems like bit rot when replacing physical
| archives. If it is lost to the world in mere decades, it is
| not useful to them.
|
| The Internet Archive is of little help here, beyond sharing
| technical information for efficient archival and retrieval
| of truly massive public datasets.
| wpietri wrote:
| > You're comparing two very different things there.
|
| This is such an important point. Governments have
| longevity and universal service requirements that others
| just don't. I am personally a charge-ahead-and-try-shit
| kind of person. But I recognize that works for me because
| I can easily say "fuck it" and move on from my
| experiments. Anything the LOC does they're stuck with,
| possibly for centuries.
|
| So I'm glad that they proceed at a pace that seems
| positively glacial to me. That's what success on those
| timescales often requires.
| ghaff wrote:
| Furthermore, there's digitizing things and there's
| providing unlimited open access to those digitized
| things. The LoC needs to tread lightly on the latter to a
| degree that other institutions may choose not to do. Just
| because they're the LoC doesn't mean they can throw open
| digital access to anything they feel like.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| This is true because the non-political departments of US
| government have ultimately very limited power, so there is
| little incentive to either capture them or destroy them by
| partisan actors. Political operatives would _much_ rather
| control something like FBI or EEOC instead of LoC or USFS.
| This should motivate us to ensure that each department's
| capabilities are as restricted as possible to achieve its
| mandate, so that Library of Congress can focus on archiving
| materials, and not, say, drafting rules on what is required
| and banned from public libraries across the country (a very
| contentious topic these days, apparently).
|
| Of course, the political operatives want the opposite: they
| want to concentrate and extend the power of government
| agencies as much as possible. The incentive to do so for
| administrative agencies is strong: elected politicians can be
| voted out, so they have to be more careful, but career
| bureaucrats are effectively not removable. The result is a
| fight for the control of the agency, and then, if one side
| wins the control, to diminish the power/funding of the
| agency, which obviously is not conducive to agency being
| effective at its stated goals.
| toss1 wrote:
| Good description of the essence of democracy and the path
| of it sliding into authoritarianism.
|
| In a democracy all of the institutions of government and
| society are relatively independent, with power spread out
| and relatively balanced between them. This goes for the
| Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of govt, as
| well as the civil service, the press, the academy,
| industry.
|
| In contrast, as politicians start controlling "something
| like FBI or EEOC", and start forcing the justice
| department, the press, academic institutions and other
| government and societal structures to bend to the will of
| the leader, you soon have authoritarianism.
|
| Once it goes that way, it is very difficult to restore a
| democracy.
| yucky wrote:
| I would argue that's an inevitability with democracy,
| since short term thinking tends to dominate.
| toss1 wrote:
| You are certainly right, it is not constantly and
| actively maintained.
|
| After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it's said
| that when Ben Franklin was walking out of Independence
| Hall, someone yelled: "Doctor, what have we got? A
| republic or a monarchy?"
|
| To which Franklin responded: "A republic, if you can keep
| it."
|
| Wise Words.
|
| And, as Plato said: "The penalty for good men not
| participating in politics is to be ruled by evil men.".
| mherdeg wrote:
| Huh I always thought of the Library of Congress as having
| pretty strong political power -- under the DMCA Section
| 1201, every 3 years the Librarian of Congress enacts new
| rules proposed by the Copyright Office (part of the LOC)
| and can broadly determine that entire categories of
| software are not illegal DRM-circumvention devices.
| Natsu wrote:
| They see that power as very, very narrow. For one, they
| have to renew exceptions every 3 years, for another,
| they've shied away from doing anything at all to some of
| the broader categories that have been proposed.
| [deleted]
| aasasd wrote:
| The man in the 'Baba Yaga' photo looks very Mongol, Yakut or
| thereabouts.
|
| (Coincidentally, apparently there's currently a thriving scene of
| low-budget cinema and documentary in Yakutia--if my memory is not
| mistaking it with another one of those eastern republics.)
| pvinis wrote:
| I would expect the valve bald head there too. Was that ever
| identified?
| shmde wrote:
| He is probably in Gabe's basement playing l4d2.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'd have thought the Valve head was 3D art, not from a
| photographic source. I guess maybe that level of detail wasn't
| possible when it was created though?
| hbn wrote:
| It was a real guy. There were actually a couple Valve
| mascots, a guy with a valve coming from his eye, and one with
| it coming from the back of his head (the more famous one)
|
| Apparently they just found a couple guys off the street to
| take photos of, but didn't keep their names or anything so
| nobody knows who they are. Though they did actually end up
| doing a 3D model recreation of the second guy for Half Life:
| Alyx (the VR title)
|
| https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Valve
| te wrote:
| So all you need to do to identify strangers is snap a photo and
| mail it to the LoC?
| rurban wrote:
| Their already solved picture puzzles are easier to read:
| https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2018/05/hard-won-victorie...
| zucked wrote:
| Definitely don't know the people in the photos, but I do love the
| work the LoC does - it's so delightfully broad and wonky.
| coldpie wrote:
| I learned recently that the LoC has a whole bunch fascinating
| blogs: https://blogs.loc.gov/ I find the "Preservation" one
| most interesting personally, but they've got a huge variety of
| topics.
| kej wrote:
| I would have expected the Library of Congress to have thousands
| or even millions of unidentified photographs, so I'm curious what
| the reasoning is behind these 17 receiving such special
| attention.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| You have to start somewhere?
| robga wrote:
| They've been doing this for a while. This post is headlined
| "One Last Time".
|
| In this 2018 link, 23rd in a series, the LoC says it has
| "exhausted its currently slate of unidentified stills"
|
| So, they have very few unidentified stills in the Moving Image
| and Recorded Sound division of the Library of Congress.
|
| https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2018/01/photo-blog-23-fin...
| sebmellen wrote:
| > "Our crowd-sourcing via this and other LC blogs has proved to
| be a spectacular success. We started with well over 200
| "unknowns" and, now, we have only 18 we don't know! Thank you
| all!"
| echelon wrote:
| I wonder if it'll be possible to do a reverse genealogy search
| from photos in the future. We have huge databases of faces, and
| I'd wager both Facebook and the department of transportation
| probably have sufficient parts of this tree to work with.
|
| Facial phenotype correlates to genes, though stresses of life
| take their own independent toll.
|
| Obviously some branches will wind up not producing children, but
| we might be able to look back quite a bit.
|
| Does anyone know of research ongoing in this area?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Seems like something the big ancestry website would be able to
| do. People have been plugging data into that website for
| decades. I would totally be shocked if they didn't have a way
| of viewing a literal family tree with all of the images.
| Probably even make a Sirius Black wall for you if you pay
| enough and subject yourself to all of the shady website games
| they play
| adolph wrote:
| Seems like an aspect of the field was in the news last month:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doppelgangers-dont...
| mkmk wrote:
| It would be wonderful to use a search engine that could find
| historical photos of my ancestors, if they exist.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| familysearch.org has a lot of old photos that people have
| uploaded. I was able to find quite a few photos of my
| ancestors there.
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