Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I spent first part of the morning scanning negatives for the basketball project, which we hope to have completed soon.

Afterwards, Brad and I went to the reading room, where he showed me how he tries to identify unknown subjects in photographs. A relative of one of IU's first basketball players has loaned several photographs to us so they can be scanned and made available through the IU archives, but several of the people and locations in the images are unidentified. In particular, there are two photographs of unknown men who were probably IU students.

Since it is possible that the unknown people in the images might be friends of the basketball player, we began by finding out whether the player was in a fraternity, since the others might then be members, as well. He did belong to a fraternity, so we checked the photographs of that fraternity in the yearbooks covering the years he was at IU, but were unable to match any of the people in those images with the photographs we had.

Since the photographs identified the towns in which they were taken, we used the yearbooks to find men at IU who were from those towns, information which used to be included in early IU yearbooks. This provided us with three or four possible names for our unknown men. We then began going through the yearbooks page by page, since they show the students not individually in alphabetical order, but rather in groups by department. We didn't identify the unknown people, but we only got through one yearbook while I was working. Brad was going to continue trying to identify the two men.