Do you recognize the locations in Sune Sundahl’s photographs?

At ArkDes, a pilot project is underway to identify the locations in Sune Sundahl’s1 photographs. Sune Sundahl was one of Sweden’s foremost architectural photographers, and his collection – over 200,000 images from 1930 to 1980 – was acquired by the then Museum of Architecture in 1988 and is now part of the ArkDes collection. The goal is to supplement these images with geographical information, so a photograph of your street from the 1960s might soon be easy to find!

We now need your help to add data to Sune Sundahl’s images and to assess whether automatic image recognition is an effective way to expand knowledge about the locations in his photographs. By delving into Sundahl’s photographs ↗ and identifying places or buildings, and by emailing your conclusions to sune.sundahl@arkdes.se, you help make this unique cultural treasure accessible to more people.

The project is part of the “Digitala museilyftet”, a skills development initiative run by the Swedish National Heritage Board, where we convert local information into linked open data. This means we use both image recognition and crowdsourcing to add geographical data to our collections, deepening the understanding of Sweden’s societal development through Sune Sundahl’s images.

A key component of this work is facilitated by OpenRefine, an open-source data-cleaning tool used to organize and structure large amounts of cultural heritage data at ArkDes. This tool allows us to enhance ArkDes’s data more effectively, particularly by adding geographical information.

This project, co-financed by the European Social Fund, is a three-year initiative that began in 2023. The purpose is to raise digital competence among museum staff. By focusing on linked open data, we find out how interconnected cultural heritage data sets can improve accessibility for digitised cultural heritage collections.

Together with the Swedish National Heritage Board, ArkDes is also producing training materials for an advanced training program aimed at helping other cultural institutions apply methods for linked open data, thus creating a richer, multifaceted picture of our shared cultural heritage.