Structures Of Image Collections: From Chauvet-pont-d' Arc To Flickr

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
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Traditional collections of images from those in museums to those in family photo albums—tend to be organized along traditional lines, whether chronologically, by type, by subject or event, or by some other common denominator normally determined by professionals in the field. The combination of digital cameras, computers, and the Internet has allowed a huge number of images to be taken and made available to a far, far larger audience than has ever been possible before. This in turn brings about Replica Cartier the need for a reexamination of how images are organized and presented, the characteristics that can and should be used to create image collections, and, most importantly, the role of user needs and preferences in forming these collections.

The fifteen chapters of this indexed textbook fall under the overarching idea that the user's interests should be the foremost consideration when an image collection is being assembled and when the contents of that collection are being described. Howard F. Greisdorf and Brian C. O'Connor cover ...
... three main topics: what collections are and why they are made, what images are for and how they are described, and the main problems and the new realities of the new image-seeking user. The authors acknowledge that they do not cover several topics in the field of image indexing, most notably content-based image retrieval and other physically oriented issues, but offer this work as an examination of the concerns surrounding the subject indexing of images, a sort of state-of-the-question address to the community. The authors note that we tend to collect things not just images but other items as well as a way to help us remember a particular time, place, or event. A collection need not be defined by the proximity of its items to one another, nor does it need to be viewable to Tag Heuer Replica Watches a large portion of potential viewers. It simply needs to be usable for some purpose by at least one person. In collections of visual materials, we see shapes and boundaries first, then shadows and textures, then color and hue. It is only after we perceive these attributes of the physical image that we can begin to address the meaning inherent in that image.

Greisdorf and O'Connor write, "As a result, we tend to live, work, and play in two different worlds, constantly vacillating between them. One being the world of perception, filled with appearances, and the other being the world of conception, filled with words, based on how we think" (p. 18). Humans collect things based on both of these notions, but these things may or may not constitute a collection as we may normally think of it. In our homes, we might have collections of things on the refrigerator door, in the attic, or scattered about the house, but to us these are still collections and are organized in such a way that we derive some sort of benefit from them and this is what the authors say matters, that there is some reasonable explanation for the collection to be constituted as we may find it. We find this idea far more prevalent today than twenty years ago because various Internet realities have allowed for more diverse and less structured collections made for reasons sometimes having less to do with helping us remember and more to do with aesthetics, community, or whim.