Date: Oct 15, 2020
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Category: Education
Title: Let the Photographs Speak: Historic rephotography in the Canadian Mountain West
For 20 years the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) has been using repeat photography to examine landscape level change in the Canadian mountain west. Using historical glass plate images taken from 1888 to 1950, MLP teams seek to determine the location the images were taken from, go to the same mountaintop, and rephotograph them as accurately as possible. The historic and modern images are then aligned and analyzed for landscape-level change. The historic/modern image pairs are also made available for use by scholars, students, government agencies, the public at large – in fact, anyone interested in exploring Canada’s mountain heights.
This research is deeply interdisciplinary – environmental science, climate science, archival research, history, computer science, statistics – and that’s just some of the “academic” side of the house. Add on mountaineering, photography, wilderness travel, and high-mountain helicopter training and the intricacies underlying the project become apparent. And, such a long-running photography project has a set of its own data wrangling issues that are non-trivial to deal with.
Over the years MLP researchers have developed and improved techniques for shooting the modern retakes, curating and analyzing the image pairs, and publishing the results. MLP image pairs continue to be used by those who wish to understand past landscape patterns, examine ecological and human legacies on the land, look for evidence of climate change in mountain landscapes, and explore cultural processes over time.
Join MLP photographer, mountaineer, and researcher Mary Sanseverino for an image-rich trip into Canadian mountain landscape discovery as she unpacks the interdisciplinary practices, photographic and software techniques that let the images of the Mountain Legacy Project speak.
Sneak-peek at some of the photos Mary will share:
http://explore.mountainlegacy.ca/
Speaker: Mary Sanseverino
Mary is well known in the ACC-VI community as the past editor of the Island Bushwhacker Newsletter. She is a Teaching Professor Emerita in the Department of Computer Science at UVic. In 2010 she was honoured with the University of Victoria’s Harry Hickman Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching and Educational Leadership.
A long time mountaineer and photographer, Mary’s other research interests have involved work with computational photography, making her a good fit with the Mountain Legacy Project. She has been associated with the project since 2010, going out into the field in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and even taking her new hip out for a short stint in the mountains in 2019.
Mary‘s photography can be seen online in the MLP Gallery: http://mountainlegacy.ca/galleries/
and on her Flick site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/msanseve/