Thomas Smits

Great to present our work (w. @melvinwevers.bsky.social) on applying "basic" ML to study historical visual culture at the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History Seminar!

YouTube video by IHR Digital History Seminar Smits & Wevers: Orientalist pixels - revealing the colonial color palette of early photography

#dhist If you missed @thomassmits.bsky.social & @melvinwevers.bsky.social speaking at the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History on Orientalist pixels, colonial colour palettes, and machine learning - plus the fab discussion that followed - the recording is now on our youtube channel youtu.be/kDTJToRCEHQ

Hi @hathitrust.bsky.social wizards and/or American #historians (espc @uofcalifornia.bsky.social), can anyone able to help me get PDFs of this record? Really appreciate any help 🤝🙏!!

catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01031...

Hi @hathitrust.bsky.social wizards and/or American #historians (espc @uofcalifornia.bsky.social), can anyone able to help me get PDFs of this record? Really appreciate any help 🤝🙏!!

catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01031...

Abstract of the paper and turnaround time from submission to publication.

Example double page of the Flora Batava series including illustration and text sections. Letters indicate the different segments of the text: a) “species names”, b) “flowering time”, c) “classification”, d) “sexual characteristics”, e) “species traits”, f) “habitat”, g) “medicinal use”, h) “domestic use”.

It's incredibly important to have a journal like Open Humanities Data. Had the pleasure working with @l-teixeiracosta.bsky.social to publish a dataset of 11k+ records from the first illustrated flora of the Netherlands (19th century)

👀 Look at that turnaround time: 1 month!

doi.org/10.5334/johd...

Tuesday 20 January 2026 - Thomas Smits and Melvin Wevers (Amsterdam): Orientalist pixels: How machine learning reveals the colonial color palette of early photography - Digital History Seminar This seminar is 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm GMT live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/98599080376 later posted to our YouTube channel. Session chair: Alexandra Ortolja-Baird Abstract: This talk explores how digita...

#dhist Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar 20 Jan midday GMT (on Zoom) for @thomassmits.bsky.social & @melvinwevers.bsky.social on 'Orientalist pixels: How machine learning reveals the colonial color palette of early photography'. Details ⬇️ ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...

Title and abstract for the linked article

📣 New #OpenAccess article

🏮 Margo Buelens-Terryn, Ilja Van Damme and @thomassmits.bsky.social, 'Projecting cities: illustrated lantern lectures as forgotten practice of place promotion in Belgium, c. 1900 – c. 1920'

🔗 doi.org/10.1017/S096... #UrbanHistory

Thanks Priti, very kind!

Thanks Katie! The method is very much based on MapReader so would love to talk more soon!

Thanks! That would be awesome! Have become very interested in 'kreupelhout' over the last weeks.

Thanks!

Thanks!

What (hopefully) makes this approach valuable is its potential to be applied to similar photograph collections worldwide. Many colonial powers created aerial archives across the Global South, and digital methods offer new ways to study environmental transformation at unprecedented scales.

The project essentially turns tools of territorial control into sources of historical understanding. These aerial surveys were designed to facilitate extraction and administration, but they also captured environmental realities the colonizers didn't necessarily intend to document.

But this isn't just about colonial power. Analyzing at scale also reveals persistence, adaptation, and resistance by indigenous communities—patterns that individual photographs might miss but become visible when you look at thousands of images systematically.

I'll develop an AI-powered method to analyze these photographs at scale—examining the sweeping transformation of the Indonesian environment through plantations, mines, roads, and other colonial infrastructure.

Pleased to share that I've been awarded an NWO XS grant for "Terraforming from Above: Digital Methods for Colonial Aerial Photography"

Between 1920-1949, Dutch pilots systematically photographed Indonesia from above, creating an unprecedented aerial archive of the colonial landscape.

If that's not enough to convince you, @nolauren.bsky.social/@taylor-arnold.bsky.social investigate pacing in 4,500 US sitcom episodes and Kaspar Beelen/Natasha Kitcher show us how we can link museum data with AI.

edu.nl/mgdud

edu.nl/349v9

In the same session, @lorenverreyen.bsky.social presents a dataset of 412 days of automatically transcribed podcasts. Hugely important work that allows us to study podcasts w. techniques from comp lit studies and takes the next step in the multimodal turn in computational humanities.

edu.nl/7w4fg

Excited for session 2B this afternoon at #CHR2025! @melvinwevers.bsky.social presents our work (w. @folgertk.bsky.social) using Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity to quantify archival silence and bias. We're measuring the diversity of the Dutch National Archive's photographic collection.

edu.nl/7cbef

Screenshot of a simple app showing bounding boxes for photographs detected in historic newspaper images.

hf jobs uv run \ --flavor a100-large \ -s HF_TOKEN=HF_TOKEN \ https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/sam3/raw/main/detect-objects.py \ -- davanstrien/newspapers-with-images-after-photography-big \ davanstrien/newspapers-photo-predictions \ --class-name "photograph" \ --confidence-threshold 0.4

Building datasets to train smaller, task-focused models used to be incredibly time-consuming.

Very excited to see SAM3 massively lower that barrier. Describe the class you want to detect and get annotated datasets automatically!

Try it yourself: huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...!

Edited by Taylor Arnold, Margherita Fantoli, and Ruben Ros

📢 The #CHR2025 proceedings are out!

97 papers, ~1600 pages of computational humanities 🔥 Now published via the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, with DOIs for every paper.

🔗 anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

And don’t forget: registration closes tomorrow (20 Nov)!

!Stop Press! Article on bias in digitised newspaper collections: ’Whose News’, in the new journal of @comphumresearch.bsky.social by Kaspar Beelen, @jonhistorian61.bsky.social, @kmcdono.bsky.social and me. See blog for summary & 🧵 1/7

Article doi.org/10.1017/chr....

Blog is.gd/2IFc30

#dh #c19 🗃️

Look at our lovely autumn/winter @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar schedule, including talks from @bamcshane.bsky.social @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social @rubenros.bsky.social @thomassmits.bsky.social @melvinwevers.bsky.social and more! #dhist

Front view of the Crystal Palace exterior rendered in Lego complete with megalosaurus and horsedrawn omnibus

Interior view of Lego Crystal Palace showing various details of the exhibition

Victorianists - a little bit of silly joy in all the gloom: take a moment today to vote for this gorgeous Lego set idea of the Great Exhibition so we can all get it for Christmas! beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

A great critique! I do wish that historians would use their anger at this article to start to think more about corpus delimitation and methods. Critiquing this kind of work is easy if you don't feel the need to explicate your methods or data (obs. not applicable to you!)

Excited to hear "Mapping Empire: A Distant Viewing Approach to News Maps in Victorian Illustrated Periodicals, 1842-1890" from Bethany Warner & @thomassmits.bsky.social next!

Can you see this list? archive.org/download/gra...
I also downloaded the issue for you, please find it here: filesender.surf.nl?s=download&t...

GitHub - tpsmi/ilnmultimodalsearch: Flask app for multimodal search in the Illustrated London News, 1842-1890 Flask app for multimodal search in the Illustrated London News, 1842-1890 - tpsmi/ilnmultimodalsearch

Search tool here: github.com/tpsmi/ilnmul...

Dataset (paper) here: openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....

Maybe I can take this oppurtunity to promote our open-access dataset of the Illustrated London News and multimodal search tool: bsky.app/profile/thom...

Search the images of the ILN (1842-1889) with words or images.

Easy install via Github but also happy to help with some image quests!