Denise

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 . [click to continue…]

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

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The word “Ofness” (hereafter simply Ofness), previously unknown to me, became a familiar word as I delved into the subject of image subject retrieval.   The term is used extensively in art and art history journals. The clearest discussion of its meaning that I have found online can be found in a wonderful book produced by the Getty: An Introduction to Art Image Access by Sara Shatford Layne, Patricia Harpring, Colum Hourihane, Christine L. Sundt, that also contains excellent illustrations.   The definition of “of-ness” is given in the glossary as:

“An expression used in the context of subject description to refer to what a work of art depicts. Of-ness may also include a specific identification, as well as a generic description, of what is depicted in a work of art. This expression corresponds to Erwin Panofsky‘s identification and description, the first two levels of subject description outlined in Categories for the Description of Works of Art. For example, “The artwork is of a woman with snakes for hair” (description). “The artwork is of the gorgon Medusa, the creature in classical mythology who turned her beholders to stone” (identification). Compare about-ness.”

The term is often hypenated, as in the Getty publication, but I have seen it just as often unhypenated.   I prefer the latter, I guess because it seems less tentative.

It was thus rather startling to me when I discovered that the word “ofness”  cannot be found in standard reference works.  Meanwhile the word appears in lots of other places.  A search at Amazon for “ofness turned up 144 books, including the examples below.  [click to continue…]

Tagged as: Bartelby.com, Dictionary.com, Google, Google search, J. P. Moreland, ofness, OneLook Dictionary Search, Random House Dictionary, Reference Tools, Roget's Thesaurus, School Time, Thesauri, Thesaurus.com, Visual Thesaurus, Vocabulary Lists, Webster's, Wictionary.org

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Tematres partial expansion of Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (Activities)

The image to the right is a screenshot of a partially expanded, but truncated (“A” to “D”), hierarchy of the first (of 26) main subdivisions of the Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (TGM), a controlled vocabulary for “indexing visual materials by subject and by genre/format.”‘   The subdivision is entitled  ” Subject Terms Activities”.  The image shows only the portion between  A to the very beginning of D.  This screenshot is not from official site of The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), which is maintained under the aegis of the Library of Congress, as one might expect, because that version is  user unfriendly in the extreme. Rather it is from a free vocabulary site, TemaTres Vocabulary Server which is much easier to navigate.  That’s why it’s here, to give a meaningful sense of the TGM’s scope and contents.

As described on the official site:

“The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials is a tool for indexing visual materials by subject and by genre/format. The thesaurus includes more than 7,000 subject terms and 650 genre/format terms to index types of photographs, prints, design drawings, ephemera, and other pictures. In 2007, the subject and genre/format vocabularies, previously maintained separately, were merged into a single list and migrated to new software, MultiTes.  Other minor changes are clarified in the links below. For questions about the thesaurus, contact TGM editors at: tgmed@loc.gov.”

In the overview of the TGM in the Tematres site the TGM is said to contain 11,893 terms, 13,262 relations between terms, and 5,230 non-preferred terms.

The merger of the subject and genre/format terms in a single thesaurus simplifies things in some respects but    [click to continue…]

Tagged as: controlled vocabulary, Library and Information Science, Library of Congress, Metadata, ofness, Tematres, TGM, Thesaurus of Graphic Materials, XML

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How it works

Artigo is another site that, like Labelme, Peekaboo, and steve.museum, is geared toward using the collective intelligence of internet users to gather data that will improve image search functionality.  Artigo is most like steve.museum in being semantically oriented.  As at steve.museum, you provide your own tags for the image that is presented.  Artigo’s image database contains 15,000 images and is set up at the University of Munich.  But there are several refinements that make Artigo game-like, and arguably more effective in obtaining valid results.

Artigo - Mid Game

Each game session is timed; the players have 5 minutes. The number of pictures reviewed is a function of how quickly the players agree to move on to the next one.  Generally you see 5-7 images per game.  There are TABOO words, ones that have already been associated with the image.  These appear below the image in RED.  Players must dig deeper to find appropriate tags.

The more taboo words there are for an image the more points you earn for the tags you provide.  Most importantly your tag is accepted only if you and your partner have both provided it, thus weeding out the chaff.

As you play a countdown of the seconds remaining appears at the top, and your points up to that point on the bottom right.  You can see how many words your partner has selected, they appear as BLUE dots on the left, but not what they are.  But when the game is over, each image is shown again with artist, title and date identified.

You also see the tags given by your partner and yourself, and any that agree are shown in  YELLOW.   They are the ones that you get credit for.  Of course you get your final score as well.

Artigo also offers a monetary inducement to play.    [click to continue…]

Tagged as: Collective intelligence, ESP Game, Image search, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Luis von Ahn

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CLICK! submission Photo credit: Elyse Taylor

A current exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA) called CLICK! is a great example of the creative role that museums can play in utilizing the web to involve users.  Click! is a multi stage project.  First, there was an open call for photographs for the exhibit on the theme of the “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.”  Then an open call for evaluation of the submitted photographs online was issued.  Finally an exhibit at the museum of the top 20% of the 389 photos submitted was assembled.  But that isn’t all.

There is also an exhibit of all the photographs, and multiple statistical views of the voting.  These results include very interesting data about the relative ratings of the raters (self-identified in 5 categories from naive to expert), along with a host of other data. I found this information as interesting as the exhibit itself.  Begging won’t help.  You’ll just have to visit the site yourself to find out how the ratings of experts compared to the ratings of the non-experts.  The site has lots of other great features, including an intelligent commentary, a look into the process of mounting the physical exhibit, the comments of raters about the photos, a blog, a podcast, and, novel to me, [click to continue…]

Tagged as: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway, Elyse Taylor, Flatbush Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, New York City, Prospect Park, Richard Meier, Union Army, Union Temple, Vanderbilt Avenue

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Peekaboom is a blast.  It’s a totally addictive online game that also contributes raw data to CBIR researchers.

“We introduce Peekaboom, an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms, which require massive amounts of training and testing data not currently available.

Peekaboom has been played by thousands of people, some of whom have spent over 12 hours a day playing, and thus far has generated millions of data points. In addition to its purely utilitarian aspect, Peekaboom is an example of a new, emerging class of games, which not only bring people together for leisure purposes, but also exist to improve artificial intelligence. Such games appeal to a general audience, while providing answers to problems that computers cannot yet solve.” Peekaboom: A Game for Locating Objects in Images

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News: Visionary Research: Teaching Computers to See Like a Human

Tagged as: Artificial intelligence, Computer, Computer vision, Games, Metadata, Online game, Pixel, Video game

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Eden as depicted in the first or left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch Image via Wikipedia

The potential usefulness of well cataloged images seems enormous.  Images can open up avenues of thought and research previously unavailable, not just within the narrow category that the image may be typically associated with (whether that be art history, architecture, geology, or some other area) but across disciplines, and into wholly new areas.  While cross disciplinary studies are not new, ready access to the whole store of images would greatly facilitate and stimulate further work by artists, economists, historians, and doctors, among others, independently and collaboratively.  Leaving aside the myriad barriers posed by expense, expertise, technology, and legal considerations (including copyright), and the differing views about priorities and cost allocation, here is my attempt to articulate an ideal.

Universal, scalable, trustworthy, sustainable, and permanent access to all heritage digital images from the publicly accessible to the privately held, including those from all museums and cultural institutions, archives and libraries, private collections, and publishers, using a system of organization that maximizes entry points and interconnections between objects and relevant texts, to facilitate retrieval for all imaginable purposes, through interfaces which have the capability of searching across all platforms, providing high resolution images, thumbnail browsing, copying and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and links to contextual materials, with continuously updated information of the applicability of worldwide copyright status and contact information for obtaining permissions.

This ideal is more utopian than anything; this is what brought Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights to mind as a good illustration here.   My utopian ideal does provides a context for looking at what exists, and what is evolving.  If there could be agreement about the goal, however unrealistic at present, this could inform the current and developing practices at critical institutions.

Since first writing this piece, The Garden of Earthly Delights has become a prime example of a different aspect of ideal access to images.  Google Earth chose to render this painting, along with  13 others at the Prado,  in unimaginably high resolution.  The detail below is of the face of the monkey that is  sitting atop an elephant in the distance, about a third of the way from the top of the picture.   In the thumbnail of the painting here, the monkey is barely detectable.

Garden of Earthly Delights - detail of moneky face

To view this painting in this way is truly breathtaking.   Google’s accomplishment far exceeds my imagination; maybe the rest of the utopian dram described above is also possible.

I must  unfortunately note the Museo del Prado’s non-existent subject search capability.   While the collections page does say that search by subject is possible: “Access on line to approximately 2000 works of the Museum’s collection. …This data base will enlarge until it holds the complete collection….The advanced search engine facilitates consultation, using categories such as artist, title of work, subject, chronology and reference number…” in fact it is not.   The advanced search has drop down boxes with NO options, and “subject” is not even one of them.   On top of that, the word “Chronology” is misspelled.  The Prado’s aspiration to digitize and share the entire collection is admirable, but image cataloging and search functionality should go hand and hand with the digitization.  It is well known that once the digitization process is complete it is very rare for more metadata to be added at a later time.

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• Google Earth Takes on the Prado’s Masterworks

Tagged as: Art history, Copyright infringement, Digital image, Garden of Earthly Delights, Google Earth, Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado

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[click to continue…]

Tagged as: Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Digital asset management, Dublin Core, Libraries, Library and Information Science, Library of Congress, Library science, ofness, Technical Services, Visual Resources Association

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