Lost and Found in the Library of Congress
By Kurt Luther In January 2020, John Banks posted on his Civil War blog a detailed examination of a glass negative in the Library of Congress (LOC) collection, titled, “Washington,
Category: Photo Sleuth
Why Photo Sleuths Do—and Don’t—Share With the Community
By Kurt Luther In these columns, I frequently emphasize the importance of community in Civil War photo sleuthing. Most of us benefit from the resources freely shared by other members
Evidence-Based Tips for Using Civil War Photo Sleuth
By Kurt Luther Photo sleuthing is, at its core, a process of elimination. We start with a mystery photo whose subject could be any of the three million soldiers who
Second Opinion
By Kurt Luther In my last column, I presented some initial facts and figures showing that Civil War Photo Sleuth (CWPS), our free website for identifying unknown soldiers in photos,
Civil War Photo Sleuth: An Update
By Kurt Luther Last August, we launched Civil War Photo Sleuth (CWPS), a free website that brings together community expertise and face recognition technology to identify unknown Civil War soldier
What to Do When Gold Standards Go Wrong
By Kurt Luther In photo sleuthing, most of us strive to set a high bar for what constitutes sufficiently strong evidence to identify an unknown soldier portrait. The gold standard
A New Era in Photo Sleuthing Begins
By Kurt Luther On Aug. 1, 2018, we celebrated the public launch of Civil War Photo Sleuth, a free website that we hope will forever change the face of Civil
Non-Traditional Research Tools—and Serendipity
By Kurt Luther Photo sleuthing fundamentally pieces together bits of evidence to build a theory. For especially tricky images, these pieces of the puzzle may come from a wide variety
Reverse Engineering an Image Macro
By Kurt Luther Most of the time, Civil War photo sleuthing feels like searching for a needle in vast haystacks of books, photo collections and websites. And, we’d be thrilled
What Are The Odds? Photo Sleuthing by the Numbers
By Kurt Luther One of the great strengths of the Civil War Photo Sleuth software we’re developing is that it makes it easy to find soldiers who look very much
