Digital Archives Featured Image #1: Rare 1884 View of Spokane

The addition of image browsing at the Washington State Digital Archives has really opened up the photographic collections. So I thought I would begin a new feature of highlighting some of the great photographs of Washington's past that are available on the site. (Reminder: Though I work for the Washington State Digital Archives this blog is not a publication of that agency and I represent only myself in these posts.)

For the first post, I wanted to share this map of Spokane that I have seen nowhere else:

(Click here to go straight to a larger version of the image at the Washington State Digital Archives site.)

The map is captioned "Spokane Falls, W. T., 1884." Maps such as these, called "Bird's Eye" or panoramic maps, were popular in the late 19th century. Apparently a company that made them traveled through eastern Washington in 1884, as there are bird's eye maps of Cheney and Walla Walla from that year as well. The Library of Congress has a great web exhibit of its panoramic maps, along with a valuable set of essays for understanding the maps. It is important to remember that panoramic maps were created to promote development and investment and "not only showed the existing city but sometimes also depicted areas planned for development," according to an essay by John R. Hébert and Patrick E. Dempsey. So there are varying degrees of fiction and wishful thinking in these maps, and historians have to be careful using them.



The map pictured here is interesting because it pictures Spokane Falls at an early period. The city had only been incorporated three years before. And in 1889 the great fire would burn down most of the buildings rendered on the 1884 map. The city is a few blocks of brick and wood buildings, with a few more blocks of residences in each direction. The mighty Spokane River is drawn in full flood, crossed by spindly-looking bridges at Post and Howard Streets. It is a stark contrast to the better-known 1890 panoramic map of Spokane Falls, pictured below:

Or the 1905 panoramic map of Spokane:

...both of which show a more developed, commercial town well past the frontier city in the 1884 map.

Image Browsing at WA Digital Archives!

Boeing 314 Clipper, with Mt. Rainier in the background, ca. 1945

The latest upgrade to the Washington State Digital Archives (my employer, BTW) makes all the photographs and audio records browseable for the first time. Hooray! Here is a list of the photographic collections we currently have online. If you click on any collection you will be taken to a collection description and a search page. From the search page click on "Browse all records in the collection" to open a browsable page of the photographs. Though browsing also works in any results for a search for photographs.

The browsing interface--designed by WSDA employees Adam Miller and Bryan Smith--is slick. Click on any image and it pops up with a descriptive caption, a link to a page with all the meta data and a larger image, and arrows to browse forward or back in the collection. The old system produced only text results for image searches, and you would have to click through two screens to see the images, and two back to return to the search results.

Browsable photographs make the Digital Archives more usable to the citizens of Washington State. And to your humble blogger. As I explore the collections I will share additional photos such as the one above.

Lantern Slide Shows of Washington State: 1910-1939

Here is a fun image collection from the Washington State Digital Archive: Lantern Slide Shows from the Washington Department of Conservation from between 1910 and 1939. [Unfortunately I cannot link directly to the images--you will need to go to the DA site, then Keyword Search => choose "Photographs" from the drop-down menus => then under "Record Series" select "Show All Records."] These arresting images show Washington State at a pivotal time in the decades just before the Great Depression. We see modern scenes of battleships in Seattle Harbor, images of farming, and early highways along with beautiful scenes of nature across the state. (To the left we see Monroe Street Bridge in Spokane.)

These slides were made for use with an early version of the modern slide projector, the "magic lantern." The picture of the magic lantern to the right is from this page at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which provides this helpful description of the devices:

Magic lanterns are an early equivalent of today's slide projectors, with a few important differences. First, magic lanterns used fire instead of electric bulbs to illuminate the slides. A second difference was the shape of the slides. Today's slides are often made of lightweight, thin plastic or glass, and come in single frames. Magic lantern slides came in strips of large, bulky pieces of glass held together with metal or wood. They often contained mechanical features that allowed limited movement of one or more slides within the projector, a feature no longer found on modern slide projectors. Lastly, many magic lanterns could display images of greater complexity than today's slide projectors.

The slides in the Digital Archive Collection feature many interesting and historically important scenes from early 20th century Washington. And many are by Asahel Curtis. Asahel was the brother of infamous photographer Edward Curtis and an important figure in his own right--but that is a subject for another post. Here are a few of my favorites of these slides:


Cattle herd at Grand Coulee:

This image has a wonderful 19th-century feel to it and is a reminder that mush of Washington State was still very rural and undeveloped in the early 20th century.


Alhambra Cabins, Soap Lake:

I love this picture of early automobile tourism!



In the loggers wake, clear cut debris:

There are a whole series of these illustrating environmental degradation, which is quite surprising for a set of slides produced by the state government.


Speed Boat Racing, Lake Chelan

The boat in the center has an almost 3D effect.

H.C. Bohlke with poultry at Grandview

Finally, a boy and his chicken:


There are over 250 of these wonderful images at the Washington State Digital Archives, so come pay us a visit!

The Holy Grail of Audio Recognition

Big news today from the Washington State Digital Archives! (Full disclosure: I am an Assistant Digital Archivist here.) Today we put the audio files of the House of Representatives Committee Meeting Recordings online--and they are keyword searchable.

The House of Representatives Committee Meeting Recordings cover 1973 to 2001. This is almost 6000 hours of hearings and the files take up 1 terabyte of data.
This list of house committees will help give context to some of these files. The files came from 30,000 cassette tapes.The tapes were converted to digital files and cleaned up starting in 2005. Putting them online and making them searchable is a cooperative project between the Washington State Digital Archives and the Microsoft Corporation.

The technical breakthrough is that these files are keyword searchable. Users can enter keywords or phrases and the search engine will dig through all of the files and discover when anyone spoke those words. The search results give some details about the file but also a snippet of the text showing where on that file the words were spoken. Click on any of the strings of words between the dashes and the in-line player will take you directly to that point in the recording. Some good keyword searches are salmon and dams, "Indian gaming," "state history," and "Lewis and Clark."

This, my friends, is one of the holy grails of computing: untrained voice recognition over thousands of hours of tapes and many different voices. We rolled out this technology with the legislative hearings because we are a state archives and this gives the Washington State public unprecedented access to these public records. But think of the other uses for the keyword searching of audio files. I have never visited an archives that did not have boxes of decaying audio tapes from an oral history project that never quite got to the transcribing stage. These tapes can be digitally preserved and put online. Television and radio interviews and news and talk programs will become searchable. This is a digital history breakthrough.