Story Archives of 'photography'

Since the pulp mill in Berlin closed several years ago, residents there have been trying to figure out what’s next for the City that Trees Built.

But Plymouth State University is working on a project that spotlights Berlin’s past.

At the turn of the last century, the Brown Company, which owned the mills hired photographers to document life in and around the city.

The PSU Project is making those thousands of photographs available online and asking for help in telling the pictures stories.

NHPR Correspondent Sean Hurley reports.

When you picture a stereotypical detective, it can be hard to shake the image of Sherlock Holmes clutching a big magnifying glass, looking for clues. But these days, if you’re out to solve a tricky crime, you may be better served with a laptop computer than the old-fashioned tools of the trade. Today on Word of Mouth, we meet two men whose detective work revolves around ones and zeroes.

Hany Farid is revolutionizing the field of digital image forensics – that’s the art of telling when a photograph has been faked. Modern technology is making it easier and easier for the average person to manipulate an image, and it’s getting harder and harder to detect the fakes. Hany’s job is to keep up with the technology and create tools that can separate the real from the phony. He’s professor and associate chair of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, and he has an article about his work in the June issue of Scientific American.

We also talk with Richard Mislan, assistant professor of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. He recently organized the first-ever Mobile Forensics World Conference in Chicago. It looked at the ways police can glean information from confiscated cell phones to help them solve crimes.

(Photo by József Sasvári)

The Library of Congress has posted about 3100 photos to the popular image-sharing website Flickr. Archivists hope the move will let them tap into the knowledge of the masses and help them identify some of the people and places in those old photos.

Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescott talks about this pilot project with Matt Raymond, Director of Communications at the Library of Congress, and David Weinberger, Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. David is the author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

Click here to check out the L.O.C.'s photos on Flickr.