Modern Tools, Forgotten Faces Using AI to Bring Museum Archives to Life
Video Description
Speaker: Stephen Recker
Museums around the world are sitting on goldmines of historical photographs—many of them unlabeled, untagged, and largely invisible to researchers. What if we could use AI to change that?
In this session, we’ll show how we combined AWS Rekognition, Lambda, and Drupal to create a facial comparison tool that helps identify unknown individuals in historic photos by matching them with known faces. Built in partnership with the Boonsborough Museum of History, the tool is part of a broader mission to preserve regional heritage and surface hidden stories from the past.
We'll walk through how we went from a working single-page application to a fully integrated custom Drupal module—automatically refactored using Q Developer, Amazon’s AI assistant for developers. We’ll cover how AI converted raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a clean, modular, class-based architecture optimized for Drupal. The result? A secure, maintainable, and production-ready tool that’s easy to extend.
This is more than a case study—it’s a practical look at how AI can bridge historical research and modern software development. Whether you're building CMS integrations or exploring the power of AWS tools, this session will offer hands-on insights you can apply in your own work.
Museums around the world are sitting on goldmines of historical photographs—many of them unlabeled, untagged, and largely invisible to researchers. What if we could use AI to change that?
In this session, we’ll show how we combined AWS Rekognition, Lambda, and Drupal to create a facial comparison tool that helps identify unknown individuals in historic photos by matching them with known faces. Built in partnership with the Boonsborough Museum of History, the tool is part of a broader mission to preserve regional heritage and surface hidden stories from the past.
We'll walk through how we went from a working single-page application to a fully integrated custom Drupal module—automatically refactored using Q Developer, Amazon’s AI assistant for developers. We’ll cover how AI converted raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a clean, modular, class-based architecture optimized for Drupal. The result? A secure, maintainable, and production-ready tool that’s easy to extend.
This is more than a case study—it’s a practical look at how AI can bridge historical research and modern software development. Whether you're building CMS integrations or exploring the power of AWS tools, this session will offer hands-on insights you can apply in your own work.