Introduction
This project is a timeline of photographs taken by Charles W. Cushman, an amateur photographer who graduated from Indiana University. He is known not only for his early adoption of Kodachrome color slides but also for capturing scenes from everyday life. While digital archives have collected photographs taken between 1938 and 1968 across the globe, I focus specifically on photographs taken in 1962 in the United States. His full photograph collection can be viewed here.
Sources + Processes
I used this Google sheets dataset derived from metadata taken from this github site created by mdalmau. The Google sheets dataset originally contained 31 variables, detailing types of lenses, locations, dates, and themes of the photographs for 1962 and 1963.
As I knew I wanted to create a timeline, I cleaned the date variable by separating the date variable into three variables: year, month, and day. I also looked at the various location variables and decided to only keep the state variable as a lot of data was missing for the photographs meaning a complete specific locational analysis wouldn’t be possible. I also looked at the the variables that described the photographs and decided to keep the broadest description as other variables also had the issue of missing data.
I then had to format the spreadsheet into a specific way with all necessary columns as outlined by knightlab which is the website I used to create the timeline.
One issue I ran into was that the links for the media that were in the original dataset linked to the website and not the photograph itself. Therefore, when I formatted the links in the specified spreadsheet, the photographs wouldn’t load in the timeline. Therefore, I manually replaced each link with the IIIF image instead which took some time and was not efficient.
Presentation + Significance
I decided to create a timeline after looking at the dataset as I was curious to see if there were any changes in what Cushman chose to photograph, as he photographed a range of different objects including flowers, people, and landscape. I thought it would be interesting to also see the locations in which he took the photographs and creating a timeline allows us to visualize how he travelled across the country.
This relates specifically to Digital Arts and Humanities because this project transforms an already existing photographical archive into something that can be explored analytically. By embedding images into the chronological timeline, the data is explored more interactively and visualizations like the actual photographs allow viewers to have a better grasp on Cushman’s works and processes.