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