A Century of Portraits: A Visual Historical Record of American High School Yearbooks

Imagery offers a rich description of our world and communicates a volume and type of information that cannot be captured by text alone. Since the invention of the camera, an ever-increasing number of photographs document our “visual culture” complementing historical texts. Currently, this treasure trove of knowledge can only be analyzed manually by historians, and only at small scale. In this paper, we perform automated analysis on a large-scale historical image dataset. Our main contributions are: 1) A publicly available dataset of 168,055 (37,921 frontal-facing) American high school yearbook portraits. 2) Weakly supervised data-driven techniques to discover historical visual trends in fashion and identify date-specific visual patterns. 3) A classifier to predict when a portrait was taken, with median error of 4 years for women and 6 for men. 4) A new method for discovering and displaying the visual elements used by the classifier to perform the dating task, finding that they correspond to the tell-tale fashions of each era.