Creating a Visual Language of Marks

This project uses the archives of 19th century Registers of Liberated Africans, art, design, data visualization, analytics and Machine Learning models to develop an interactive searchable visual database in the hopes of recovering African identities and life stories which the slave trade sought to erase...

Project website

Photograph of man with scarification marks and screenshot of machine learning prediction results

(left) A man shows tribal scars on his back in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, November 1919. Photograph by E. Torday, National Geographic - source: http:natgeofound.tumblr.com/ author: Photographes du National Geographic
(right) Screenshot of Language of Marks Machine Language model prediction results

Machine Learning models to recover African identities...