The Ethics of Photo Restoration or Editing

In 1982, knowledgeable travel photographers detected that the National Geographic magazine cover contained a photograph that had been digitally altered. In fact, the editors of the magazine had moved one of the Pyramids of Giza in a horizontal photograph to fit the magazine's vertical format. See www.jkiel.com/comm7180/kiel_pyramid.pdf and many other sites and articles. Up until recently, the Arizona Highways magazine would not accept digital photographs. Now it is apparent that most of the photographs in the magazine come from digital images. In some cases, I can tell that the images have been altered in a photo editing program.

Genealogists are likely to have or find old photographs, sometimes of family members, other times of various subjects, photos taken on vacations, for commercial purposes or other types of photos. Digitizing old photographs and photo restoration are frequent topics in print and at conferences. But the issue of altering history is hardly mentioned.

If I had a history of an ancestor containing information I felt was objectionable, i.e. a criminal act, infidelity, poor grammar, poor choice of words, politically or racially insensitive statements, would I be justified in editing out the material I felt was undesirable? What if I do the same thing, only with an image? With today's digital tools I can literally re-write the visual past. Here is an example. Look closely at the two photographs. Do you see any differences? You can click on the image to get a larger view.

Image No. 1

 

Image No. 2

Was it ethical for me to alter the photograph and thereby change history? Do you see the difference? I will give you a hint, one of the people in the first photo is missing in the second one. Now, if I were asked to determine whether or not the photograph had been digitally altered, could I do it? What if I were given the second photo and not even told that it had been altered? Could I prove in court that the second photo was not "accurate?" 

Why would I alter a photograph to take out a person? I can think of a lot of reasons, starting with long standing family feuds and going on to all the other issues we sometimes find in our family trees. Is it ethical for me to do so?

What if I don't take out a person, but just freshen the people up a bit. Clear up their complexions and take out the teenage blemishes, it this ethical. If I had a bad complexion when I was a youth, should that information be hidden from future generations in the name of "restoration." What if I take a clearly damaged photograph and, in the name of restoration, put in a few of my own details in the damaged areas? Is that historically accurate or ethical? How is that different than what National Geographic did with the Pyramids?

As genealogists we can get hyper over the lack of the proper citation, shouldn't we get more upset when photographic history is altered to serve our present likes and dislikes and prejudices? Perhaps the courses on photo editing or restoration should address the ethical and historical accuracy issues involved in making digital edits to photographs. Photo editing tools are extremely sophisticated. The average person likely has no clue that the images they see on TV and in print are far from accurate reproductions of the originals. In this sense, the modern camera does lie and lie in style. 

What do you think?

An Information Disconnect -- Genealogy vs. the world of business and law

Genealogist spend their time looking for people. Interestingly, so do a lot of businesses and law firms. Sometimes they are looking for the same people, but the tools they use are very different as are the reasons for searching. Business and law firms look for people to collect debts or pursue litigation, they also use online search services to do credit checks, background checks for employment, and other similar activities. Most people, including most genealogists, have no idea at all about the online tools used by law firms, banks, credit reporting services and other consumers of people tracking programs.

Let's say you want to find a person who lives in California. This last week our law firm had a demonstration of a new product from Westlaw, called WestlawNext in conjunction with a program called Westlaw PeopleMap. Now, before going into any detail about these programs, it is important to know that a Westlaw subscription can cost many thousands of dollars a month. Not a few hundred dollars a year like Ancestry.com. Neither you nor anyone else is likely to have access to such a tool unless they have a really good business reason for the service.

So what is Westlaw PeopleMap? It is advertised as a way to "quickly discover relationships between people, assets, and other public records." Does that sound familiar to a genealogist? Here is a further explanation of the program:

Before you've even started your research, Westlaw PeopleMap already has made connections between individuals from billions of public records across the country. Westlaw PeopleMap then brings those connections to you, making it faster and easier to identify a person of interest and their relevant relationships.

The program includes a dynamic interactive graphical view that helps you see connections quickly and a mapping feature to help home in on the person you're looking for. This program is by no means unique. There are many competitor programs out there in the marketplace. What is unusual is not the Westlaw program or other similar programs but the amount of information available about nearly every single individual in the U.S. and possibly the world.

I still talk to people frequently who are worried about their "privacy" and are afraid to give out their "personal data" because of the possibility that the data will be "made public." This is the most uniformed and naive view of today's world imaginable. While we were in the demonstration, one of the attorneys threw out the name of a person he was looking for. In about two minutes, the Westlaw representative had a multi-page report on the individual showing among other things:

• His personal information, date of birth etc. including social security number (partially disguised but easily confirmed)
• His current address and all prior addresses (that is all prior addresses)
• A list of related people, family, friends, business associates etc.
• Every bank account he had ever had
• Every loan he had ever had and what was purchased
• All of his real property
• All other tangible assets

And so on and so on for pages and pages. How much did this all cost the attorney? Less than $50, the exact price depended on the amount of usage of the service because the whole program is bundled with all other Westlaw products.

Don't you wish you could get that kind of information about your ancestors? Well, guess what? In some cases you can. Genealogists just don't realize, for the most part, that they live in a world of information, some of which is high priced, but still available.

What's new with FamilySearch?

I noticed that it had been a couple of months since I took an over all look at the FamilySearch websites for a post. What has gone on in the FamilySearch world the last few months? More and more content which is why we need and use the FamilySearch websites. Here is a brief summary of each of the sites:

FamilySearch.org: This is the premier site. The Historical Record Collections continue to grow unabated with the addition of millions of records almost every work day of the week. In fact, two large collections were updated or added on August 6, 2011, a Saturday. So far in August alone, millions of records in ten different collections have been added. For example, the Panama Catholic Church Records, 1707 - 1973 contain 240,799 images and were added on 2 August 2011. There are so many new records that the genealogical community is ignoring new additions as "old" news, I am afraid. When was the last time you checked for new additions?

One change, at least in most of the U.S., is that films from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, must be ordered online rather than in person at a Family History Center. See Film.FamilySearch.org.  The films are still sent to a Family History Center near where the film is ordered, but the ordering process is all online now and will be shortly implemented throughout the world.

Wiki.FamilySearch.org: The FamilySearch Research Wiki now has 60,879 articles, although that number will probably change before you read this post. There is a very active Wiki community and even though this site passed into the rank of the first places to go for research aid many months ago, it is a still a relatively unknown and unused resource. I remind someone about this site every time I am asked a question and constantly get either the response, Oh, I forgot about that or I didn't know about that site. This is another site that has changed recently and needs to be visited regularly.

Indexing.FamilySearch.org: The vast indexing program keeps moving right along. New features that were added recently include (quoting from the website:

• My Accuracy. Get feedback on how you're doing with your indexing. Since the indexing program began, the most frequent request of indexers has been "Please tell me how I'm doing." This feature is a giant step toward answering that request.
  
  My Accuracy is not a grade. It will show you how often your indexing work and the final arbitrated values match. You can look for patterns and see if there are areas where you can improve. The information is anonymous and only provided to you.
  
  Please remember that arbitrators are volunteers as well. They may not always agree with you, even when you both do your best to follow instructions. You can mark values for review, but this will not affect your My Accuracy score. This feedback will be used by headquarters to track data and be alerted to trends.
  
  After this feature is released, you can start reviewing your indexing batches as soon as they are arbitrated.
• 
  
• Invite a Friend. Send e-mails to friends to invite them to join the fun of indexing. More people indexing means more searchable records published online!

 FamilySearch.org/TechTips/: The TechTips site keeps adding new content and changing the look of the site. This is another valuable site that has a low visibility in the genealogical community. Articles are added almost daily and the site already has a large number of valuable articles.

New.FamilySearch.org: It looks like the changes to New.FamilySearch.org are concentrated in the Asian languages interface. There haven't been any other significant changes since my last comments on this site.

As I mentioned above, content seems to be the name of the game right now with FamilySearch and this is as it should be. The sites will only become even more useful as new content is added. On a different note, there is still no visible change to the Historical Books Collection at the BYU Archive. None of the books scanned over the last two years at the Mesa Regional Family History Center has yet to appear online. As a test, I have mentioned before that I had my Great-grandmother's book scanned for inclusion in the online collection. I am the copyright holder, in fact I have the original copyright in my possession. The book was scanned more than a year ago and has yet to appear online. The book does not appear in the online catalog of the BYU Archives, although the Family History Library also has a copy. The Family History Library copy does not show a digitized version of the book online.

If you would like more info about FamilySearch online, check out my new book, The Guide to FamilySearch Online, now available at the BYU Bookstore.

Now the photo (document, etc.) is digitized, then what?

Digital preservation has primarily focused on the issue of digitizing existing documents. So of us have ended up with a hard disk full of digitized files, including books, old photos, documents, and about anything else we could scan or photograph. So now what do we do?

The first concern, of course, is to backup the files so they are protected from loss, preferably at some off-site location. But that is just the first page of the first chapter of the preservation story. Backing up files is like buying food for storage, you can store it for only so long before it goes bad and has to be thrown out. Some of us also maintain the actual physical documents and photos and their conservation is an entirely different book, not just a different story. Fortunately, there is an abundance of online help for the amateur or home archivist. You may want to start with the Digital Preservation website of the Library of Congress. This site covers the whole gamut of digital preservation, audio, video, photographs, documents, websites, everything.

One of the concerns is the issue of file formats. For example, you digitized an old photograph and now find out that the file format you used is no longer supported. What do you do? Are you basically lost? Obviously this subject is huge. There are hundreds (thousands) of online documents on the subject but unless you start reading and studying and get past the basic digitizing step of the process to file preservation, you are literally wasting your time. Your concern should be in direct proportion to the amount of data you want to preserve. Here are the questions as posed by the Library of Congress:

• When seeking to acquire a body of digital content with the intention of sustaining it for the long term, which formats are preferred or acceptable and why?
• Which digital formats must be fully supported by systems, automated tools, or workflow associated with the digital content life cycle processes under discussion at the Library, i.e., support for receiving and validating digital content (in the Get process), selecting digital content (in the Select process), preparing digital content for responsible long-term custody (in the Prepare/Assemble process), and establishing strategies for preservation (in the Sustain process)? 
• Given content in a particular format, does the Library already have a commitment to support content in this digital format? If so, are their more specific technical requirements that apply? What associated metadata of a technical nature is essential? Does LC have an existing workflow process appropriate for receiving and validating digital content in this format? Or are software tools for format validation and metadata extraction available for building a workflow process? 
• If a particular digital format is not already categorized as preferred or acceptable for a particular category or subcategory of material, what information or assistance is available to develop a recommendation that a format should be supported or that a process be developed for reformatting to a supported format?

If you read these items carefully, you will see a lot of buzz words: formats, digital content, workflow, life cycle, long-term custody, metadata, reformatting and so forth.  The discussion of digital preservation deals with each of these terms in a very specific way. LC (Library of Congress) defines a format as follows:

This Web site defines formats as packages of information that can be stored as data files or sent via network as data streams (aka bitstreams, byte streams). For reference, the working definition from the proposed Global Registry of Digital Formats is "A format is a fixed, byte-serialized encoding of an information model."

You may recognize some of the file formats discussed by LC. These include, WAVE, PDF, MP3, TIFF, JPEG etc.

Where do we get started? Do we really need to know all this stuff about file formats? The answers to both questions are not simple. Digital preservation is really quite a complex issue and the whole issue is made more complex by reason of the fact that the whole subject is in constant change and evaluation. The illuminating principle here is that huge complex organizations, like the Library of Congress, are actively reviewing and researching the issues.

Cutting through all the jargon, the issue is whether or not any particular digital file will survive in any particular format. If you save your journal in Microsoft Word 2011, how long will that particular file format be supported before you have to migrate the file to a newer or different format?

If you have gotten this far, you probably are wondering if there is a simple solution. The answer is no. But there is hope. I will keep at this subject for a while so we can all get some idea of what we need to do to preserve our files.

Photos on Google Earth

Just a short note of news, many of my photos that I feature in PhotoArizona360.blogspot.com are now online in Google Earth. If you go to Arizona and zoom in on Mesa, you can see the little icons for 360Cities.net where the photos are hosted. This is what I do in my spare time. Here is an example of the interior of the Tabernacle at Temple Square that I took while I was in Utah attending the BYU Family History and Genealogy Conference.

Interior of the Tabernacle on Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah USA in Salt Lake City

You can view other photos by clicking on the links. Right now, I have about 50 or so I have taken recently yet to be put online. Just so you know that law, writing, genealogy and camping are not all that I do.

What is digital preservation?

If you have ever suffered a computer crash and lost files, then you know the consequences of not being aware of digital preservation. In its most simple form, digital preservation is preserving digital files from loss due to physical destruction or obsolescence. If we are going to try to preserve our genealogically important documents from physical loss, these efforts at preservation need to take into account the possibility that the digital files created from scanning or other digitizing methods, are not also lost.

Here is a list of some of the ways files can be lost:

• Physical loss, destruction or failure of the storage media. This means that you can lose the file if the copy of the file is stored on some sort of physical media, i.e. a hard drive, flash drive, CD, DVD or whatever, and the media itself is destroyed, lost or fails. This can be a something as common as losing a flash drive to something as complicated as having a hard drive fail. 
• Loss of the file due to inadvertence or software bugs. Your hardware may not fail, but the archived file itself may be corrupted or lost through inadvertent erasure or a bug in the software. You might do something as simple as overwriting the file with a newer file with the same name.
• File incompatibility. Over time, software may change dramatically. The program you used to create the digital copy may no longer be recognized or the program you used to create the file may no longer be available or able to operate with current computer systems.
• New technology may make the both the hardware and the file obsolescent. There are a number of examples of computer file storage technology that are either gone or on their way out. For example, do you have a current way to read Zip Disks? Do you even know what a Zip Disk is?

I could go on, but the point is that there are many factors to consider when you approach the issue of preserving your digitized or digital files. If you make a backup copy or two or three, these extra copies will not protect you from file incompatibility or new technology.

Digital preservation is a set of strategies, if followed, will give a high likelihood that your digital files will be preserved and available to future generations, not just next year or the year after. I shudder to think how many bank safety deposit boxes around the country contain stacks of floppy disks. By the way, making a print out of all of you files defeats the whole purpose for making a digitized copy of the record in the first place.

There is a wealth of resources available on the Internet about digital preservation. But if you do not take the time or make the effort to follow the recommended procedures, then you are wasting your time digitizing files or downloading them from the Internet.

The first important step in preserving your files is to identify the files you wish to preserve. I am sure that some of our computers would look like the proverbial hoarders' house if you could physically see inside. I have seen E-mail inboxes with thousands of files making it really hard to find and use the previously digitized file. Make sure the files you are saving for posterity will be useful to or valued by that posterity. I don't save documents and photos based on what I think my children will want someday, I make that decision based on years of genealogical research and the significance the files have to me.  I know I fall well into the category of genealogical hoarder, but if I find the record or document relevant, it is not going to be thrown away.

The next thing to consider is where the files are going to be stored and in what format? Stay tuned for the next installment.

A short note on Google+

On my Facebook account, it has taken about two years to get to my present level of "Friends." I must admit that I do not actively go out and solicit additional friends, I just wait for people to ask or invite only people I have some particular relationship with. Now, we come to Google+. Gone are the days of a slow growth in friends. With Google+ you get contacts every time you open the program. By concentrating on the genealogy community, I will shortly surpass the number of Facebook friends after only a couple of weeks of Google+.

Is this rapid growth good or bad? Time will tell. One thing I did find was to make sure anyone you add is really a potential member of your interest community. I had a "Notification" of someone who had added me as a member of their Circle and clicked to check it out. The first thing I noticed is that we had no contacts in common. I have not been adding anyone who did not share circles with someone I could identify as a member of the genealogical community. This particular "Invitation or Notification" turned out to be a highly objectionable spam site. OK, so Google+ has some (probably all) of the same issues as the rest of the Web. We need to be vigilant about being sucked into objectionable sites.

Despite this caveat, I think that Google+ could be another interesting tool to help support genealogy.