Maybe I’ll take our wedding photo and superimpose Emma’s head over mine. Where do I submit that for consideration?

Oh, so you want algorithms, do you? You want computer science?

Bunk. Any decent MS grad can make his algorithms support his bias.

As a gag, my advisor and I once submitted two papers to a conference taking opposite sides of an argument using the same data and the same algorithm.

Both were accepted.

However, Mr. Tracy is not the only one to propose or use such techniques. Most of the “forensics” tests that have been suggested by readers on this and related posts involve computer technology — facial recognition, digital reconstruction of Joseph’s person drawing from all available sources, overlaying proposed images on photographs of the death masks and skulls, etc. Just this morning, a scholar who has investigated another proposed image (not the Scannel) showed me his own computer-based analysis.

I repeat, as I have said multiple times in this and related threads: I am not attacking any individual. I am not targeting any proposed image as being any less likely a candidate than any other (except to the extent that, like the one in this post, it has been conclusively identified as NOT Joseph Smith). My purposes have been to suggest how historians might evaluate such claims, and to remind readers that standards of evidence should not be lowered simply because new tools are available, and to suggest how unfruitful a search for any photograph of Joseph Smith would likely be if undertaken in the manner that has apparently characterized the search so far. Those reminders and suggestions are intended for anyone who cares to read my posts, and are not aimed at any particular person.

That year, there were 866,452 free white males 30-39 years of age in the United States. Without provenance, any one of those young men is just about as likely as Joseph Smith as a candidate for being the subject of a random anonymous photograph.

If we had the provenance to tie a given image to Hancock County, Illinois, the number of most likely candidates suddenly shrinks to 644.

That’s still more than I would want to investigate, but it does give a rough idea of the value of provenance.

While there were probably many more daguerreotypists at the end of the 1840s than there were in the first half (Joseph Smith’s “window”), there may have been very many who theoretically could have taken an image of Joseph.

At the same time, a large number of daguerreotypists who could have taken the image means a large number of images made overall — not just in Joseph’s “window,” but in the whole period of 1840 through, say, 1860, when anonymous portraits offer few clues to precise dating. To me, that is further evidence of the futility of grabbing at every anonymous portrait which looks somewhat like Joseph Smith and attempting to investigate it.