Copyright, Privacy, and Public Access in News Archives: a proof of concept on the Boston Globe photograph morgue | AI & SOCIETY

Abstract:  Whether supplementing written articles in newspapers or playing a leading role in photo-reporting, photography has achieved an influencial role in the delivery of information and framing of narratives to mass audiences. Photojournalism archives represent a unique source of historical data and public records about local, national, and international events, political movements, demonstrations, and urban development. This paper outlines a data archaeology project that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for organizing and searching through photojournalism collections, based on the Boston Globe photograph morgue. While the primary goal of the project is to foster public access to news archives, the large-scale digitization and recovery of information from photojournalism collections raises ethical questions about intellectual property and the right to identity protection when records are made available online. We present a proof of concept that tackles these issues by means of AI, while still offering equitable access to journalism archives that are often kept inaccessible within private media institutions. The first part of the paper discusses how machine learning can resolve the lack of resources to parse through data on digital surrogates. After providing an introduction to the use of ML to facilitate access to information in the Boston Globe photograph morgue, we outline two partially automated computational tasks: (1) an AI toolkit for transcribing archivists’ notes and to recover photographers’ names and creation dates, which can be used by librarians and archivists to assess copyright on records; (2) a pipeline for face detection and blurring that detects areas where identifiable people are present and allows for anonymization. As news archiving is confronted with challenges derived from the “digital heap” of orphaned data, privatization, and other barriers to journalism records, this report explores an ethical approach to structuring data in news archives for public access, by preserving intellectual property and privacy.