Midterm
Charles W. Cushman was a photographer who captured life from the mid 20th century in color using kodachrome. He was able to represent emotions of everyday life within his photos; the metadata of which is still accessible. As such, I approached this project through a technical lens to accurately depict the attention to camera setting details. My visualization portrays what type of focal length Cushman used at different points in time over the course of 1950 to 1952.
To create this visualization, I had to clean the cushman photograph collection metadata. This meant making the dates for all of the photos machine readable by turning the text to a number format. I then had to isolate the camera settings data to show onto the focal length as the visualization otherwise would have been too messy to depict anything comprehensively. Once the data was clean enough to use, I went through a couple different ways to present the information. Initially I had planned to use a timeline using RawGraphs.io, however this proved difficult as none of the timelines provided good legibility. I then tried TimelineJS, however this required me to reformat my data entirely. At this point, I had been contemplating if timelines were the best way to display my data as I could be displaying even more information with other graphs. Flourish ended up being my final decision as it provided the most options for both timeline and proportional data visualization. My final visualization, as shown above, depicts both the time each photo was taken and the camera focal length.
Paying attention to when certain photos were taken and how they were taken allows for other photographers to understand what techniques were used by Cushman during certain time frames. For example, Cushman expands his range of settings towards 1952 and begins to take many more photos. Understanding what techniques were used could be useful in developing future approaches to photography and art altogether. Within Digital Humanities, mapping out trends over a large data set is important in interpreting what patterns could be applied from the data to other areas of life. The other areas, in this case, being developing new techniques for photography and art.