historical-research

In recent research, I received two photographs of unidentified women that were purported family members, and I wanted to explore a structured way of comparing them that could also be easily communicated as a two-dimensional still image for ease of publication/distribution. The following is the approach I took, and although I don’t know if this approach is valid, I thought the process and the results were interesting enough to warrant this description.

Quadrant Addressing or Quaddressing provides an intuitive and consistent way to make relative spatial references to an original, two dimensional artifact (primarily for documents such as a printed text, photographs, etc.) regardless of its size or shape, or whether the artifact is physical or digital. Quaddressing relies on imprecision to aid human judgement instead of relying on highly precise measurements of varying units across different types of documents, thereby greatly increasing the ease and efficiency of both recording and interpretation across all documents for both human actors and code.