DoubleCheck: Designing Community-based Assessability for Historical Person Identification

Historical photos are valuable for their cultural and economic significance, but can be difficult to identify accurately due various challenges such as low-quality images, lack of corroborating evidence, limited research resources. Misidentified have significant negative consequences, including lost value, incorrect historical records, the spread misinformation that lead perpetuating conspiracy theories. To assess credibility a photo identification (ID), it may necessary conduct investigative research, use domain knowledge, consult experts. In this paper, we introduce DoubleCheck, quality assessment framework verifying IDs on Civil War Photo Sleuth (CWPS), popular online platform identifying American War-era using facial recognition crowdsourcing. DoubleCheck focuses improving CWPS’s user experience system architecture display information useful assessing CWPS. mixed-methods evaluation found users contributed wide diversity sources IDs, which helped facilitate community’s these through DoubleCheck’s provenance visualizations. Further, badges visualizations supported in making accurate assessments even cases involving ID conflicts.