December CommQuote

 

We've had videos reign as CommQuotes; our quote this month is an image (or two).

There's more to  Erik Kessels 24 HRS in Photos installation than meets the eye. What looks like just a junky room full of trash is actually all of the images uploaded to the popular social networking photography site Flickr on a single day in October. Kessels printed out over 900,000 images that exhibit participants can walk through or pick up for closer viewing.

Kessels’ installation is part of A Sense of Place, a photography group exhibit on view at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco through May 2014. A review of the show can be found here.

You can get to know this artist/designer better at this TEDxBreda talk.

July CommQuote

This month's quote is brought to us by Nick Bilton, author, professor and technology reporter for The New York Times in his July 1 Disruptions column, "Dropping the Tedium of Typing for Photos That Say It All." Given the article's length I'm excerpting way too much of it I'm sure. But it's chock full of so many interesting observations I couldn't rein in the work of my scissors (and Elmer's glue). 

"Photos, once slices of a moment in the past - sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation - are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what's for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, "Hey, I'm waiting for you," is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts. "This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment," said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are "turning photography into a communication medium."

...Snapchat is a mobile application that allows a person to take and send a picture or video, then control how long - up to 10 seconds - it's visible to the person who receives it. After the photo is viewed, it disappears forever, like a casual exchange on the street. "You have images now that have no possible afterlife," said Kelsey. "They are simply communicative."

...What's more, there are no language barriers with images. As the world grows smaller, thanks to technology, people from all over the globe can chat with images that translate into a universal tongue. Do you speak only Mandarin? No problem, you can now communicate with someone who speaks only English. Take a picture and reply. Germans and Spaniards? Snap! Send. Done.

...It's a shift that appears to be coming at the expense of the last big thing. Images sent between cellphones are on the rise as text messages continue to fall, according to CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry. An industry report released this year said 2.19 trillion text messages were sent and received in 2012, about 5 percent less than a year earlier. In comparison, MMS, or multimedia messages that include photos and videos, grew by 41 percent to 74.5 billion in 2012.

...So isn't this all bad for society? Another blow for the English language where children won't even bother to communicate in LOL-speak anymore? "We're tiptoeing into a potentially very deep and interesting new way of communicating," said Mitchell Stephens, author of "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word," and a journalism professor at New York University."--Nick Bilton, NYT, Business section, July 1

Searching Pictures in Lexis-Nexis?

Doesn't seem possible does it? Since there are hardly any images in Lexis-Nexis Academic documents. All true, but when an image is included in an article it is tagged with metadata that is maintained and can be searched on. As Jennifer Matheny explains in a Lexis-Nexis Wiki post a couple months back:

Are you curious to see how many newspapers re-ran an Annie Liebovitz photo on a particular day? Do you want to know how many Getty Images are used by newspapers this month? Use the GRAPHIC section in your search!

On the Power Search form, select a publication or a group file. Then, the Add Section search should pop up. Select "GRAPHIC" from the drop-down box. Type in your term and click the blue Add to Search button.

Of course you still can't view the pictures but sometimes all you want are counts, pictures of Palin versus pictures of Biden, for instance, or such search results provide an interim step for locating pictures elsewhere--on microfilm or electronic files that offer page facsimiles.