Thursday, 11 December 2014

The rise of interpolated content?




Photoshop has long let you edit the contrast and tone in images, but now their Content-Aware Move, Fill and Patch tools can seamlessly add, move or remove content from images, making it easy to create 'new' historical moments. The images on, which uses '[n]ew techniques in machine learning and image processing [...] to extrapolate the scene of a painting to see what the full scenery might have looked like' show the same techniques applied to classic paintings.



So 2014 seems to have brought the removal of human agency from the process of enhancing, and even creating, text and images. Where do we go from here? How will we deal with the increase of interpolated content when looking back at this time? I'd love to hear your thoughts.


  1. I hadn't thought of digital interpolation in a wider context of digital history until just reading your post. I am pushing on what the limits of interpolation and extrapolation might be with my world history model ( The model engine interpolates history data to show any date in history with data tagged so it knows the fidelity of what it is computing and displaying ( While the web version isn't powerful enough to do much interpolation, the app version really pushes things by doing things like interpolating to get city population values, then generating inferred street maps and buildings (and eventually people on those streets). Would love your thoughts on how to best convey to the user what the engine knows versus what it infers.

  2. Hi Garth,

    thanks for commenting! Visualising uncertainty still seems to be one of the trickier design issues in visualisation, whether archaeological illustrations that fill in gaps in what's known about buildings or fuzzy dates in museum collections. There's a 'truthiness' about visualisations that makes them seem more authoritative than they should sometimes. And to make things more difficult, different disciplines have different assumptions about 'true' data and different conventions for expressing. You could use texture or variations in colour hue or saturation to express certainty but explaining that so that it's immediately clear to viewers could be tricky.

    I'd be curious to hear about your experiments as you explore with the best way to designate interpolated data!

    Cheers, Mia