Distant Viewing Scripts

Welcome!

Welcome! Distant Viewing Scripts is a free, open-source website that provides tutorials and scripts for doing computational analysis with visual and multimodal data. All of the code is written using the Python programming language, with open-source models and freely accessible data. Please use the table of contents navigation n the left to access the pages of the site.

Distant Viewing Scripts is designed to complement the Distant Viewing Explorer, which provides web-based tools for applying and visualizing AI models directly in the browser. For those new to programming and/or the application of computer vision models, we recommend starting with the Distant Viewing Explorer to get a quick hands-on sense of the methods and approaches before continuing with the material here.

The first section includes several longer tutorials. The first tutorial gives a gentle introduction to image analysis. It includes slides and discussion questions, making it an excellent starting point for both classroom use as well as self-study. The second tutorial expands the techniques from the first to include working with moving images. The final tutorial explores how to create and organize your own visual collections.

The remainder of the scripts are grouped by data type, with one page dedicated to a different type of model. Many of these mirror the interactive visualizations from the Distant Viewing Explorer website. The code should be easy to adapt to your own datasets and to expand with other models of a similar kind that are available online.

Taylor Arnold
Lauren Tilton
Directors, Distant Viewing Lab, University of Richmond