CSI Civil War: Photo Sleuthing (Roanoke Civil War Round Table Talk )

CSI Civil War: Photo Sleuthing -

The Use of Facial Recognition Software and Crowdsourcing to Identify Unknown Civil War Soldier Photos

The body of the Union soldier was found in the streets of Gettysburg, a grim reminder of the many casualties during the bloody fighting on July 1, 1863. His dead hands clasped a small photograph to his chest. The image was of three young children, two boys and a girl. Clearly, as he lay dying the soldier’s last thoughts were of the family he never would see again.

The poignant circumstances of the soldier’s last moments stirred peoples’ desire to know who he was. Yet the body carried nothing that could be used to identify the dead man. John Francis Bourns, a Philadelphia physician who had travelled to Gettysburg to treat the wounded and had seen the photograph of the children, determined to solve the mystery. In an early resort to “crowdsourcing,” Dr. Bourns turned to the public for help in identifying the soldier. He prepared a detailed description of the children in the photograph and encouraged newspapers across the North to run the story. The result was that Philinda Humiston, a resident of a small village in New York, learned that her husband, Amos Humiston, the father of her three children — Franklin, Alice and Frederick — was dead.

The Civil War continues to provide a fertile field for what has become known as “photo sleuthing.” Some 4,000,000 soldiers fought in the Civil War. Advances in photography and the relative low cost of prints by the war’s start resulted in hundreds of thousands of soldier photographs. Many of the individuals in those photos are unidentified, and their stories thus unknown. But that is changing.

Today, facial recognition computer technology is among the tools used to identify previously anonymous images; however, it is not the only tool used. Crowdsourcing tactics have evolved from Dr. Bourns’ use of newspapers, but remarkably continues to be a vital tool in a unique photo sleuthing effort spearheaded by Virginia Tech. That effort will be the subject of an upcoming talk presented by the Roanoke Civil War Round Table featuring Professor Kurt Luther.

Dr. Luther is an associate professor of computer science and (by courtesy) history at Virginia Tech. He directs the Crowd Intelligence Lab, researching the complementary strengths of crowdsourced human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) in domains like history, journalism, national security, and creativity. Since 2015, he has written a quarterly column on Civil War photo sleuthing for Military Images Magazine. He was named an Emerging Scholar by the American Civil War Museum and a Distinguished Writing Awards Finalist by the Army Historical Foundation.

On Tuesday, April 9, the Roanoke Civil War Round Table will sponsor Kurt Luther’s talk on this fascinating subject.

Date, Time & Location: Tuesday, April 9 (7:00 pm). Chapel of the Residents’ Center at Friendship, 397 Hershberger Road, Roanoke. Admission is free (but becoming a Round Table member welcome).