A Doctoral Partnership between the University of Southampton and the Imperial War Museum is working to catalogue and analyse 17,000 propaganda images created by Islamic State. There were several challenges. A large portion of the images contained extreme violence posing a risk to researcher wellbeing, and the embedded text was not accessible to researchers who were not native Arabic speakers. We developed software to allow researchers with no HPC experience to employ the Iridis cluster to automatically extract and translate text within the image archive, which also minimised researchers’ exposure to graphic content.
“Without the HPC facilities and Conn’s considerable efforts, the Islamic State collection would have very likely remained uncatalogued for the foreseeable future, so this project has been tremendously successful”
Hirah Azhar
Postgraduate Researcher, School of Humanities