Entries tagged as ‘DM8305’
Tuesday 18 November 2008 10:24AM
During my presentation, as I talked about photos from elsewhere in my ‘mikosian’ Flickr account leaking into the pool of 100 images, which I said could be remedied by removing tags from all other photos, the prof pointed out that I could have made a separate account that contained only those images. True enough, if I’d known where I was going to end up. When I first uploaded the 100 images to my Flickr account I had done so merely to take advantage of existing organizing tools and hadn’t thought they would remain there for their final archive/database form. It wasn’t until later that I found TagGraph, which does more or less what I’d envisioned for the final representational form and does it through the Flickr API.
But I’ve been thinking about this and today I created a new Yahoo/Flickr account ‘hundredimages’ (they wouldn’t let me begin a user name with a number) and the DM8305 100 images are uploading as I write. However, I can create a screen name and an easier-to-remember (and type) URL alias that starts with a number: http://www.flickr.com/photos/100images/
Of course, this means applying all those tags again…
11:25AM – IMPORTANT NOTE: TagGraph pulls information based on the Flickr *screen name*, not the user name or alias, which I found out when both ‘hundredimages’ and ‘100images’ returned a “(user not found!)” message. Just FYI.
Categories: Archives · Courses · Images · Media · Technology
Tagged: DM8305
Wednesday 12 November 2008 11:47PM
Whew! Because I can’t rely on Internet access for my presentation I just spent the last couple hours retracing my process of finding the TagGraph software and making numerous (70!) screen shots, 46 of which are within TagGraph’s navigation of my ‘100 Images’ on Flickr. Of course, the screen shot process results in a lot of images named ‘Picture 1.png’, ‘Picture 2.png’, ‘Picture 3.png’, etc. so I found myself absorbed in a sub-archival endeavour naming and organizing these images meaningfully.
Now I just have to summarize key points of my process thus far and squeeze it all into a presentation that will only take ten minutes.
Edit (2008/11/13 1:45AM): Oops, make that ‘Plus 104′ – I forgot to grab images from the Taglines app, which was the first Flickr image tag visualization example I came across. I made (and cropped) 34 screen shots to give an impression of its (non-interactive) time-line format. I’m probably doing way more than I need to but I want a lot of visuals. I have also been making point-form notes of the various stages I have gone through in this process so far.
Categories: Art · Courses · Images
Tagged: DM8305, presentation
Wednesday 12 November 2008 5:34PM
OK, it’s down to the wire. I’m presenting tomorrow. I was originally scheduled for next Thursday but I’m participating in an all-day workshop that day, so I switched to tomorrow.
I know what ‘d like my final form for this image database to be (I discussed before a 3-D tag cloud that shows the images), though I lack the skills to implement it overnight, but that hasn’t stopped me from searching for other people’s software projects that might come close. At first I thought of downloading the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus to have a working demonstration of the navigational interface. Then I thought I’d look a little more to see if some open source project might fit the bill (and save myself US$39.95, though I’d likely use the thesaurus beyond this course – I check online dictionaries and thesauri semi-regularly as it is) and I found this Visual Complexity website that has collected an impressive array of software projects related to data visualization. A project called Flickr Graph (accessible via the Flickr Graph web interface) is getting closer to what I had in mind, except that it maps user relationships, not tags within sets or collections of photos… and for some reason it does not display my images in its grid (nor my Flickr user image).
Here’s a cool navigational interface for a repository of videos: TED Sphere (AKA VideoSphere).
Back on the Flickr tag track, I found TagGraph. The TagGraph web interface is similar to FlickrGraph but – oh yes! – it displays images and tags. Best part is that you can look at all photos for a given tag or, most relevant to my purposes today, by Flickr user – here is the TagGraph for ‘mikosian’ images tagged DM8305. If you click on ‘+ more images’ eventually all tagged images will be displayed. Then click on ‘+ related tags’ to see connections between images and various tags. This is where some of my tags (e.g. nyc) that are shared by photos outside the 100 Images set get pulled in, thus muddying the data pool (but not too much). I could go and remove tags on all other images to isolate the 100 Images set (since I can’t choose just that set through this interface), but that might be more work than necessary to illustrate a point (as opposed to actually implementing a digital photo archive navigational interface).
I had planned to create my own non-interactive (i.e. static) visual representation in Photoshop because the wireless network is so unreliable in our class room, but maybe now that I’ve found a working implementation of what I had in mind, screen shots will suffice. I only have to present for ten minutes, after all.
Categories: Archives · Courses · Images
Tagged: DM8305, Flickr, interface, navigation, tags
Sunday 9 November 2008 10:11PM
After taking a break to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, eat dinner and spend a couple hours on another assignment (for Sound Design class), I returned to my not-yet-ended tagging process, deciding to approach it from another angle, namely my Flickr tag cloud. Immediately I noticed another inconsistency, ‘adult’ and ‘adults’ tags, which made me a little concerned about the various meanings of ‘adult’, especially applied to images. Good thing it is easy to call up all the images tagged thusly so that the singular ‘adult’ tags can be edited to the originally-intended ‘adults’. However, the changes were not saved. I tried twice. Perhaps I need to delete the ‘adult’ tags and add new ‘adults’ tags.
Actually, I think it did save changes and I was looking at cached info. I also found a better way to change a tag than editing it in each individual image. When you click on a tag from the tag cloud, on the page that comes up is a ‘Change this tag?’ link where you can edit the tag and have the change applied to all photos with that tag.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to isolate tags for just the ‘100 Images’ set (i.e. have a tag cloud just for one set), at least not that I’ve discovered. The ‘NYC’, ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Manhattan’ tags do not apply to any of the ‘100 Images’ photos (well, except the WTC images that I tagged with ‘NYC’). Fortunately I have been a neglectful tagger in Flickr up until recently, so most of the tags are ‘100 Images’ tags. It’s also a good thing I have a two-digit number of tags, since the cloud only displays the most used 150.
There is, however, a way to select photos by multiple tags in the multi-tag search. More usefulness!
Oh, and I forgot to mention that Flickr has its own date-arranged archive view of one’s photos.
Categories: Archives · Courses · Images
Tagged: DM8305
Sunday 9 November 2008 5:55PM
As I once heard it said, though I do not now recall where, “A painting is never finished. The artist simply chooses a place to stop.” So could the same be said of this archival undertaking (but not before searching for the origin of this, which turns up a quote attributed to 20th C American artist Paul Gardner Darrow: “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places”). Although, if I were really designing an archival system I would consider its intended uses in terms of constructing cataloging, storage and retrieval methods, and this would, to some extent, inform the limits or scope of the archive. My list of tags has grown to 51, just over half the number of photos, and I haven’t elaborated categories such as ‘predominant colour’ or ’shot type’. Of course, I haven’t applied all these tags yet and each image has several tags. I’ve been working across broad categories, making note of details that could become tags (when they exist in more than one photo) and slowly refining toward greater detail (while remaining general enough to refer to multiple images).
So, what interesting places can I stop? Do I end when I’m tired of tagging? Do I just close my tag list to further additions? I have to present on Thursday (another contextual factor informing my decisions) and I still haven’t got round to visually representing my 100 Images archive.
Categories: Archives · Courses · Images
Tagged: DM8305
Sunday 9 November 2008 2:12PM
Oo! ‘Batch Organize’ in Flickr is a much handier way to go for tagging across the visually obvious groups. For example, I can assemble every photo with people in it, whether they’re figure skaters, public figures, contorting photographers or backyard partiers, and apply people-related tags to them. Oh, the joy of flexible systems!
Edit (2:40PM): Of course, there are minor hazards such as accidentally applying a tag to a photo it doesn’t apply to because that one photo was nestled amid others in such a way as to elude my otherwise sharp eyes. Also, the thumbnail photos in batch edit mode sometimes exclude tagging criteria. This happened when tagging for apparent gender and I found later that two photos I thought contained only men actually had a woman in them near the edge of the frame (and therefore not visible in the thumbnail version). So, I still have to go back and fix little inconsistencies that creep in.
Let me clarify that I am not going for any kind of total coverage. My aim is to be thorough in my own approach. I wholly acknowledge that there will (always) be gaps. I just want to be sure that within my process I am applying my sorting criteria consistently.
Then I get distracted by tangents like finding out who those people are in the Warhol print photos. I knew Jackie O, but I don’t recognize the other person. I wish there was a search engine that could take images as search parameters…
Categories: Archives · Courses · Images · Technology
Tagged: DM8305
Saturday 8 November 2008 8PM
Finally, the first tagging pass is complete. It did get easier as I began to cut and paste groups of tags across similar photos (e.g. figure skaters). But it also made me realize a) there are more possible categories, b) I need to go back over and cross-reference for consistency and c) I ought to get a bit more detailed to distinguish other classification patterns that stretch across the visually obvious.
I was scheduled to present on Thursday 20 November 2008, which I initially was happy about until I remembered I have an important In Forma Theatre facilitation training workshop to attend (research / preparation for my thesis project). So I will likely be presenting *this* Thursday 13 November. I definitely won’t be experiencing any miracles in software or web development over the next four days, but perhaps I can at least represent my idea visually in Photoshop…
Categories: Courses
Tagged: DM8305
Tuesday 4 November 2008 8:54PM
Well, this sure gets tedious applying tags (from my list of 30 or so) to 100 images in Flickr and, of course, I find myself caught up in word choice, struggling for some kind of consistency. Should I use ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ or ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’? And then I find certain tags are not obvious, such as ‘wide’ (for shot type). Should I abbreviate shot types to WA (wide angle), MW (medium wide) and CU (close up)?
I’ve also been thinking about the final form as I go through the tagging (unfinished as yet). A 3D tag cloud à la Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus (been around for awhile) combined with images à la Taglines is what I imagine. I lack the skills to create such a thing on my own before 20 November, but surely someone else has developed software that enables a user to create their own tag clouds… hmmm, there’s Tag Cloud Generator for WordPress (easier to use for Windows users), a subscription-based web service called ZoomClouds, as well as various modules and plug-ins for specific social sites like Twitter and del.icio.us or content management systems like Drupal, Zope or Plone.
I will have to do more research. Meanwhile I have tags to keep adding to my 100 Images in Flickr.
Categories: Courses
Tagged: DM8305
