This feels like clickbaity story generation - cool new tech doing something many enjoy.... not enough tension... go and find a handful of grumpy people who don't concur
Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue -
If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today.
Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it."
Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
From the article...:
"That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
"For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
> Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought.
Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
I thought it was silly as well. But then I bought a copy of The Colour of Time [1]. I don't know why it makes a difference, but it definitely does (at least for me). Obviously, your mileage may vary.
But this is because of strange racial issues. Americans expect "Muslims" to all be uniformly brown (I remember circa 9/11 the slur "sand n#$%r" was common) , but Afghans and Iranians have whiter skin and often eyes that are not black. And then we decode that as "this is beauty and it's surprising that there is beauty among these people".
When all the images you see from a certain time period are captured in a certain way (black and white, in this case) then it's easy to imagine that this is also how the people at the time perceived it, which of course isn't the case at all.
I wouldn't call it "unrelatable" as such, but adding colour – even if not completely accurate – certainly gives me a better impression of how people at the time saw things, and it becomes more relatable.
Black and white can certainly be used for fantastic artistic intent in e.g. movies, by the way. But for these kind of historical records that's not what was going on; it was just a technological limitation at the time.
> Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.
This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.
> So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
Yeah, these quotes all seem like ad lapidem, just unsupported vague claims. I'm not even sure I agree people can be "closer" or "farther" from the past when looking at an image, it's a poetic way to look at the difference but not precise, and seems like it would evaporate if we tried to find any quantifiable measurable effects.
>> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.
> This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
Probably because the colorization can be misleading. With a B&W images, it's clear the color data is missing. With a colorized photo, a red building could be shown as blue or gray, and someone could leave with the false understanding the the building was really a different color than it actually was.
> This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
It increases factual distance and reduces emotional distance. When just "distance" is used, some people assume one, some people assume the other, and everyone values each differently.
I don't know what you mean by factual distance. Those buildings and people were definitely not black, white or gray. Now they've got a color which is (in most cases) much closer to the original. The original recording was probably also distorted in other ways as well.
You might say you're not looking at the (probably) only reliable source of information for that particular scene, but that's an entirely different proposition.
I can't believe they're shitting on "They shall not Grow Old". The whole point of it was to give an emotional and immersive experience of one of the worst wars humanity has seen to modern audiences. There can be other goals than absolute historial accuracy. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favorite books and not because it's the most exhaustive and accurate history of WW I.
Because a photograph is already a lossy simulation of some real situation. But then, even though we don't know what WW1 or Marilyn Monroe really looked like, we know what the artifacts look like. Upscaling is yet another level of simulation. What it says beyond the immediate impact is more about the early era of deep learning than it says about WW1. But it also entices us to mistake this Disneyland WW1 for something that's supposedly behind the original artifact (which did have some reference to the real battle). This is what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal.
> What information has this person added? What have they taken away?
That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was there originally and what was added through interpretation and extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's available in audio libraries mostly.
But it is not just the present-day processing of the material; as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them) had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.
It is unclear to me how viewing the originals, as opposed to these derived works, gives you any greater insight into the motives of those who made them.
The only corner-case I can think of is the erasure of obvious signs of faking, but that does not seem to be the issue that people are getting worked up over. Is anyone even wasting their effort on upscaling faked film?
I think it’s so strange to see all of the arguments saying “if this building is colored as gray instead of blue, then it is making it harder to understand the past”.
A layperson does not care about the exact color of a building or a jacket or a hat, and if it is really that important then it’s probably documented somewhere.
It might be important to historians and that is ok. But they are not the intended audience of these type of upscaled/colorized clips.
And even those 2 don't have any real arguments, just opinions. They really sound like they're trying to say something profound while they stroke their chin.
"Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."
It's just an opinion. I can say the complete opposite and the opinion sounds just as valid:
"Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it decreases the gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it removes differences."
This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep making them.
It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
Likewise, I've personally been in awe at some of the upscaled Nuclear testing footage that's cropped up on YouTube recently. It's literally awe-inspiring. So what if it's not 100% accurate?
I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there.
I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
> If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. (...) If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W.
So the colorized versions are a Fantasy, but the original b/w versions were already a Fantasy.
If we're looking at colorized feature films, everything is a fantasy of course. The cinematography used various colors to get the desired look on black and white film, in some cases to evoke various percieved colors with totally different colors.
When colorizing, sometimes they have color photos from the filming. You can try to match those, but that may not match the intent of the film. But you might not know the intent either, so you have to guess at that too. It might be easier to convince people to watch colorized films, but it's important to realize it's not really the same film.
There's a big difference between a colorized movie and historical film that's been colorized.
The movie represents a directors vision, and how it looked in B&W was part of that vision. I agree, they should not colorize old movies.
But historical films are in B&W because that's all they had, not because they wanted to depict it that way. I'm sure if the creators of those films had the option of 4K HDR, they would have used it.
The historical films also represent the directors' vision, as they had to choose the lens/film/exposure/processing to interpret the image and get their message across. 4K HDR would just gives them more knobs to tweak. A documentary has less control over what happens in front of the camera, but the whole workflow behind the camera is still completely under the directors' control.
This was my first thought as well. However, I can think of at least one possible disadvantage --
If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect there will be less desire for the original "source of truth" videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario: the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially manipulated to look better gets 100k.
Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future historians will only have our grossly-artificial reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
(but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent this)
If the "improved" version didn't exist, how many Youtube views would the original get? 110? 200? 1100? It sure wouldn't be 100,100. On what basis would you assert that 10 or 100 or 1000 people viewing the original was better than 100,000 viewing the enanced version?
And eventually the original gets lost? What it if eventually gets lost anyway, and we don't even have the enhanced version?
Historians fill in gaps from partial information about what happened in the past all the time. I see this as no different then recreating a scene based on an old video.
>Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
Yes but that super accurate account is worthless if the accounts never actually get told to someone who isn't a historian. It's somebody's job to take those accounts and present them to non-historians/muggles and they care very much that you feel connected to the past.
No, that's a cultural issue about the confusion between education and entertainment. If people aren't interested enough in actual history the solution is not to turn science into entertainment, it's to foster a genuine interest in actual science in the population.
Trying to turn everything into entertainment is a race to the bottom, because people will more and more demand that their scientific education is 'engaging'. That's actually how the history channel went from well, actual history to ancient aliens
This kind of purist attitude is so self-defeating in my opinion. The choices are "make history interesting/easily digestible/accessible" or "not have people care", unfortunately "make people care more about history" doesn't just happen. I'm sorry but I'm not motivated at all to pick through old/inaccessible texts trying to pull out some historical significance but I'll gladly watch a documentary/YT series/TV docuseries that does a good job of explaining events, painting a full picture, and puts events in context.
The type of approach you suggest feels like the arguments about how people should just learn the CLI or low-level computer operations. The "We shouldn't bother with GUI's", "it's not important that we expose functionality with pretty UI", or "if people cared they would learn the CLI and be happy about it".
Making history/art/computers/etc more accessible is not a bad thing.
We don't have to forbid AI-upscaling videos, we just have to maintain the proper awareness of what those actually are (entertainment) and are not (accurate history). That's what academic historians are speaking up about.
"Alter things to make them more popular" is fine in some contexts, but if everyone starts confusing that with the original study of factual knowledge... that's a huge problem.
It's also how we got Titanic, Hamilton, Saving Private Ryan, and the entire genre of Westerns. Ancient Aliens is very dumb, granted, is it so bad that it's worth discarding the entire idea of historical entertainment?
They can do whatever they want. It's a free country. But on day zero, they're on the same ground as the recolourizers. On day 365, they'll find that I'm willing to pay the recolourizer more. Because the utility of a historian to me is making me understand the past.
They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened. Or they may. Either way they are not in control. I am.
Interpreting the past is literally a subjective process. Previously we used a human neural net - famous for assuming relationships between individuals that do not exist and for denying ones that do.
In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence.
After all, knowledge that does not adjust my actions is worthless. So if there is truth somewhere that I cannot access and some less accurate information that is well accessible and which will move me closer to the truth then the latter is superior every time. I'll just multiply it appropriately with my prior probability on how accurate an ANN reconstruction can be.
"They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened."
You may have more understanding of something, but you have to be very careful to remember that it's not "what happened". Adding another layer of inaccuracies does not make something more accurate.
"In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence."
I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, if you do get an "artificial neural net" to do that, you might want to start worrying about what impressions it wants you to take away.
It’s just a machine. People have ulterior motives. Machines just do what you tell them to. People need to worry about their jobs, their ethnicities, their status. Machines don’t even care about replication. There is no silicon gene that drives them.
And as for what’s happened, it doesn’t matter that it’s less precise. Every piece of information only moves my belief tensor in some direction. It only has to move me in the direction of what’s happened and it’s already superior to an exact description of what’s happened that doesn’t move me in that direction at all.
You overvalue inaccessible truth. And you overestimate historians’ propensity to tell the truth. They have every incentive to lie. And they do. And it works because I suspect you value precision over accuracy. The net result is you have lies told to you by people with a vested interest in you believing a thing.
And I, I have a machine that I can make that makes mistakes. But you know what, you take your approach. I’ll take mine, we’ll see who wins in the marketplace of ideas.
If anything, I an overvaluing the error bars on what is knowable. And I know I will lose because the "market place of ideas" strongly prefers the certainty of a comfortable lie.
Good point about ancient aliens. I feel like that is the Walmart of science shows. But the same trend towards "edutainment" is also what brought us Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone who can be entertaining and didactic at the same time.
No, the Historian's job is to preserve and transmit. Then, it becomes the job of the writers and artists to connect us to that knowledge in a cultural and emotional way. Two very different jobs. Some individuals have the talents to do both, but they are discrete disciplines/jobs/roles.
> It's somebody's job to take those accounts and present them to non-historians/muggles and they care very much that you feel connected to the past.
Yep. That's the job of writers of popular history books and school history textbooks, which historians themselves sometimes write, and creators of historical entertainment such as novels, plays, movies, and TV shows.
Every field of study contributes to building a bridge: math and science the engineering, language the coordination of labor. History alone tells you why to build the bridge.
That video of NYC is breathtaking. I don't care in the slightest that the colors might technically be wrong. The emotional impact of feeling like I could actually be standing on that street is genuinely amazing.
Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
Yeah this article presents a really tiring argument. Learning should be boring! How dare you make it more exciting. These YouTubers don't claim to be some archivists for a national museum..
"...a better idea of what things really looked like..."
But that's the problem. Is it what things really looked like?
I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.
'“The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,” says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy.'
Why do these academics always want to complicate things and dictate how we feel? Nobody put them in charge!
'“There's something that's gained, but there's also something that's lost,” says Mark-FitzGerald. “And I think we need to have a conversation about what both of those things are.”'
I'm guessing that would be a pretty one-way 'conversation'.
Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. It's charming to think of them fooling around in the garden with new technology, 132 years ago this month.
They're not dictating anything. They're giving their opinion. Just as you are.
> Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage.
I mean, isn't that exactly the issue that the critics are pointing out? The algorithm is inserting something - the behaviour of people - into the source material that may not have been there. It may be biased towards falsely making the past look like the present because that's what the algorithm has been trained on.
"The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there."
I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.
So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic.
I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.
People didn't look like books either, and didn't look like pottery/statue fragments with the paint washed off, but historians aren't trying to ban that.
There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in live performance.
I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that.
I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white.
My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.
Remember, this footage was created using silent-era film equipment over a hundred years ago. Much of the footage used in the film is borderline unwatchable without the post-processing used: hand-crank cameras meant wildly variable framerate, volatile & unstable early film stock on the frontlines of a war exposed to smoke, dust, heat, cold and gas attacks, over/under-exposed footage caught in the heat of the moment, the list goes on. What I'm saying is, you'd probably complain a lot more if you saw the original footage, or you'd skip most of it as unwatchable in its original form.
Finally, there's an education factor at play. Young people deserve the best possible chance they can get to engage with their history, especially when it offers such a tremendously impactful lesson. And like it or not, I think 90% of people are going to be more engaged, not less, by well-curated, well-produced and respectful recreations of the past. Jackson recorded the SFX using original historical weapons, and colored uniforms using historical examples.
"However, it’s a bizarre sight that greets us, and not just because we lose the top and bottom of each frame. The effect is initially impressive, but that soon wanes. Almost every man has a creamy, peachy skin tone, and the grass in each shot is a warm, yellowy green. The sky is blue. If it weren’t for the daubs of bright red blood, and the bomb craters, this would risk being a unnaturally prettified image of war, with remarkably consistent scenery. These are really incredible images – so homogenising them in this way does them a disservice. It’s not easy either to dispel the thought that all these colours (as well as many of the sounds) are simply guesswork: the colour of hair, blankets, signs and wildflowers having been plucked out of the air." (https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-shall-...)
> Much of the footage used in the film is borderline unwatchable without the post-processing used
That's an interesting commentary on how much technology has advanced, and how we have become so desensitized to it. Consider that when silent films first started, the movie of a train coming right at the camera scared the audience so much that they ran out of the theatre to get out of the way of the train, IIRC.
I agree on your point regarding engaging audiences. Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk probably taught more people about WW2 than many classes or books.
The difference with moving pictures is that it comes with the implication of photo-realism, while other art forms are self-aware about being representative or expressive rather than being high fidelity simulacra.
Well, technically you're right, but I don't think the pigments in our skin made huge evolutionary advancements in ~100 years. I'd guess people were working more outdoors, but that's it.
So if you were to recolor a film you can take skin colors from today. But an advert, car color or fabric is incredibly difficult, even if you have the original, since the material will have degraded. Even if you repaint it with the original paint it will look different, since the paint will have changed, or if you use new paint the process to manufacture the paint (->led).
which skin colour is a question here as well. There are a lot of variations and I'm not sure that a black and white film is going to contain enough information for you to know. There's a danger of white-washing (or the reverse!) history by mistake.
I think the point is that you simply don’t know in a lot of these videos. They’re random bystanders, not known figures with photographic evidence. So you’re not going to know what to recolour it to, or if it’s even wrong in the first place.
A couple years ago I used deep learning to recolor some old family photos. The net I was using would do it's best guess first, then present a limited set of options for me to choose from when it didn't know what to do. In general, its first pass would immediately make human faces look correct, but leave everything else really desaturated.
I think some of it comes down to the fact that convnets are really good at recognizing human "shapes" (faces, silhouettes, etc) and also the valid color space for human skin tone is pretty constrained if the photo was well lit and you have the luminance value for a grayscale image.
The network was particularly bad at getting the colors of balloons in a picture. I don't know what the real colors were, but the network was trying to tell me 4 of the balloons in a picture were pale yellow and beige while one was a super saturated red.
Yes, and we have artifacts (I believe they're called antiques :-)) from that time too that tells us what color clothes were, signs, etc. So we should be able to do alright.
And being such artifacts the means used by historians to reconstruct the past, while they deny others the same rights to interpret it, is quite ironic.
> And being such artifacts the means used by historians to reconstruct the past, while they deny others the same rights to interpret it, is quite ironic.
Maybe that's because those others are more likely to do a bad job, because they lack the training to do a good one. Sort of like how sci-fi filmmakers have taught millions of people that you can hear explosions in space and that lasers make a "zap" sound.
But those artifacts have usually faded with time and exposure to the light, so even those don't show you what the colors actually looked like, unless they have been sealed away from light exposure all this time.
Often you can find a bit of the paint in an overspray area that was covered by some other piece that is well preserved, even if the original paint is totally lost. Start taking off bolts and look at the flecks of paint stuck to the underside of the bolt.
Also, we still have the techniques and materials used to make old paints. New batches can be whipped up (assuming they aren't too toxic) for comparison. Lead based paints obviously are more problematic, but modern technology is really good at replicating paint colors.
You've seen though where a fabric covered couch, color faded over time, will reveal its original color when you roll back the cording covering the zipper or whatever. But I get your point.
I don't mind the colorizations, but to give you some additional ammo for your argument, check out the TV show "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family". If you're not familiar, they're supposed to live in creepy dark houses, and in black and white, the houses do indeed look dark and creepy.
But in reality, those sets were bright pastels. Actual dark walls and floors didn't show up well on film. Which makes me wonder how right we are with some of our other colorizations.
You can google [what did the munsters set actually look like] to get some great examples.
For additional additional ammo look at Star Trek (TOS). A lot of the campy bright colors weren't used to make it look campy but to show up equally well on black and white and color TVs. By using brightly colored uniforms it was obvious even on a B&W TV that Kirk, Spock, and ensign C. Fodder were different and one wasn't coming back from the away mission.
Another point is that displays can never provide real color representation anyway.
The process flow goes from converting the full spectrum lights in nature into color filtered photons captured on a camera sensor with an artificial color profile, it's own resolution and pixel arrangement, and its own lens specifics, then converted to another limited color palette with another artificial color profile and it's own resolution and pixel arrangement that is the display, in order to simulate the colors of nature as detected by yet another set of filtered detectors with it's own color profile, resolution, neuron arrangement, and lens specifics that is the human eye. There is already no such thing as objective truth when it comes to photography, every step involves heavy interpretation.
One of the most eye opening videos for me was that sky train that ran through a city. Germany I think? Such high quality I could really begin to feel what that era was like in some ways.
This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.
AI sometimes adds things which were not present in the original scene. For example some upscaling algorithms love to draw tiny glasses. While I don’t see much harm in making some scenes more fun for people, it’s important to keep original sources, because they are ultimate truth, not algorithm outputs. And there’s danger that some people will destroy originals thinking that they are inferior.
I don't think so. I think eventually we would have an ensemble of restorations with different flairs, like how people see movies based on history almost
Take the original Star Trek. Its color scheme is 'iconic' now but at the time most people watched it in black and white. They specifically picked those colors to look decent on the semi new color TV's but just as importantly to not smear out into the background on black and white TV's. Gilligans island was similar.
These academics seem to think they have some ownership of history because they study it. And it seems they’d rather historical content rot in an irrelevant pile than be accessible. All of this with an argument that “something” is lost by upscaling, without any real elaboration as to what is actually lost.
My cynical take is that these historians’ objections stem from jealousy: they lack the ability or means to create these restorations, and are thus envious that the upscaled versions are receiving more attention than the originals ever did.
My cynical take is that there are no historians saying that we shouldn't upscale images. There are historians who are warning that lots of the information in the upscaled images are ahistorical (blue jeans in the 1910s) so people should view this images as interesting but not accurate views of history. The journalist is the only one saying anyone should stop anything. None of the historians in the article ever say the youtubers should stop. They're just saying pretty much: "Hey, history cares about the context and accuracy of sources and these images are worse sources than the originals, they're good entertainment but bad historical sources". Pump it through a journalist and this is what you get. It's at this point I make some ironic point about how the journalist is using his neural net to upscale the story, inserting innaccurate information to the picture to create a more entertaining piece than the underlying facts.
This is the first time I am seeing these remarkable videos. I cannot tell you why, but I am feeling awfully emotional while watching them. It cannot be nostalgia, as I wasn't there during the recordings of these videos, so I'm not sure what it could be.
This along with the ‘wandering’ videos are seemingly getting popular on youtube. Eg nippon wandering tv, rambalac. These colorized + hd historical videos are super fascinating. Love how AI has been the driving force for towards creating these
It's the artifice of presentation that gets me. The color's not real, the filled in scratches aren't real, and once upon a time a photographer sat and composed the shot in the first place. It's an artist illustration of history. Which is fine, those are important to have. But it's too easy to forget that it's not reality.
As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.
It might not be to everyone’s taste but it’s impressive work.
Why do these particular academic historians not trust people to understand the limitations of this? To me this is not dissimilar from translating a book from an ancient language - there are problems of bias and so on, but why not make good things a little more accessible? Nothing wrong with something that sparks the imagination.
There are shades of green, brown, red, but not exactly and it doesn't stick or stay, just the way I remember colors in dreams. They are colorful, but I can not exactly recall vividly.
You can find this phenomenon of self-appointed protectors of values everywhere: the clergy, rap purists, rustaceans, Apple users... in their echo chambers they are always right and only they know how things should be done. If you somehow have the misfortune of treading upon their proverbial holy turf and doing something they consider against their teachings... boy will they get pissed. Especially if you make their world more understandable to those not in the know, then you're immediately a problem.
This sounds like just another form of gatekeeping.
So what is the state of the art in auto upscaling and detail re- imagining? There's a lot of 240p VHS transfer music videos on youtube I'd like to see less bad versions of without regards to accuracy.
This is a manufactured controversy. There's always some people opposed to anything. It's a non-story to moderate something that is just far too awesome: a portal into the past.
As an avid reader of history, I tried hard to understand the points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do.
A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.
Note: My opinion is that I am neutral/do not like or dislike historical media, I am not a historian, but I do dislike those awful Twitter spammers that steal random "historical image of the day", often with a completely wrong caption, stolen content, no sourcing, and then post affiliate links all over them. I have previously done professional work with ML/AI.
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I can kind of understand this if it was made very obvious that it was "AI generated"; that is, the colours are totally invented and made out of thin air, that spaces might be filled in with random computer generated content to support upscaling and make it look better.
I don't want a machine-generated random filler content to be repurposed for "oh, here is a source video for the skin colour of specific people back in the day" or "you see those marks in the corner (that didn't exist in the original source), those are hieroglyphs"
AI does not mean you magically get colour restored to an image that did not have any in the first place, it is invented, machine created content that potentially has absolutely zero bearing on the real world.
Additionally, stuff like this ends up ranking higher than the original source content; preference is given to HD+ videos in search, "viral cool colourised version of the past" on instagram will rank higher than "actual history"; it is potentially a large problem when you have people that don't actually know how to separate genuine primary source vs computer generated content.
A very old rule of thumb that I learned at one of my first jobs: "Never give anyone more than two significant digits. Never give a manager more than one."
By reading historical accounts of what colors different things were.
If you give people black-and-white film to watch, people are guess the colors that are there based on what they are familiar with anyway, so this has a chance to be more historically accurate than that.
Consider the film "They Shall Not Grow Old" in which WW1 footage was painstakingly restored and colorized. They went and found old uniforms and weapons to check the colors. They went to the present-day locations to check the colors of the grass and trees. Etc.
Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history.
Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
(Well, I should say it's not history of Hamilton's time. It will be studied as an important part of the history of our time.)
The folks running these upscaling operations understand the concerns:
> Antic and Kelley aren’t under any illusions that images treated by DeOldify will come out historically accurate, though their reservations are with the practicalities of training a neural network. Making sure colourised films are accurate is “a literally impossible problem,” Antic says. DeOldify uses modern images to train its AI on, he explains, “and we know that's a big weakness, because, amongst other things, it biases people to wearing blue jeans.”
The challenge is, once they create one of these films and post it for the public, the implications and effects are out of their hands.
You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (i.e. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and compare it to any actual museum or historical society's website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference.
On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is. Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image: https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/
They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and likes to spam with later.
Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.
This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into thinking that those records are faithful recreations of color and sound. But without those obvious markers, people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in these modified records pretends to be real in a way that the originals do not.
I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous.
It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in reaction to one of the videos earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369
I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it.
Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly?
By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.
The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses.
I think you make a very important point. I watched lots of silent movies as well as historical footage growing up, and the jerky motion and slow frame rates gave them a cartoonish quality that I still find artistically endearing but which makes history less real to the viewer. For historical figures one admires, it confers a sort of mythic aura, and for ones you don't it makes them seem clownish or misshapen. This impacts written history too, where it's already hard to separate our posterior knowledge of how things turned out from the historical figures of whom we have a visually distorted mental image.
I watched a historical series on WW2 where the imagery was colorized and somewhat stabilized/cleaned up a year or so ago and was struck by the different perspective it offered without all the 'emotional blurring' that occurs due to the technical limitations of the time. It was much easier to relate to events, both good and bad, through a 'happening now' frame of reference that would have been closer to what people experienced at the time, when newsreel footage offered immediacy and accuracy that was new and modern.
No doubt in the future there will be debates over whether HD and 4k footage of today and the recent past should be given the full VR treatment, allowing people to experience current events from the point of view of the participants and so forth.
Perhaps the Academic Historians are critical because enhanced and colorized documents make the past more understandable to lay people and reduce the need for the Academic Historian to define the historical context compared to looking at the world through a dirty, scratched up, black and white windshield.
I've always had the thought that religious texts should be updated with modern prose and sensibilities. Not for the believers of the religion, but for the non-believers. People are not incentivized to slog through some text that was written centuries ago, using phrasings that they've hardly ever encountered. But if a modern twist was put on it, perhaps it would be better accepted as a good yarn by the general population, and widen the readership.
> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history.
No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the dominant historical narrative that they themselves have created.
> "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate" than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is fiction created by historians affected by their own biases. History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science.
> That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There are facts and then there is history ( which is what is colored in between the facts by historians ).
There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all fiction.
As a note, if you are going to go all post-modern, you should go all the way. Inconsistency is bad.
"History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science."
Science is interpretation. Scientists are concerned about maintaining their dominant narrative. "Facts" are very scarce on the ground. (I'm willing to act as if Mumbai exists, but I have no personal experience of it and therefore no positive reason to believe it does.)
In more serious terms, a good academic historian will point to evidence as a way to explain why they want you to believe some statement, and---because they recognize the perils of what they're doing---many of them will complain about potentially misleading modifications to that evidence.
I doubt those youtube historians could possibly do more damage to false history lessons, than all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies.
And the youtube historians I have seen, were very good. So mostly on the right side in battle to truth (dramatically speaking) and mostly not on the side of cheap effects for drama, or even intentional misleading for political reasons.
(seriously, there is nothing wrong with historic fiction - but it disturbs me deeply that a) most movies/books are not labeld that way, even if they should and b) even if it is labeled, most people probably do not notice)
Most expensive "historical" movies are wrong too. Otherwise I totally agree with you. I just don't think how much a movie cost to make matters much with regards to historical accuracy.
>all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies
There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust, where a recurring feature is completely historically inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").
If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform, or a different country's uniform, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're in a different branch of the military.
If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had.
If you've got a photo of a famous scientist or war hero who had a Mediterranean complexion and you colourise them with more of a pale complexion, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're a different race.
(Of course, these sorts of accessibility-accuracy trade-offs aren't unique to colourising photos - they also apply to everything from translations of historical documents, through illustrations and selecting what content makes it into books, to questionably accurate history facts shared on social media)
You may have missed one more part. When you see a black and white picture, you assume that the black, gray and white are not real. When you see color, it biases your brain to think the color may be close to correct.
> If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had.
But what about the opposite? What if a B&W photo shows someone with white hair, but his hair was blonde. Now the colorized photo is more accurate than the B&W photo. I just don't think you can claim B&W is more accurate absolutely.
> If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform
Do you understand that the typical consumer of this media cannot tell the difference between air force, and army uniforms from 100 years ago? Get people interested in history, then worry about the little details like the color of someone's hair or uniform.
Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world. Most people's knowledge of history is abysmal. History is boring, as it is taught in schools today.
Normally I think you're right about these things, but between the ivory tower comment, and the sentence after, I think there's an implied argument that's pretty relevant to the situation.
That argument being that the academic approach hasn't lead to people having a more accurate image of history. It has scared them off and resulted in most of them having almost no knowledge of history. The approach doesn't seem to lead to it's intended goal.
The comment was perhaps made a bit crassly, but I think it's something worth considering.
>Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
That's such an arrière-garde cause. It doesn't take too much time nor too much effort for any self-examining historian to understand that you can't create a "right impression" of history at the level of the general public. It will always be partial, truncated, falsified. Your cherry-picked period is misunderstood by the general public ? Too bad, that's part of the job. The best you can hope is making somebody interested enough that someday they'll have to reflex on historiography, philology and epistemology.
I think the purpose of colarization of a video is same as mimicking a drawing in ruin that lost its paint. It is an interpretation of history from current time. If historian find the color is not represent the event accurately, it can be changed anyway, just like a painting.
I keep thinking about dinosaurs in this context. How do we know how dinosaurs looked like? All we have are some scattered fossilized bones (and footprints) found in a layer of sediment, which experts have carefully (and perhaps wrongly) puzzled together.
Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or a 3D rendering of these guesses?
I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth.
I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably be even worse if experts wouldn’t paint their best guess at the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to recreate it for the population.
I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today.
But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real.
Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u
I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover.
I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.
> I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today.
It's possible to see recreations of extinct animals that humans have overlapped with enough to write and draw how they looked. It's even possible to see real specimens of extinct creations, such as the Oxford Dodo
https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo
You don't need much more knowledge, but definitely more than "they don't exist today". But equally with colourised photos/video: you don't need more knowledge than "this was filmed before it was possible to film in colour, so all colours are guesses".
Nit: We have some very good fossils of dinosaurs that have preserved skin, coloration, feathers, and even gut contents. It's not just bones anymore. PBS Eons had a good one on a recent-ish find:
I was hoping someone would bring up PBS Eons, such a lovely series. In fact I was thinking about An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs when writing this comment.
But they're not altering primary documents, any more than someone who writes a new history of some well-covered topic is trying to destroy all other commentary on the period, or artist's renditions of what ancient societies looked like are an attack on archaeologists, or new translations of works in other languages are meant to prevent people from learning those languages.
The original films were not altered in any way. They still exist and were not destroyed or compromised by the process. They can still be studied by historians while others are free to enjoy the colorized versions.
In fact I think we might even need more of these. How many people imagine ancient Roman architecture with white columns and white statues, when in fact there is evidence those were painted in varied colors. Without tools to aid our imagination we have effectively bleached ancient Rome.
I visited the Vasa museum in Stockholm a few years back. The Vasa is an amazingly preserved shipwreck from the 1600s. There ship is mostly original and looks like bare brown wood like everyone imagines a shipwreck to look like.
However, they have a model and reproductions of parts of the ship showing how they were brilliantly painted. The tour guide made clear that the aesthetic beauty and conspicuous consumption on display was as much a part of the kings arsenal as the cannons. It really changed the way i looked on the past.
Perhaps it's because of loss of control? Previously one may have relied on an academic's interpretation via interview and now the upscaled video becomes the more compelling medium.
You can't really know history without paying tens of thousands of dollars to a university -- and it has to be a university that pays big salaries to professors too. Not one of those cheap ones. Then the professors will say that you've really learned something.
Think of it as translation. Should you read Dante in his original medieval Italian or in a modern English translation? Yes. But if you want to understand and make strong arguments about Dante, you'll probably have to dig out the Italian.
Or, alternatively, back in the day there were these shows called "situation comedies" or sitcoms. One of them was "Three's Company." Many of the stories of the episodes of Three's Company were taken more or less directly from Shakespeare's comedies. Is it elitism to suggest that seeing a production of Shakespeare's plays is a better way of connecting with what he was trying to say than watching a '70s sitcom?
Fair enough, but then the argument of these historians is basically equivalent to "There shouldn't be an english translation of Dante". Which I think is still a bit silly.
The play is pretending to be a Shakespeare production when it isn't, and will give people unrealistic views on the history, whereas the sitcom won't do that
it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do
I think there's a very similar pattern in tech with developers who hack on apps in 'proper languages' like Rust and C++ dunking on developers who write JavaScript or PHP because those aren't seen as 'true development' because they make things 'too easy'.
<...> I tried hard to understand the points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do.'
With respect, historians who are involved with archiving aren't grinding these historical points fine because they're 'rooted in elitism'. Even if some are elitist (some people are), that's not what the profession of archiving is all about. Snowwrestler before me aptly sums the matter up. I'd also offer the following comments but I tackle some of the reasons why archivists do what they do from a more technical perspective.
Archiving is a very complex business, especially so if historical context is to be preserved with fidelity. Moreover, as we've seen from both the article and these posts, that historical 'fidelity' is defined or set by the different contexts in which the archive material is used. Simply, people will use archived material in many different ways according to their individual requirements; furthermore, one's requirement will also likely vary depending on one's circumstances or surroundings. (For instance, a curator will likely require the highest quality of reproduction for a museum exhibit and a lower one on his/her smartphone.)
Here, I'll mainly confine myself to archived images as per the article, however these issues could also involve paintings and other works of art, and even objects (have you noticed how the value of a rare coin dramatically decreases in value if you are silly enough to remove its patina?)
Back to images: Ideally, for preservation, we'd like to replicate an image perfectly and end up with an identical clone—and the only way to do that is copy the whole physical object molecule-for-molecule. Clearly, this is impossible, so what’s next?
The limits of current technology means that essentially we are limited to capturing a planar reproduction of the image by photographing or scanning it from directly above or by projecting light through it onto some recording medium. So what are the criteria for doing this, that is if we wish to copy every trace or single bit of information from said image?
1. First we have to acknowledge that even if we were able to record every bit of information that's available from this planar view/projection (which is very unlikely), that it is not all the information that comes with the image. Being a physical object, it has thickness; it has a photographic emulsion; its emulsion is chemical and we may wish to know how it was made. Is the emulsion only blue sensitive, say a collodion emulsion, or is it new enough to be either orthochromatic or even panchromatic? What is its physical condition, has it been damaged, or scratched, or has it been repaired, and how was it stored, .etc (as that extra (metadata) information tells us a great deal more about the image and its history than just the image itself)? Clearly, those who require this ancillary physical information are likely to be different people to say casual YouTube viewers—this is an important difference.
2. Incidentally, archivists are also concerned not just the intrinsic nature of the image itself but also aspects about the way it was viewed, its environment, etc. For example, did the original film stock have a tint or was it completely neutral? Has the film changed in color since the print was made, does it now have sepia tint? When film was first viewed, what was the brightness and color temperature of typical projector lamps of the period? This information is important as it will influence how we end up viewing the film today,
3. To capture every detail of the image requires some very stringent requirements and often it's not possible to meet them. If we attempt to capture every detail to the point that the law of diminishing returns has determined it's not worthwhile g...
I strongly disagree with these historians, for historical reasons. Our limited recordings of the recent past make it hard for us to understand that it wasn’t that long ago and things weren’t that and people weren’t that different. By 1911, the railroad I used to get to from Westchester NY to Manhattan was already electrified, thanks to an investment from JP Morgan, where my brother works today. By 1910 the subway line running down Lexington Ave I’d take all the time had already been built. So had the Grand Central Post Office, on top of which the office building I used to work at was later built. By 1910, all of Manhattan had been electrified for decades, and you had electric refrigerators and curling irons and stoves. By 1910, vaccines had been developed and the first antibiotics were coming out.
It’s important not to forget how close in time we are to history. Imagine if, instead of always seeing black and white pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., people saw him in 4K color. Maybe they’d remember he was shot for his civil rights activism when Bill Gates was already a teenager, just a couple of heads before Unix and C.
So people are 'enhancing' videos and photos. Just like we've been doing for decades. Only the process was manual and labor-intensive. And usually NOT performed by historians.
As long as we don't destroy the originals, I can't see why there's even a debate. Every medium captures an interpretation of reality, they are not reality itself.
The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned. The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just approximation
Photographers and filmmakers also make art in their own style. There is no such thing as a perfect representation of the world on film: they are compressing the dynamic range and adjusting the color/brightness profiles through the film they use, the exposure settings and any added filters on the camera, the development process for the film (chemicals, timing, pushing/pulling), the paper for the print (photography) or the film for the positive print (movies), the dodging/burning of the print, and others.
It's not about correcting the image to match what their eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get their message across.
I totally in no way meant to imply that camerawork has somehow less artistic value than any other medium, but just as pencil and paper can be used to produce technical drawings of architecture and field sketches to outline geography, documentary footage can be recorded with the primary intent of capturing a scene and setting before rendering a creative work.
I believe gridlockd's point was that the colorization and interpolation applied to these films and photos is a modification to and a stylistic choice about a representation of the state of the world, in the same way Van Gogh's skies are modifications and stylistic choices about the skies he saw.
It's not even so much about stylistic choice but about the historicity of it. Van Gogh belongs to an era in art history. If you chose to paint in this style today it would have a different meaning, even if it looked the same.
The way these photographs look is as much part of history as what they portray - whether intentional or not. These enhancement processes will remove that part.
Intent isn't necessarily the significant part of a historical artifact, but even then: The way these photos look is part of the state of the world at the time. The way they aged is part of history.
What does it mean for something to be "old"? What does it mean for something to be "well-preserved through time"? All of this is information that may not be significant to you, but it may be significant to a historian and their audience.
An artist is executing a vision with the tools available. The final product is what they intended. And sometimes not (see how George Lucas kept updating Star Wars as new tech came out to match his vision).
But for historical documents, the creators are usually hamstrung by technology, not embracing it. If they could have had 4K HDR, I'm sure they would have.
Van Gogh would still use oil on canvas to execute his vision.
The historical films also represent the directors' vision, as they had to choose the lens/film/exposure/processing to interpret the image and get their message across. 4K HDR would just gives them more knobs to tweak. A documentary has less control over what happens in front of the camera, but the whole workflow behind the camera is still completely under the directors' control.
With regards to Van Gogh, seeing how he likes to make his paintings three dimensional (if you ever had a chance to see his paintings in person) in additional to his sculptural works, I wouldn't be surprised if he became a 3D graphics or VR artist had he lived in modern times.
The source material doesn't lie to you, though. The black and white you see is the true brightness of the scene, without any fake colours dreamed up by a neural network. Your mind is free to fill in the details itself without having someone else's guess at them imposed on it.
It is like the difference between a film adaptation of a text and the original text. If you see the film first, it will permanently colour your reading of the text, taking away from you the opportunity to draw your own meanings from a blank slate.
Hold on -- every capture of reality, whether it's a 100-year-old black and white video camera or a modern day 3d video -- "lies" to you. There is no such thing as an objective capture of reality. Media is inherently representative, from the limitations of the medium itself to the biases of the recorder in what they choose to focus on and what they choose to not film. Hell, even our own eyes lie to us frequently.
It's not that the source material is accurate, it's that our knowledge is based on the source material, so the limits of the source material make clear the limits of our knowledge.
It's kind of like the concept of "significant digits" in science. If your experimental apparatus can only measure a value with precision plus or minus one tenth, it's inappropriate to report your results with digits out the thousandths. Doing so would make it seem more precise to the reader, but the additional precision is an illusion.
In much the same way, using software in 2020 to guess what things "really looked like" can give viewers a false impression of how much we actually know about what things really looked like.
Wouldn't the same logic apply to someone drawing or painting a historical event based on written source material?
I find it hard to believe these academics would criticize Paul Philippoteaux for the Gettysburg Cyclorama despite it going far beyond the limits of the source material.
Are you saying that we should only display dinosaur bones and never draw illustrations of what the dinosaurs actually looked like, because it might fool someone into thinking we know more than we actually do?
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadIf more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today.
Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it."
Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
From the article...:
"That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
"For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
[1] https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-histo...
You'll immediately will understand how your senses help "add" thought, context, feelings, emotion behind it.
It can be anything, a road w/ houses, a car, a portrait of a person at a famous sight.
That. That's the sentiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Girl
I wouldn't call it "unrelatable" as such, but adding colour – even if not completely accurate – certainly gives me a better impression of how people at the time saw things, and it becomes more relatable.
Black and white can certainly be used for fantastic artistic intent in e.g. movies, by the way. But for these kind of historical records that's not what was going on; it was just a technological limitation at the time.
http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-8900-ex :)
This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.
Yeah, these quotes all seem like ad lapidem, just unsupported vague claims. I'm not even sure I agree people can be "closer" or "farther" from the past when looking at an image, it's a poetic way to look at the difference but not precise, and seems like it would evaporate if we tried to find any quantifiable measurable effects.
> This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
Probably because the colorization can be misleading. With a B&W images, it's clear the color data is missing. With a colorized photo, a red building could be shown as blue or gray, and someone could leave with the false understanding the the building was really a different color than it actually was.
It increases factual distance and reduces emotional distance. When just "distance" is used, some people assume one, some people assume the other, and everyone values each differently.
You might say you're not looking at the (probably) only reliable source of information for that particular scene, but that's an entirely different proposition.
That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was there originally and what was added through interpretation and extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's available in audio libraries mostly.
But it is not just the present-day processing of the material; as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them) had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.
The only corner-case I can think of is the erasure of obvious signs of faking, but that does not seem to be the issue that people are getting worked up over. Is anyone even wasting their effort on upscaling faked film?
A layperson does not care about the exact color of a building or a jacket or a hat, and if it is really that important then it’s probably documented somewhere.
It might be important to historians and that is ok. But they are not the intended audience of these type of upscaled/colorized clips.
And viewing old film at the wrong speed is the opposite of an authentic experience.
It isn't.
1) historians have no power over random people colorizing, upscaling and frame interpolating some old videos for fun
2) it's not "historians", it's actually a tiny minority of vocal historians who want this to be a problem
"Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."
It's just an opinion. I can say the complete opposite and the opinion sounds just as valid:
"Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it decreases the gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it removes differences."
It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
So the colorized versions are a Fantasy, but the original b/w versions were already a Fantasy.
When colorizing, sometimes they have color photos from the filming. You can try to match those, but that may not match the intent of the film. But you might not know the intent either, so you have to guess at that too. It might be easier to convince people to watch colorized films, but it's important to realize it's not really the same film.
The movie represents a directors vision, and how it looked in B&W was part of that vision. I agree, they should not colorize old movies.
But historical films are in B&W because that's all they had, not because they wanted to depict it that way. I'm sure if the creators of those films had the option of 4K HDR, they would have used it.
If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect there will be less desire for the original "source of truth" videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario: the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially manipulated to look better gets 100k.
Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future historians will only have our grossly-artificial reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
(but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent this)
If the "improved" version didn't exist, how many Youtube views would the original get? 110? 200? 1100? It sure wouldn't be 100,100. On what basis would you assert that 10 or 100 or 1000 people viewing the original was better than 100,000 viewing the enanced version?
And eventually the original gets lost? What it if eventually gets lost anyway, and we don't even have the enhanced version?
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
Trying to turn everything into entertainment is a race to the bottom, because people will more and more demand that their scientific education is 'engaging'. That's actually how the history channel went from well, actual history to ancient aliens
The type of approach you suggest feels like the arguments about how people should just learn the CLI or low-level computer operations. The "We shouldn't bother with GUI's", "it's not important that we expose functionality with pretty UI", or "if people cared they would learn the CLI and be happy about it".
Making history/art/computers/etc more accessible is not a bad thing.
"Alter things to make them more popular" is fine in some contexts, but if everyone starts confusing that with the original study of factual knowledge... that's a huge problem.
There is a balance that can found that drives engagement from the public that fuels that historical work needed to be done.
They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened. Or they may. Either way they are not in control. I am.
Interpreting the past is literally a subjective process. Previously we used a human neural net - famous for assuming relationships between individuals that do not exist and for denying ones that do.
In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence.
After all, knowledge that does not adjust my actions is worthless. So if there is truth somewhere that I cannot access and some less accurate information that is well accessible and which will move me closer to the truth then the latter is superior every time. I'll just multiply it appropriately with my prior probability on how accurate an ANN reconstruction can be.
You may have more understanding of something, but you have to be very careful to remember that it's not "what happened". Adding another layer of inaccuracies does not make something more accurate.
"In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence."
I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, if you do get an "artificial neural net" to do that, you might want to start worrying about what impressions it wants you to take away.
And as for what’s happened, it doesn’t matter that it’s less precise. Every piece of information only moves my belief tensor in some direction. It only has to move me in the direction of what’s happened and it’s already superior to an exact description of what’s happened that doesn’t move me in that direction at all.
You overvalue inaccessible truth. And you overestimate historians’ propensity to tell the truth. They have every incentive to lie. And they do. And it works because I suspect you value precision over accuracy. The net result is you have lies told to you by people with a vested interest in you believing a thing.
And I, I have a machine that I can make that makes mistakes. But you know what, you take your approach. I’ll take mine, we’ll see who wins in the marketplace of ideas.
Yep. That's the job of writers of popular history books and school history textbooks, which historians themselves sometimes write, and creators of historical entertainment such as novels, plays, movies, and TV shows.
Make your choice historians.
Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
10/10 best possible ad for these services.
It's not, though. It's a great way to get an idea of what a few people today think things looked like.
Enjoying the videos is fine, but it's not great to think they are more accurate just because they look better.
But that's the problem. Is it what things really looked like?
I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.
Why do these academics always want to complicate things and dictate how we feel? Nobody put them in charge!
'“There's something that's gained, but there's also something that's lost,” says Mark-FitzGerald. “And I think we need to have a conversation about what both of those things are.”'
I'm guessing that would be a pretty one-way 'conversation'.
Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. It's charming to think of them fooling around in the garden with new technology, 132 years ago this month.
I'm not sure how they envisage such a "conversation" (whatever that means in this context) taking place.
> Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage.
I mean, isn't that exactly the issue that the critics are pointing out? The algorithm is inserting something - the behaviour of people - into the source material that may not have been there. It may be biased towards falsely making the past look like the present because that's what the algorithm has been trained on.
Yes you can argue that the colorized version is not a historical document. Does it matter? Neither is a movie about history.
I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.
So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic.
I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.
There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in live performance.
I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white.
My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.
Finally, there's an education factor at play. Young people deserve the best possible chance they can get to engage with their history, especially when it offers such a tremendously impactful lesson. And like it or not, I think 90% of people are going to be more engaged, not less, by well-curated, well-produced and respectful recreations of the past. Jackson recorded the SFX using original historical weapons, and colored uniforms using historical examples.
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/re...
One criticism:
"However, it’s a bizarre sight that greets us, and not just because we lose the top and bottom of each frame. The effect is initially impressive, but that soon wanes. Almost every man has a creamy, peachy skin tone, and the grass in each shot is a warm, yellowy green. The sky is blue. If it weren’t for the daubs of bright red blood, and the bomb craters, this would risk being a unnaturally prettified image of war, with remarkably consistent scenery. These are really incredible images – so homogenising them in this way does them a disservice. It’s not easy either to dispel the thought that all these colours (as well as many of the sounds) are simply guesswork: the colour of hair, blankets, signs and wildflowers having been plucked out of the air." (https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-shall-...)
That's an interesting commentary on how much technology has advanced, and how we have become so desensitized to it. Consider that when silent films first started, the movie of a train coming right at the camera scared the audience so much that they ran out of the theatre to get out of the way of the train, IIRC.
I agree on your point regarding engaging audiences. Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk probably taught more people about WW2 than many classes or books.
Um, do we really?
So if you were to recolor a film you can take skin colors from today. But an advert, car color or fabric is incredibly difficult, even if you have the original, since the material will have degraded. Even if you repaint it with the original paint it will look different, since the paint will have changed, or if you use new paint the process to manufacture the paint (->led).
It might as well be another universe.
Unless there's also a way to accurately extract the specific hue, you will never get anything accurate.
Anyone that ever wore foundation can tell you that human skin has tones, undertones, different reflective qualities, etc.
Just look at https://www.temptalia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/summer-... or https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0009/0000/5932/files/Shade... or this https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_zp3U1XAAAk4Iz?format=jpg&name=...
I think some of it comes down to the fact that convnets are really good at recognizing human "shapes" (faces, silhouettes, etc) and also the valid color space for human skin tone is pretty constrained if the photo was well lit and you have the luminance value for a grayscale image.
The network was particularly bad at getting the colors of balloons in a picture. I don't know what the real colors were, but the network was trying to tell me 4 of the balloons in a picture were pale yellow and beige while one was a super saturated red.
Maybe that's because those others are more likely to do a bad job, because they lack the training to do a good one. Sort of like how sci-fi filmmakers have taught millions of people that you can hear explosions in space and that lasers make a "zap" sound.
BTW, if you want to support some folks that actually try to get it right, check out the expanse.
Also, we still have the techniques and materials used to make old paints. New batches can be whipped up (assuming they aren't too toxic) for comparison. Lead based paints obviously are more problematic, but modern technology is really good at replicating paint colors.
https://www.c82.net/werner/
eg, this blue:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/natures-colours-page-paint.ht...But in reality, those sets were bright pastels. Actual dark walls and floors didn't show up well on film. Which makes me wonder how right we are with some of our other colorizations.
You can google [what did the munsters set actually look like] to get some great examples.
https://gbmedia.azureedge.net/aza/user/gear/1961-gibson-les-...
Actual white guitars would look like blown-out blobs on black and white TV. TV Yellow would "look" white on TV.
Most notably the work of Russian chemist Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who took absolutely stunning color photos around 1910.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%...
The process flow goes from converting the full spectrum lights in nature into color filtered photons captured on a camera sensor with an artificial color profile, it's own resolution and pixel arrangement, and its own lens specifics, then converted to another limited color palette with another artificial color profile and it's own resolution and pixel arrangement that is the display, in order to simulate the colors of nature as detected by yet another set of filtered detectors with it's own color profile, resolution, neuron arrangement, and lens specifics that is the human eye. There is already no such thing as objective truth when it comes to photography, every step involves heavy interpretation.
This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg
Erm, not reconstruction ;-)
Take the original Star Trek. Its color scheme is 'iconic' now but at the time most people watched it in black and white. They specifically picked those colors to look decent on the semi new color TV's but just as importantly to not smear out into the background on black and white TV's. Gilligans island was similar.
As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.
Why do these particular academic historians not trust people to understand the limitations of this? To me this is not dissimilar from translating a book from an ancient language - there are problems of bias and so on, but why not make good things a little more accessible? Nothing wrong with something that sparks the imagination.
This sounds like just another form of gatekeeping.
Original: http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%252...
A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.
--
I can kind of understand this if it was made very obvious that it was "AI generated"; that is, the colours are totally invented and made out of thin air, that spaces might be filled in with random computer generated content to support upscaling and make it look better.
I don't want a machine-generated random filler content to be repurposed for "oh, here is a source video for the skin colour of specific people back in the day" or "you see those marks in the corner (that didn't exist in the original source), those are hieroglyphs"
AI does not mean you magically get colour restored to an image that did not have any in the first place, it is invented, machine created content that potentially has absolutely zero bearing on the real world.
Additionally, stuff like this ends up ranking higher than the original source content; preference is given to HD+ videos in search, "viral cool colourised version of the past" on instagram will rank higher than "actual history"; it is potentially a large problem when you have people that don't actually know how to separate genuine primary source vs computer generated content.
If you give people black-and-white film to watch, people are guess the colors that are there based on what they are familiar with anyway, so this has a chance to be more historically accurate than that.
Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
(Well, I should say it's not history of Hamilton's time. It will be studied as an important part of the history of our time.)
The folks running these upscaling operations understand the concerns:
> Antic and Kelley aren’t under any illusions that images treated by DeOldify will come out historically accurate, though their reservations are with the practicalities of training a neural network. Making sure colourised films are accurate is “a literally impossible problem,” Antic says. DeOldify uses modern images to train its AI on, he explains, “and we know that's a big weakness, because, amongst other things, it biases people to wearing blue jeans.”
The challenge is, once they create one of these films and post it for the public, the implications and effects are out of their hands.
You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and compare it to any actual museum or historical society's website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference.
On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is. Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image: https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/
They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and likes to spam with later.
I think you are missing OPs point.
Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.
It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous.
It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it.
Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly?
By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.
I think you make a very important point. I watched lots of silent movies as well as historical footage growing up, and the jerky motion and slow frame rates gave them a cartoonish quality that I still find artistically endearing but which makes history less real to the viewer. For historical figures one admires, it confers a sort of mythic aura, and for ones you don't it makes them seem clownish or misshapen. This impacts written history too, where it's already hard to separate our posterior knowledge of how things turned out from the historical figures of whom we have a visually distorted mental image.
I watched a historical series on WW2 where the imagery was colorized and somewhat stabilized/cleaned up a year or so ago and was struck by the different perspective it offered without all the 'emotional blurring' that occurs due to the technical limitations of the time. It was much easier to relate to events, both good and bad, through a 'happening now' frame of reference that would have been closer to what people experienced at the time, when newsreel footage offered immediacy and accuracy that was new and modern.
No doubt in the future there will be debates over whether HD and 4k footage of today and the recent past should be given the full VR treatment, allowing people to experience current events from the point of view of the participants and so forth.
Linking derivatives makes sense. Replacing original works does not.
And the little things matter.
We will learn how much over time, and ideally we keep originals to benefit from the lesson.
Really, what we do by augmenting originals is lock in one best guess interpretation.
The point of history is for people to go back and see what can be learned, not settle on what everyone should have learned.
On the other hand, unless there was a 4K full color film those millions of people wouldn't even watch the original.
The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than minorly-distorted knowledge?
Yes. No knowledge is much better than distorted knowledge.
No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the dominant historical narrative that they themselves have created.
> "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate" than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is fiction created by historians affected by their own biases. History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science.
> That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There are facts and then there is history ( which is what is colored in between the facts by historians ).
There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all fiction.
"History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science."
Science is interpretation. Scientists are concerned about maintaining their dominant narrative. "Facts" are very scarce on the ground. (I'm willing to act as if Mumbai exists, but I have no personal experience of it and therefore no positive reason to believe it does.)
In more serious terms, a good academic historian will point to evidence as a way to explain why they want you to believe some statement, and---because they recognize the perils of what they're doing---many of them will complain about potentially misleading modifications to that evidence.
I doubt those youtube historians could possibly do more damage to false history lessons, than all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies.
And the youtube historians I have seen, were very good. So mostly on the right side in battle to truth (dramatically speaking) and mostly not on the side of cheap effects for drama, or even intentional misleading for political reasons.
(seriously, there is nothing wrong with historic fiction - but it disturbs me deeply that a) most movies/books are not labeld that way, even if they should and b) even if it is labeled, most people probably do not notice)
There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust, where a recurring feature is completely historically inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").
No one is altering the original documents. They still exist, right?
"actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color)."
That's debatable. Why is "no color" more accurate? The world wasn't monochrome.
If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform, or a different country's uniform, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're in a different branch of the military.
If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had.
If you've got a photo of a famous scientist or war hero who had a Mediterranean complexion and you colourise them with more of a pale complexion, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're a different race.
(Of course, these sorts of accessibility-accuracy trade-offs aren't unique to colourising photos - they also apply to everything from translations of historical documents, through illustrations and selecting what content makes it into books, to questionably accurate history facts shared on social media)
But what about the opposite? What if a B&W photo shows someone with white hair, but his hair was blonde. Now the colorized photo is more accurate than the B&W photo. I just don't think you can claim B&W is more accurate absolutely.
> If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform
Do you understand that the typical consumer of this media cannot tell the difference between air force, and army uniforms from 100 years ago? Get people interested in history, then worry about the little details like the color of someone's hair or uniform.
Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world. Most people's knowledge of history is abysmal. History is boring, as it is taught in schools today.
Your ad hominem attack devalued your whole argument. Argue the merits of his points, not your preconceptions of his mental state.
That argument being that the academic approach hasn't lead to people having a more accurate image of history. It has scared them off and resulted in most of them having almost no knowledge of history. The approach doesn't seem to lead to it's intended goal.
The comment was perhaps made a bit crassly, but I think it's something worth considering.
That's such an arrière-garde cause. It doesn't take too much time nor too much effort for any self-examining historian to understand that you can't create a "right impression" of history at the level of the general public. It will always be partial, truncated, falsified. Your cherry-picked period is misunderstood by the general public ? Too bad, that's part of the job. The best you can hope is making somebody interested enough that someday they'll have to reflex on historiography, philology and epistemology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
So they want to ban textbooks and force kids to learn dozens of languages to read primary sources and to travel to places of their origins?
Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or a 3D rendering of these guesses?
I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth.
I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably be even worse if experts wouldn’t paint their best guess at the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to recreate it for the population.
But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real.
Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u
I feel that is the difference.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover.
I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.
It's possible to see recreations of extinct animals that humans have overlapped with enough to write and draw how they looked. It's even possible to see real specimens of extinct creations, such as the Oxford Dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo
You don't need much more knowledge, but definitely more than "they don't exist today". But equally with colourised photos/video: you don't need more knowledge than "this was filmed before it was possible to film in colour, so all colours are guesses".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-UZXBF63z4
They also have a good one on the history of dinosaur illustration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE
The original films were not altered in any way. They still exist and were not destroyed or compromised by the process. They can still be studied by historians while others are free to enjoy the colorized versions.
I visited the Vasa museum in Stockholm a few years back. The Vasa is an amazingly preserved shipwreck from the 1600s. There ship is mostly original and looks like bare brown wood like everyone imagines a shipwreck to look like.
However, they have a model and reproductions of parts of the ship showing how they were brilliantly painted. The tour guide made clear that the aesthetic beauty and conspicuous consumption on display was as much a part of the kings arsenal as the cannons. It really changed the way i looked on the past.
Or, alternatively, back in the day there were these shows called "situation comedies" or sitcoms. One of them was "Three's Company." Many of the stories of the episodes of Three's Company were taken more or less directly from Shakespeare's comedies. Is it elitism to suggest that seeing a production of Shakespeare's plays is a better way of connecting with what he was trying to say than watching a '70s sitcom?
The play is pretending to be a Shakespeare production when it isn't, and will give people unrealistic views on the history, whereas the sitcom won't do that
I think there's a very similar pattern in tech with developers who hack on apps in 'proper languages' like Rust and C++ dunking on developers who write JavaScript or PHP because those aren't seen as 'true development' because they make things 'too easy'.
With respect, historians who are involved with archiving aren't grinding these historical points fine because they're 'rooted in elitism'. Even if some are elitist (some people are), that's not what the profession of archiving is all about. Snowwrestler before me aptly sums the matter up. I'd also offer the following comments but I tackle some of the reasons why archivists do what they do from a more technical perspective.
Archiving is a very complex business, especially so if historical context is to be preserved with fidelity. Moreover, as we've seen from both the article and these posts, that historical 'fidelity' is defined or set by the different contexts in which the archive material is used. Simply, people will use archived material in many different ways according to their individual requirements; furthermore, one's requirement will also likely vary depending on one's circumstances or surroundings. (For instance, a curator will likely require the highest quality of reproduction for a museum exhibit and a lower one on his/her smartphone.)
Here, I'll mainly confine myself to archived images as per the article, however these issues could also involve paintings and other works of art, and even objects (have you noticed how the value of a rare coin dramatically decreases in value if you are silly enough to remove its patina?)
Back to images: Ideally, for preservation, we'd like to replicate an image perfectly and end up with an identical clone—and the only way to do that is copy the whole physical object molecule-for-molecule. Clearly, this is impossible, so what’s next?
The limits of current technology means that essentially we are limited to capturing a planar reproduction of the image by photographing or scanning it from directly above or by projecting light through it onto some recording medium. So what are the criteria for doing this, that is if we wish to copy every trace or single bit of information from said image?
1. First we have to acknowledge that even if we were able to record every bit of information that's available from this planar view/projection (which is very unlikely), that it is not all the information that comes with the image. Being a physical object, it has thickness; it has a photographic emulsion; its emulsion is chemical and we may wish to know how it was made. Is the emulsion only blue sensitive, say a collodion emulsion, or is it new enough to be either orthochromatic or even panchromatic? What is its physical condition, has it been damaged, or scratched, or has it been repaired, and how was it stored, .etc (as that extra (metadata) information tells us a great deal more about the image and its history than just the image itself)? Clearly, those who require this ancillary physical information are likely to be different people to say casual YouTube viewers—this is an important difference.
2. Incidentally, archivists are also concerned not just the intrinsic nature of the image itself but also aspects about the way it was viewed, its environment, etc. For example, did the original film stock have a tint or was it completely neutral? Has the film changed in color since the print was made, does it now have sepia tint? When film was first viewed, what was the brightness and color temperature of typical projector lamps of the period? This information is important as it will influence how we end up viewing the film today,
3. To capture every detail of the image requires some very stringent requirements and often it's not possible to meet them. If we attempt to capture every detail to the point that the law of diminishing returns has determined it's not worthwhile g...
The article unfortunately doesn't point out why this is a naive take.
If you upscale an image for display on a 4k display, you can:
1. Leave an aliasing artifact intact.
2. Remove an aliasing artifact.
Now, suppose you have two clients-- one making a documentary about the moon landing, and another making a documentary about moon landing conspiracies.
Pick your favorite "sincere and accurate" ML algorithm-- it cannot generate a single image that will be suitable for use by both clients.
Perhaps "straining and toiling" is hyperbole. But I don't see an alternative to careful, deliberate study of the primary sources of history.
Also-- keep in mind that was a didactic example. When you talk about colorizing films or cartoons, things get quite muddy.
It’s important not to forget how close in time we are to history. Imagine if, instead of always seeing black and white pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., people saw him in 4K color. Maybe they’d remember he was shot for his civil rights activism when Bill Gates was already a teenager, just a couple of heads before Unix and C.
So people are 'enhancing' videos and photos. Just like we've been doing for decades. Only the process was manual and labor-intensive. And usually NOT performed by historians.
As long as we don't destroy the originals, I can't see why there's even a debate. Every medium captures an interpretation of reality, they are not reality itself.
It's not about correcting the image to match what their eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get their message across.
The way these photographs look is as much part of history as what they portray - whether intentional or not. These enhancement processes will remove that part.
What does it mean for something to be "old"? What does it mean for something to be "well-preserved through time"? All of this is information that may not be significant to you, but it may be significant to a historian and their audience.
But for historical documents, the creators are usually hamstrung by technology, not embracing it. If they could have had 4K HDR, I'm sure they would have.
Van Gogh would still use oil on canvas to execute his vision.
With regards to Van Gogh, seeing how he likes to make his paintings three dimensional (if you ever had a chance to see his paintings in person) in additional to his sculptural works, I wouldn't be surprised if he became a 3D graphics or VR artist had he lived in modern times.
It is like the difference between a film adaptation of a text and the original text. If you see the film first, it will permanently colour your reading of the text, taking away from you the opportunity to draw your own meanings from a blank slate.
It's kind of like the concept of "significant digits" in science. If your experimental apparatus can only measure a value with precision plus or minus one tenth, it's inappropriate to report your results with digits out the thousandths. Doing so would make it seem more precise to the reader, but the additional precision is an illusion.
In much the same way, using software in 2020 to guess what things "really looked like" can give viewers a false impression of how much we actually know about what things really looked like.
I find it hard to believe these academics would criticize Paul Philippoteaux for the Gettysburg Cyclorama despite it going far beyond the limits of the source material.