Digital Humanities 2010 1 Building Dynamic Image Collections from Internet

People often want to collect and utilize free, publicly available images on a given subject. Image sharing systems such as Flickr store billions of user-contributed images. While such systems are designed to encourage user contributions and sharing, they are not well-organized collections on any given subject. We propose an approach that systematically harvest images from Internet and organize the images into an evolving faceted classification. We implemented a prototype to continuously harvest the most popular images on Flickr related to African American history, and organize them into an evolving faceted classification collaboratively maintained by users. The same approach can be applied to other digital humanities resources on the Internet. The talk will elaborate the details of technical design and prototype implementation, and discuss evaluation results. 2