Do you recognise this metro station?

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 took more than 200 000 photographs between 1930 and 1980. The images are now part of ArkDes’ collection, and the goal is to supplement them with geographical information. Imagine if one of all these photographs shows your street in the 1960s?

Now we need your help to add data to Sune Sundahl’s pictures and to assess whether automatic image recognition is an effective way to broaden the knowledge about the places in his pictures. By delving into Sundahl’s photographs ↗, identifying places and buildings in the pictures, and emailing your conclusions to us at DigitaltMuseum, you contribute to making the treasure trove of images accessible to more people.

The project is part of the Digital Museum Lift, a collaboration with the Swedish National Heritage Board, where we convert local information into linked open data. This means that we use both image recognition and crowdsourcing to add geographical data to our collections. The initiative aims to deepen the understanding of Sweden’s societal development through Sune Sundahl’s images.

This initiative is one of 16 projects with funding from the European Social Fund and 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.