Why Ofness?

Jonah and the Whale Example of Micrography

My interest in the issues around retrieving digital images evolved from my interest in art, text, the intersection of the two, a project, a penchant for organization, and a library science degree.

Several years ago I learned Photoshop with a particular project in mind. After working on that project for a year and a half, I had a new idea. This idea was to create a large rose, using one of my watercolors, but to make an image of the rose exclusively out of words. The original inspiration for this was my discovery of micrography. Not the micrography that is about photos of microscopic things; rather the micrography that has been practiced for hundreds of years by Jewish artists.  Jewish micrography creates images related to the texts from which they are made.

For example, as shown here, the text of the book of Jonah is used to create the boat on the water, the whale, etc.  The text is written in calligraphy but in a virtually microscopic form.  From what I understand this art form was an outgrowth of the prohibition against making images. An online exhibit of micrography including this image can be found at the site of the Micrography Exhibit at the Jewish Theological Society .

Rose in Micrography

My initial idea was to create the rose using the genome of the rose expressed in the letters A, T, C, G.  But as I researched online I found so many texts that refer to the rose. I gradually came to appreciate, in a way I never had before, the rich symbolism of the rose, which dates back as far as recorded history.  My online research continued; I purchased books on the subject; and I found references to roses everything: newspapers, films, television.  I even quite coincidentally stumbled over references to roses in books where one would not expect them.  I found some wonderful references. Then my concept shifted.  I decided to use the texts I found most interesting to create the rose. This project too took a long time, but ultimately I completed it and was very satisfied.

Rose in Micrography - Sample

Fast forward. A few years later I decided to got back to school in Library and Information Sciences. I had thought I was a pretty good online researcher.  I discovered how little I knew and became even more involved in general exploration online. Whenever I explored a new database, website, or library, I would search for “rose.”  It had become rather a habit.  This was actually quite useful.  It was a controlled experiment for comparing (in a rudimentary way) the usefulness of these resources.

My interest in art and art history led me to research the intersection of copyright law and online access to images. This led to deeper exploration of museum and other digital image collections, where i found such a wide variety of practices. On and on, from one area to another. I looked into DAM’s and had the opportunity to use TMS while volunteering at an art museum. A paper on access to images in scholarly journals and books took me deeper into the problems involved in providing meaningful access. I ended up immersed in the metadata resources used to classify art images, While I learned alot about the many kinds of information that can be preserved in metadata, my interest, as a layman, was primarily with subject access. More on why in another entry. Ultimately I learned alot about the English based terminologies and schemas, and ultimately introduced to the concepts of Ofness and Aboutness.

Tagged as: Art museum, Copyright, Digital asset management, Information science, Jonah and the Whale, Library science, Micrography, ofness, online research, rose