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Graphing the Stateless People in Carl Durheim's Photos

to reconstruct relationships

Demo

micha-durheim-relations.jpg

CH-BAR has contributed 222 photos by Carl Durheim, taken in 1852 and 1853, to Wikimedia Commons. These pictures show people who were in prison in Bern for being transients and vagabonds, what we would call travellers today. Many of them were Yenish. At the time the state was cracking down on people who led a non-settled lifestyle, and the pictures (together with the subjects' aliases, jobs and other information) were intended to help keep track of these "criminals".

Since the photos' metadata includes details of the relationships between the travellers, I want to try graphing their family trees. I also wonder if we can find anything out by comparing the stated places of origin of different family members.

I plan to make a small interactive webapp where users can click through the social graph between the travellers, seeing their pictures and information as they go.

I would also like to find out more about these people from other sources ... of course, since they were officially stateless, they are unlikely to have easily-discoverable certificates of birth, death and marriage.

  • Source code: downloads photographs from Wikimedia, parses metadata and creates a Neo4j graph database of people, relationships and places

Data

Team

Links

durheim

Graphing relationships of homeless people photographed by Carl Durheim in Bern, 1852-3.

This code was written for the 1st Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon, 27-28 February 2015.

The idea of this project is to explore this collection of photographs from the Swiss Archives: Category:Durheim portraits contributed by CH-BAR. Currently, it is possible to download all of the portraits, parse the associated metadata and load it into a Neo4j graph database. The relationships between people and their places of origin are added to the db and can be browsed with the Neo4j browser interface.

Usage

  • Download and start Neo4j. Open http://localhost:7474 in a browser.
  • In the terminal, enter: python durheim.py
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