Genaro García Photograph Metadata for 19th-century Mexican Political Network Visualization

Alexandria Suárez's 2019 capstone project for a Master of Science in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin digitized 425 photographs from the Genaro García Photographs collection. The metadata spreadsheet created from this digitization was used to generate nodes and edges for a network visualization in Gephi, showing relationships between photographers and their subjects in 19th-century Mexico.

Use Cases

• Constructing social networks of 19th-century Mexican politicians based on photographer-subject relationships.
• Analyzing the visual representation and political iconography of historical figures based on photograph metadata.
• Training entity recognition or relationship extraction models on structured historical metadata.
• Creating visualizations of historical social spheres based on the described node and edge data.

Strengths

• Contains metadata for 425 digitized historical photographs, providing a defined scale.
• Data was explicitly created for and used in a formal academic visualization project.
• Project origin and methodology are clearly documented in the description.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown for the derived metadata spreadsheet, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect temporal and source bias inherent to the original Genaro García collection.

Provenance

Source

Genaro García Photographs collection, boxes 14 and 15.

Collection Method

Manual digitization and metadata entry from physical photographs for a university capstone project.

Time Range

19th century (implied by subject matter).

Freshness

Last updated 2024-03 18 05:16:04; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Mexico