Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck

Google Books: A Meta Data Train Wreck by Geoff Nunberg definitely made me think deeply about the serious ramifications of Google’s digital archivist and their motivations to scan quality books and literature onto the web. It made me wonder if the motivations of google’s archivists were taking this very new problem to heart.

This “train wreck” that google has made for itself, especially as the largest and more popular go to search engine, is both amazing and disturbing.  Its amazing because they have taken on a major feat for the future of digital archiving which is commendable, yet are they doing it for the right reasons?  I immediately thought of the next generation of researchers, historians and book collectors. Would these fresh minds be mislead, misinformed or be forever digging for the factual records of these works? Would these new researchers have to verify and double check dates and meta data concerning books stored by the Google?

If Google is purposely manipulating or altering meta data of books searched on their site, it is a sign that the future of digital archiving is in trouble. According to Geoff Nunberg, Google has a very large portion of it’s collections systematically mis-dated and with hundreds of thousands of classifications errors.  For example, it carries a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress listed under “Drama”.   Nunberg argues that these mistakes are prevalent throughout the system but who is to blame for this? Should we blame the publisher? Should we blame librarians? or should the mislabeling of books on google’s attempt to compete with Amazon?

Google must look deeper at it’s responsibility for future digital archiving and the importance of this practice.  This important practice of storing and scanning literature can not be taken lightly and Google should understand its vital role in this effort to preserve literature and history.  Future scholars will use Google’s files and collections in the future and if Google has not decided to correct this issue, I am afraid we will continue into a world of “fake information” and just unreliable hit and miss “googling”.

It makes me nervous when Google executives are confronted with these concerns and begin to pass on the responsibility to librarians, users and providers of the materials. It makes me concerned about future meta data scanned by Google Books. Will they have the best intentions for the people or will they become this private data-mining company that harbor information?  Will they become this meta data monopoly providing books to a certain social class?

Nature & The Archive

From archiving ice to an artist’s dated computer work, the materiality of capturing the ephemeral materiality is a huge part of the archive. Figuring out, in a rapidly changing climate, how to archive and subsequently learn about our own earthly environment is important to our very existence.

The ice archive fascinated me and that’s what I chose to focus on for my presentation. A few things that stood out to me here are:

  1. Scientist plays the role of the archivist. When archiving nature, we have a group of professionals that are not experts in saving, but in studying/experimenting. What does that mean for how the archive is organized? Are all these scientist/archivists talking around the world? Are they working together to determine what to archive most efficiently?
  2. I have seen the natural world displayed in museums and various exhibits, but I haven’t thought of it in a living and breathing archive. This is an archive that takes an immense amount of energy to upkeep…and there is a deep irony of using the earth’s resources to save the earth’s creations.
  3. If we lose some species of insects or plants in our future, will the archive play a role in saving our existence? Should we be looking at our “nature” archives in this way?

 

Silence Between the Notes

 

Claude Debussy famously said, “Music is the silence between the notes.” In this same way, Wolfgang Ernst expresses a need for us to remember that in the digitization of the Archive, we will experience a lossiness of intention implied by the creating body.

Even in expressing through new media there is a “lossiness” of intention. In texts, or Twitter and Facebook posts, or even the “arcane” email  – often it is difficult TO READ INTENTION. there is a removal of latency tone body language (see what i did there)?

Just this weekend, John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, implored people to read through transcripts of No. 45’s speeches to see the lack of linear thought and coherent expression in his use of language.

I agree that tone, intention, the space between the notes, is difficult to express and difficult to digitize.

E. Coli is now a Movie Star!

Out with the Old, In with the New… not exactly. Technology is interconnected. The software and hardware may become obsolete, yet what is produced from them are not. It is this interconnectivity that makes digital material so hard to store and preserve.

This week what has impacted me the most is human behavior in relationship to stuff and its environment. We create stuff, destroy stuff, and then become insanely anxious about not having “The” stuff so we hoard, in a last attempt to conserve it and have it available. Hint: We are saving motion pictures in DNA. I will not be a hypocrite and say that this is not intriguing and exciting. The thought of cell spies is very interesting, yet at the same time I feel it is a symptom of our recklessness. The only reason we would need spy cells is too counteract our own neglect in tacking care of ourselves (not to discredit scientific advancements).

On that same note, after reading “Arks of the Apocalypse” by Malia Wollan I literally cried. Bio banks, Coral Nurseries, Environmental Banks, Milk Banks! It all seems insane to me. We are saving all this biological material in the hopes that in the future “smarter scientists” fix the mess we created. In this regard, the reason behind this practice I feel distorts the concept of the archive, because we are no longer conserving materials to preserve knowledge or a picture of a time. What we are doing is amassing anything and everything. In the end, what will we do with all of it? Anything can happen (and things have happened and will continue to happen), and stored material can be lost in a blink of an eye. So, shouldn’t we be more considerate with our environment and our intellectual creations and change our behavior now? There is so much the Archive can do or handle.

archives for the apocalypse and for digital media

The readings from this week made me realize two very different paths that seems to be happening with the use and conception of archive and media storage nowadays. As the text “Arks of Apocalypse” explains, we are living in the Anthropocene epoch, meaning that we know we are destroying our ecosystems so we are trying to save everything we can, creating the many repositories places around the world (repositories of seeds, animals, ice) in the last years. On the other hand, the internet and the digital media have been changing the idea of the archive. The archival media memory is, as Wolfgang Ernst reveals, intrinsically related to a time-based organization instead of a spatial one, becoming what he calls “de-monumentalized”.

It seems that these repositories places are the current stronger example of archive in the “traditional” sense, meaning a process of choosing what to preserve (and what not to) with a place to carefully storage everything, in which access is not easy (physically and bureaucratically), and in which there is a very linear and written-based order to organize, whereas the internet and the digital media is more like an anarchive, with no specific place and in which discontinuity and ephemerality are part of. The first one gives us a feeling of stability that can save all we need (in an unstable world) while the second is a “constant dynamic flow of information” in which we have to deal with absence (p. 110).

I wonder why these two almost opposite processes are happening at the same time and how can one give the other any “release” of their own processes.

Stranger than Science Fiction: DNA Storage for Film Clips & Shakespeare’s Sonnets?!

I read through the articles about ice as a medium for storage, the frozen zoos, and other types of “Arks of the Apocalypse” to archive and preserve our planet’s ecological biodiversity for posterity. But it was the New York Times article, “Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA” that struck me as the most intriguing among this week’s selection of readings. Since I had majored in psychology as an undergraduate student and spent a lot of time reading about Rene Descartes and the notion of mind-body dualism in my philosophy classes, I needed to wrap my head around what it meant that we can now use DNA as storage spaces for various types of information after coming across this fairly recent article.

DNA itself is codified organic material made up primarily out of four types of nucleotide protein bases—adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytocine (C). DNA, our biology, is physical matter, whereas our minds are on the metaphysical cognitive level. From a classical Cartesian mind-body dualism perspective the brain (as an organ in the body) is separate from the mind, which is simultaneously a generator, processor, and repository of information, knowledge, beliefs, desires, and dreams. Mental events are side effects of complex physiological systems becoming activated (e.g. neurons firing to send signals to the rest of the brain when processing external environmental stimuli or reacting to an internal physiological reaction). Mental events (thoughts/feelings/mental images) are not exactly the brain activity itself. So if DNA is part of the physiological structure, how can visual media data containing mental images be encoded into DNA?

CAT scans and MRIs can show us the structural lobe areas of the brain, and EEGs can highlight the neurological activation in process in relation to their location in the brain, but these tests don’t really tell us much about what the person is actually thinking and/or feeling at the moment that these data are captured, unless the person being examined tells the evaluator. You can screen a person to see that they’re probably hungry if their hypothalamus is active, but unless the person explicitly states it, you cannot really know what specific kind of food they might be craving in that exact moment (e.g. a cheeseburger with fries from Wendy’s as opposed to a fruit salad).

So what does all of this mean now when scientists claim that we can now store visual media data, such as clips from a motion picture or snippets of Shakespeare’s sonnets, into strips of DNA as an alternative/new place to store our media archaeology? DNA holds organic information, so how does one translate and transcribe visual media data (e.g. pixels) into codified protein base instructions into bacterial cells for film archival preservation?

It sounds like crazy science fiction, but it amazes me how geneticists and other scientists have come up with ways to execute this idea of storing data in bacterial DNA. I think this could possibly revolutionize heath care industry in terms of accurately monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients on a longitudinal scale (e.g. cancer patients). As quoted from the article: “The idea is to have bacteria engineered as recording devices drift up to the brain in the blood and take notes for a while. Scientists would then extract the bacteria and examine their DNA to see what they had observed in the brain neurons.”

Sure, “DNA bacterial data storage”—as I’m going to call it (that sounds so odd!)—could be a sustainable organic solution to the problem we have of trying to minimize wasteful media materials (e.g. discarded discs, decayed magnetic tapes, etc.). I can accept and believe Dr. George Church when he asserts that “Storing information in DNA is this side of science fiction.”

However, I’m still left wondering about the ethical implications of all of this in terms of just how we are going to use these methods to address social issues if geneticists expand beyond bacterial DNA and move to human DNA to store media data. While it would be edgy to say at a party that I literally have Shakespeare’s sonnets embedded in my DNA (as opposed to joking that poetry’s in my soul), I have to question what other practical purposes this kind of data codification, storage, and archival preservation would serve in the broader auspices of institutional infrastructures.

What would the government do if they knew I had classified information encoded in my body? Am I a piece of property if I am the only individual (literally) carrying DNA with sensitive secrets (such as the instructions to a medical cure, the whole coding language for digital and analog media files to DNA storage, or the geographical location of a nuclear weapon) on my person? Where would my human rights begin and my ownership of this data end?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I’m missing something here and need to do more research on the topic. But what I do know is that truth is stranger than science fiction. It’s epistemologically mind-blowing.

Preserving Sound + Image While Keeping Sustainability In Mind

One of the challenges of capturing and archiving sound and image from the past is preserving the material of the mediums on which the data was recorded. Prelinger was innovative in having the foresight to preserve old discarded educational film reels dating since the WWII era, and it’s great to see that people still find his film archive to be useful for research and other kinds of media production. I’m curious about how the Library of Congress is preserving each delicate film reel from the collection they had acquired from Prelinger. It’s one thing to have a temperature-controlled vault within a building to store them. However, I would imagine that the actual handling of the material, many of which are probably at least over seventy years old, would still have to go through some kind of preservation and/or restoration process.

Even when it comes to recording and archiving performance art, such as spoken word poetry, we still face the same issue of trying to preserve an ephemeral experience in a more permanent medium that could withstand time. “The Politics of Film Archival Practice” touches on these same issues of exploring the processes of preservation and restoration of materials. As old and current media formats get outdated and replaced by newer technological advances, we still have to consider which sets of materials are worth saving and ensure that data is not lost and that the quality of the materials is not sacrificed in the process. In her piece “Chemistry is Restoring our Audio History from Melting,” Katherine Gammon wrote about the gradual degeneration of tapes, discs, and film recording materials, and she also addressed the ways in which they are being restored and preserved through high-resolution digitization. This reminded me of our previous reading from Zack Lischer-Katz, “Studying the Materiality of Media Archives in the Age of Digitization: Forensics, Infrastructures, and Ecologies.” As we replace old film reels with data servers, but we also need to keep in mind the effects that our media waste in archival practices have on our ecological environments.

Sound

What struck me in this weeks readings was the handling of decay and ‘dematerialization’ of sounds discussed in Alvin Luciers piece.   It reminded me of how similar personal memories are subject to disintegration, the inevitably of fading of certain parts and amplification of other parts until they can be completely obliterated or forgotten if there isn’t some sort of structure or distinct outcome.  And also the reason that we tell stories or memories to one person, but not another seems to function in an equally selective way as to who gets to have access to things that are important, or can only be understood in certain circumstances.

It seems natural that presentism of evaluating an objects impacts access to them, but that sounds have the added layer of needing secondary access through another device or transference makes them seem much more fragile.  Like personal memories, if the person disappears, like the technology, they will be gone forever, whereas with an object, it will forever exist in some form, even in a less perfect way.

testing testing 1-2-3…

In the Professor’s interview, she touches on the unique offerings the medium (or mode) of sound can have in an archival context. She mentions the “medium, material, and volumetric properties of both the recorded sounding subject or object and the space in which that recording occurred”. It is certainly true that analog sound recordings carry a type of metadata about the state of the space, and the world, at the time of recording. Reading the Gammon article, it seems as though the widespread degradation of analog (magnetic) media constitutes a loss of our collective memory of the acoustics (and spacial properties) of all the places at which important sounds have been captured. Even in the digital recording era, there still exists an important relationship between space and sound, although the impacts on audio fidelity seem reduced.

 I just had a relevant experience this past weekend with friends who sat around a studio and mastered an album through digital-analog transfer, and back. In the world of music, the degradative properties of analog mediums are often sought out for use as a post-production filter to bring aesthetic merit to sets of digitally edited and recorded songs. The descriptions of the “improvements” heard when running digital songs through tape, and back again, is often described in terms of increased “dimensionality”. This makes me wonder whether culturally we deeply associate analog grit (the behavior of tape) with the acoustic properties of rooms used for recording at the height of the analog age in popular music (the old recording studio room setups – lots of echoes and phase cancellation, textures of wood, things which many engineers consider a no-no, but which also define the sounds of classic records we all love)…

Processing Post

The sound collections in the listenings are impressive and refreshing to me simply because of the different sensory information other than a visual or written encyclopedia. Acoustic productions like podcasts gained in popularity over the past several years. My mom tends to go to sleep with a book podcast in stressful days. ASMR seems to have become a subculture. The listenings just reminded me of the magnetic tapes I had in my first and second grade, which allowed me to enjoy storytelling before reading more text.

Screens and sound cater to the head, and what about the body? I think the artists immersed in the now are inclined to create an atmosphere with more than visual and acoustic effects. With 3D-printing and more technologies, touch would be increasingly represented. However, our storage may not be enough to record a period of time after new physical information becomes archivable.

Speaking of media archaeology, what excites me is that it is cyberpunk (or silkpunk if the early time is focused on). Intellectual property can date back to at least four centuries ago. It seems that human imagination has evolved slower than I expected.

Theory, emulation, classification…

The over-theorization of archives confuses me more as my study of it deepens. I enjoyed reading Rick Prelinger, because to me the best way to understand things is to ground them, and he did just that for me. What are archives? Who is an archivist? Should and/or archives participatory? Archives as an institution and a political actor… I mean it goes on and on and on! This is why I now have more questions than answers and with no clear way in which I will start to unravel all my confusion because the archive is a complex organism that interacts with many actors and contains many roads.

Maybe my questions arise from a naive place, yet the separation of scholars from the archives and the separation of the archives from media archeology as reflected in “Media Archeology of Poetry and Sound”, demonstrate a constant in the field, which is the non recognition of the archive and therefore all that it comprises, hence in a way alienating it from intellectual processes and research. Moreover, I am conflicted with the dichotomy between the “bureaucratic, inflexible” traditional archive and the participatory archive being considered in contemporary culture. On one hand, I believe that the archive should be more adaptable to the changes that time imposes, yet on the other the idea of newcomers dancing within the archive realm makes me very uncomfortable.

The Paradox of Preserving a Performance

I have friends who work in the performance world, one is a dancer at the New York City Ballet and another is a program director at BAC (Baryshnikov Arts Center). The three of us have talked, a few times, about preserving performances and we wish we could, but they aren’t mean to be preserved.

While completing this week’s readings, I kept going back to that conversation and thinking about how the preservation of the sound/performance can alter it…thereby creating another layer of experience that wasn’t present when it was viewed by an audience. What archive the performance/sound is a part of can create and embedded meaning, how it was catalogued, who presented it, etc.

The multi-sensory archive can offer more context to the experience of the archival object, but it can’t ever fully preserve the context/time/space of the object. Do we accept those imperfections, try to improve them (as people are doing), or should we let these pieces die as perhaps they were meant to? Zen for Film was a perfect paradoxical example of this. Given the principles of Zen to be in the moment and let each moment flow and die as we move to the next.

Nov. 12: Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of New York @ NYU

See the NYU Skirball website for schedule + tickets  and Rick’s list of relevant readings

Co-presented with the Museum of the Moving Image

Since 2006, film historian and archivist extraordinaire Rick Prelinger has presented twenty participatory urban-history events to enthusiastic audiences in San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, and at festivals throughout the world. For the first time, he is bringing his Lost Landscapes project to New York City.

Lost Landscapes of New York (approx. 85 mins., HD video transferred from 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film) mixes home movies by New Yorkers, tourists, and semi-professional cinematographers with outtakes from feature films and background “process plates” picturing granular details of New York’s cityscape. The combination of intimate moments, memories from many New York neighborhoods, and a variety of rare cinematic perspectives forms a 21st-century city symphony whose soundtrack will be provided by the audience. Viewers will be invited to comment, to ask questions and to interact with one another as the screening unfolds.

Lost Landscapes of New York will span much of the 20th century, covering daily life, work, and celebration, and including street views of the Lower East Side, Harlem, Williamsburg, and Bensonhurst; a ride from the Bronx to Grand Central in the 1930s; old Penn Station before its demolition; the Lincoln Center area pre-redevelopment; street photographers in Times Square; 1931 Times Square scenes in color; Spanish Harlem in the 1960s; Manhattan’s exuberant neon signage; firefighting in the 1920s and 1930s; garment strikes in the 1930s; Depression-era “Hoovervilles”; crowds at Coney Island in the 1920s; Italian Americans in Brooklyn in the 1930s; and a visit to both 1939-40 and 1964-65 Worlds’ Fairs.

Angry Librarian

“The immense backlogs of physical film seem to defy efforts to process them. Could we bring nonprofessionals into the archives to work with materials, annotate, repair, conserve, prepare for copying and scanning?” – Rick Prelinger, “Workshops, Workflows & Wooden Trains,” Keynote at Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Pre-Conference, Oakland, CA, 2015

In an effort to house the full contents of The Archive at a quaint and genteel historical society, the powers that be have decided to expand the archival structure. Great! But, now what? There is no existing catalog; there is no increase in labor; and there is no foundation in place for The Archive to be accessed any more by a public audience in the larger structure than in its current home. So what can we do?

The notion of control over The Archive is prevalent in Prelinger’s presentation as is his theory that not only should outward viewing of the archive be given to the people, but so should the back-end structure. In the same way that Christine Mitchell describes being blocked from access to digitized media in Concordia’s archive because the machines used to digitize must be preserved and protected from overuse (Amodern, 2004), protecting the contents of The Archive from being misused by blocking access to the back-end structure is shortsighted and counterintuitive to the purpose of the archive. If it’s preserved and no one knows it’s there, then what’s the point of preservation?

Application Presentation

Application Presentation

Photo Collection

 

I chose this funny picture (01) to start: it is the first camera ever made (photographed by the second one ever made), at least this is what is says on the website I got it. I found it funny because of the size and because, somehow, the machine and its materiality stand out more than people.

One point that I found very interesting in the readings is the fact that, since the beginning of photography, the issue of archive was part of its production.

There’s an example on John Tagg’s text, which is the stereograph (02), [this double picture that you need to use a specific “viewer”, called the stereoscope, to see the picture.]

The stereograph had a peak of popularity around 1859 and Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American physician, foresaw that this proliferation would create big collections that would need a form of classification and organization in libraries.

Also, it created the necessity of a piece of furniture that would make the storage of them possible, in an organized way – thus the creation of the file cabinet (03), which is this furniture on our left, with the drawer open.

——

 

Like the stereograph, the same situation happened with photography since its beginning. Bertillon (04), French director of the identification bureau of the Paris prefecture of Police, was the inventor of the first system for cataloging and retrieving of photographic records (05).

He had to organize the pictures of criminals and suspects in a way that would be easy to work and access, becoming easy to identify people and connect them to see if they had similar expressions and characteristics.

Besides organizing the photos, he also developed a system for criminal identification (06), based on photos. He used what we called today the mug shot along with detailed pictures of parts of the face, based in five primary measurements, such as the head length, the length of the middle finger, the length of the left foot.

I found interesting how he was able to create two systems of classification, one of people (07) (suspects) and one of photos and documents about them. Here is a “class” (08) he gave to explain his system for criminal identification.

—–

 

Another interesting aspect about these systems of photo classification is the fact that, many times, the method of classification create what Elizabeth Edwards says as a passive resource, in which photos are assembled regardless of their deep meaning, just like a neutral document.

For instance, the creation of the modern vertical file (09) in 1892, like this one, made possible the organization of photos using the decimal system of classification.

But the use of this system and placement made photo collection more related to the machinery of the archive (10) than to the machinery of the camera. Again, as Foucault is cited in Tagg’s text, the space of the file is the space of a disciplinary machine.

—–

 

Jumping from this date to the 1970s, but somehow still related to the commandment aspect of the archive (Foucault), I would like to talk a little bit about the NYPL Photography Archive (11), here is the home page of the now digital collection.

And this is the second point I would like to discuss about the readings.

This archive was created in 1977 by the librarian Julia van Haaften. This photography archive was “discovered” by her when she, somehow, looked into the library collection in a different way, seeing another possible organization / order, in an archive where a system of organization was not “promoting” photography. NYPL Photo Archive (12)

It’s also around this time, a little bit early, that photography started to be used in artistic works, such as Robert Rauschenberg paintings with photos (13).

So, there is a change of status in the photography work. Related to the art work, but especially to the archival process.

Photography was switching from being only a document related to another form or file, a document that would give information, to an art piece, which its aesthetic force. It also started promoting the photographer (the artist, the author). NYPL Photo Archive (14)

[ MoMA Collection already had a department of photography since 1940, which also helped this inclusion of “photography as a form of artistic expression on an equal footing with the other arts” (Thomas Weski, cited in Anne Sophie Springer text) ]

 

Which goes back to Elizabeth Edwards’ text when she talks about the possibility of the photo archive to become an active resource, with historical and creative force. NYPL Photo – Weegee (15). Citing her text on page 55

Weegge, who was a criminal photographer – something very related to information and objective documentation that, pretty obviously gained more meaning when viewed in a photo collection.

However, Douglas Crimp’s text says that though photo status changed, their way of being archived are still very related to the traditional matrix of curating: organized by genre and chronology, based on its acquisition or other “archiving” aspects. The Grain of the Present – exhibition of ten – (16)

So again, the space of the file (now, the photo) is the space of a disciplinary machine and I wonder which ways of classification can break this.

And if the photo acquired this new meaning, the aesthetic aspect of it (cited in Douglas Crimp’s text), wouldn’t be possible to think in new forms of archiving that would be less technical or information-based, and more “synesthetic”?

—–

 

These questions led me to remember a photo collection I saw at the New Museum’s exhibition last year called “The Keeper” (17)

It was a collection created by Wilson A. Bentley (American) (18) in the end of the nineteenth century and called the Snow Crystal Collection (19). Starting in 1885, he photographed and collected information about snowflakes during 47 years of his life. He was able to create an apparatus that consisted of a combination of camera and microscope.

Here is one of the photos (photo snowflake – 20)

I’m using this example because I found very interesting how the original motivation was very scientific (21), thus a documentation of nature, and, even though he was fascinated by the beauty of each snowflake (22), he didn’t consider himself an artist.

But I believe that because of the powerful photo collection he created, his work went to museum (photo newspaper 23) and gained somehow an artistic status, related to the aesthetic experience. Read second paragraph of the newspaper.

His collection was acquired by the Buffalo Museum of Science in 1947 (he was already dead). The digital library was created in 2004 by Dr. June Abbas and graduate students from the University at Buffalo’s Department of Library and Information Science.

I also find this photo collection interesting because each snowflake is unique (24) and very ephemeral, so I it’s also maybe a good metaphor of the archiving process and the photo collection as cognitive artefacts in their production and reception.

Photos 25 and 26 – more snowflakes

 

 

 

Cristina_ApplicationPresentaion_pictures

Image Atlas

I found John Tagg’s piece on photography and filing cabinets to be a really great nudge to rethink the history of photography — particularly how it was instrumental (but perhaps also itself instrumentalized) for the “archiving apparatus” (Tagg 33) which must now include platforms such as Google, etc. Photography’s role in the production of certain knowledges — especially that of ethnographic discourse further facilitated by the networks of colonial empires — is certainly within Tagg’s discussion; there are countless other scholars who write about this, or the association between photography (as light-writing) and that of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on illumination, transparency, and the light of reason. But what I really found helpful in Tagg’s piece is the unhinging of photography’s centrality, and to situate photography within a broader apparatus which included the technology of filing systems.

Under the long shadows of the archiving apparatus, and reflecting on search engines today coming up with more and more powerful reverse-image searches, I wonder if photography is increasingly pressed to the service of the archive. *Side-note: I love the Image Atlas project by Taryn Simon and the late Aaron Schwarz, which politicizes search engines and their geographical biases when it comes to image search results.

Though digressing a little from the class’s focus on archives/archiving, but keeping the line of inquiry on photography, and for those who might be interested in rethinking the definition/history/origin of photography, Joanna Zylinska has a wonderful lecture “Photography After Extinction”. It links photography and geology together, and as such forms also an interesting link back to the 1977 Original Sun Pictures exhibition mentioned in Anna-Sophie Springer’s article.  

 

Photography

What struck me throughout several of the readings this week was not just the dilemma and ongoing discussion of how to theoretically classify photography itself to be and where it should go, but how the choice of language becomes paramount in this labeling process in dictating their context longterm.

Vestberg called it the third typical problem, the ‘for whom’  access to a photograph is intended for.  That this decision dictates the kind of engagement to a photograph seems most apparent in the examples of how access through digitization has become reliant on word-searches to turn up information. Which makes the question of how the language and semantics are applied to bring up these searches seem much more political to me.

There was a tangram game that I played growing up where one person had to convey to another person through language the pictorial layout of a tangram composited geometric house or penguin, etc. that they had in front of them . We’d give relational descriptions that the pieces had to one another for them to recreate the exact image. Both people were looking at the exact same scaled, colored and shaped pieces but figuring out how to communicate how these things were arranged in relationship to one another on a flat plane, was incredibly challenging.

That the task of translating what a photographic image is in terms of scale (in multiple ways), color, complicated content is then dealing with an understanding of so many more variables, though single searchable words seems obvious.  I am curious about the hierarchical structures that the people labeling photographs then see as more important, per their audience.

Vestberg uses this quote, by Wilder ‘by stripping away some of the “photographic” traits of the photographs (author, type, origin, date)’ in favour of information pertaining to the objects they depict, photographic archives have relied precisely on the same illusion of a transparent medium, the technicalities of which are (presumed to be) irrelevant to the users of its products.’

It seems like Instagram plays with these exact same ideas to see how hashtags and labeling create more links or likes between users.  They’ve eliminated their automatic geotagging and now make it an optional choice for users, even if the image is taken nowhere near where they’ve tagged it. The connection between the words and the image is established though, creating a translation of understanding of a place to an image even if it has no physical basis.

This also reminds me of Hito Steyerl’s essay ‘In defense of the poor image, linked here:

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Archive, Knowledge, and Identity

This week’s readings brought us deeper into the archive by looking at it from another perspective of photo archives. I realized a few things about the organization of the archive that were evident before, but were really apparent in this week’s readings. John Tagg talks about how the photo archive is a “political apparatus” that is “inseparable from the rationalization of information the control of bodies, and the relegation of the photographic operator to ‘the status of a detail worker.’ There is a lot to unpack there, but overall it helps us realize the power of the archive and how its function and organization extend beyond just the organization of data and material objects and into the realm of societal norms and functions. Archives are systems of knowledge and we see both the importance and limits of the archive. As Nina Vestberg stated, the politics of truth fold into a politics of identity through the regulation of relationships both to time, truth, and memory and to the practices and technologies of record and recollection. Our archives reflect our own identity and how we think about the world.

Previously I hadn’t thought about how many different subjects the photographic archive touches and how important it is to access those photos for various disciplines (medical, artistic, etc.)

In my previous job as a copywriter in advertising I would write metadata for images to help people find our website. This was my own form of organizing a kind of photographic archive within the tripartite system that Vestberg talked about. We have the thing, then data about the thing, and finally the bits of information to help you search for the thing and determines your finding, therefore determining your exposure and knowledge.

In current terms, hashtaging on Instagram serves this same function. We are both functioning as the Warburg and Conway libraries do, we account for what a picture shows, but sometimes it is never the same as describing what it depicts.

A New World Order of Things

Libraries have always given me a sense of calm. As I enter, I’m met with hushed movements of patrons and the smell of printed paper. Whether I arrive with a clear intention of what I am taking home or not, I always take a stroll through the stacks, feeling the sense of moving through a maze of stilled information awaiting my curiosity.

Although it is difficult to impress upon generations of students the importance of searching for objects vis a vis the “the first order of order,” (Weinberger, 2007) perhaps the search for objects and relationships between them can be had by creating a digital stroll through an online world filled with first order objects. Instead of being met by a stringent set of indexing from a database interface that requires a specific word that will (fingers crossed) be tagged in the corresponding metadata, like Sir Martin’s explorations in the physical world the researcher could cull the digital landscape for hidden treasures: original letters; early photographs; clay tablets scene from 360* vantage point through VR.

Nina Vestburg is correct in analyzing the digital database and how it will be used. No longer will it be tied up behind hopeful clicks made like the roll of a die: moving forward we must ask of the database, as Vestburg has, “for whom it is intended: the same people, often specialists, who made use of the analogue archive, or a new and expanded audience, perhaps largely made up of amateurs?” (pp 481). I believe it is the latter. As a community we are continuously socialized to expect digital access to the information of the world through our Google and Wikipedia searches, so why not the contents of the library?

Collecting Photographs: The more our mediums change, the more our archival tendencies remain the same.

After taking a series of photos during an event or even throughout my vacation, I often feel overwhelmed and vexed thinking about how to organize and caption each photo. The initial excitement is still there — that feeling of “I’ve caught something unique and different that the world has yet to see through my lens,” both in the figurative and literal sense. However, developing a system in which to order, caption, tag, and file away these photos can become a daunting effort if you’ve taken hundreds of photos throughout the course of your travels.

With that said, I can only imagine how archivists at the New York Public Library must feel when combing through boxes and entire stacks of photos and other kinds of visual images in the attempt to make sense of how to properly organize the media for the public’s research uses. Paintings in a museum took time to create, but photographs are often created in a snap. As John Sarzowski, director of MoMA’s department of photography stated: “The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process — a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made… but photographs, as the man on the street puts it, were taken” (Crimp).

It doesn’t really matter whether an artist chooses a blank canvas or a camera. The photograph is just another medium, a conduit to convey the theoretical aspects of an artist’s subjectivity. I can only imagine the series of archival planning involved in curating these photographs and creating entirely new collections out of previous ones by consolidating them into sections such as “Art, Prints, and Photographs.”

The reclassification process, according to Crimp, is based on each photograph’s “newly acquired value, the value that is now attached to the ‘artists’ who made the photographs.” In a way, it’s like organizing paintings by subject (19th Century Art), topic/technique (Impressionism), and then by the artist (Monet, Manet, etc.). I personally don’t find it to be that revolutionary to designate a librarian with the new job of reorganizing and curating entirely new photo collections by “artist.” Who else is going to sift through these materials and help us make sense of it? However, what I do find noteworthy in the endeavors to do so is the subject matters that each photographic material captures — images that document particular events and which otherwise cannot be reproduced instantaneously by painting them.

As a graduate student looking back on the history of archiving and retrieving photographs, I thought that John Tagg’s articleThe Archiving Machine; or, the Camera and the Filing Cabinet, was a little amusing. “[T]he photograph’s mechanism of capture could not operate so irresistibly if not embedded in the entirely nonmimetic machinery of the catalogue and the file.”

Although Tagg is referring to a file cabinet in that quote, I also can’t help but think of the way in which I plug in my camera into my computer to upload the newly captured images. My MacBook Air still detects a certain ordering system in my Nikon DSLR camera’s memory card. Like the file cabinet, I have a medium with which I have “the possibility of storing and cross-referencing bits of information and collating them through the particular grid of a system of knowledge.”

Paintings are to photographs and JPG screenshots, as filing cabinets are to memory cards and Instagram pages, as index cards are to meta tags and hashtags. Of course, the methods of archiving are going to differ based on the type of medium (e.g. the paper that photo was printed on if printed, the type of camera used to capture the images). The mediums of art and documentation may have changed over the last century, but the overarching concepts of retrieving, ordering, and storing these visual media in specific epistemological receptacles remain the same.