Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

Multimedia question answering

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A Systematic Literature Review on Image Information Needs and Behaviors

Purpose: With ready access to search engines and social media platforms, the way people find image information has evolved and diversified in the past two decades. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the literature on image information needs and behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: Following an eight-step procedure for conducting systematic literature reviews, the paper presents an analysis of peer-reviewed work on image information needs and behaviors, with publications ranging from the years 1997 to 2019. Findings: Application of the inclusion criteria led to 69 peer-reviewed works. These works were synthesized according to the following categories: research methods, users targeted, image types, identified needs, search behaviors, and search obstacles. The reviewed studies show that people seek and use images for multiple reasons, including entertainment, illustration, aesthetic appreciation, knowledge construction, engagement, inspiration, and social interactions. The reviewed studies also report that common strategies for image searches include keyword searches with short queries, browsing, specialization, and reformulation. Observed trends suggest common deployment of query analysis, survey questionnaires, and undergraduate participant pools to research image information needs and behavior. Originality: At this point, after more than two decades of image information needs research, a holistic systematic review of the literature was long overdue. The way users find image information has evolved and diversified due to technological developments in image retrieval. By synthesizing this burgeoning field into specific foci, this systematic literature review provides a foundation for future empirical investigation. With this foundation set, the paper then pinpoints key research gaps to investigate, particularly the influence of user expertise, a need for more diverse population samples, a dearth of qualitative data, new search features, and information and visual literacies instruction

Challenges in Image Cataloging: A Case Study of the Image Database at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center

This paper reviews some challenges of image cataloging in the form of a literature review and a usability study conducted on the image database at North Carolina Biotechnology Center, hosted on Presto Inmagic software. The usability study aims to examine whether the addition of descriptive metadata detailing the conceptual aspects of images, e.g. the images' Aboutness, has a positive effect on users' searching experience while they conduct a series of assigned searching tasks designed to generate queries that require searching for images whose subject can be considered both general and abstract. In addition to this research question, the database design and existing description are examined for effectiveness

Online Visual Image Resources and Reference Services: Understanding Preferred Resources

As students and teachers in higher education begin to use images in their courses, assignments, and research more frequently, new skills and literacies are needed to find and use images on the Web. Images can be found online in several different types of resources, including subscription image databases, freely available digital libraries and collections, user-generated collections such as Fickr or Picasa, and the general Web. Academic libraries and librarians can serve the image needs of their users by providing access to online image resources and visual literacy instruction. This paper presents a research study that explored the types of image reference questions librarians receive, the resources they use most often, and the difficulties of searching for images online

Identidad folksonómica de la comunidad Ethnicity en Flickr : aproximación ciberetnográfica a los procesos de etiquetado social

110 páginas.Trabajo de Máster Oficial en Comunicación y Educación Audiovisual. Universidad Internacional de Andalucía / Universidad de Huelva. Director: Dr. Ramón Tirado Morueta. Se repasan las características del modelo folksonómico como propuesta representacionista que busca la contextualidad e interconexión sociocultural entre los dominios de conocimiento. Se estudian los preceptos discursivos de disciplinas como la Cibersemiótica, la Visualización del Conocimiento, el Análisis de redes sociales y la Etnografía virtual para comprender, desde sus esencias, una parte importante del escenario transdisciplinar de las folksonomías. Se presenta, desde esta transversalidad, una aproximación ciberetnográfica a cómo se suceden los procesos de etiquetado social en la comunidad de práctica Ethnicity del marcador social Flickr. Se estudiaron 705 imágenes agregadas por los 80 miembros del grupo lo cual ha permitido visualizar un escenario que fomenta la agregación, representación y socialización de recursos de conocimiento. A partir del análisis de co-palabras se estudiaron las 9027 etiquetas descriptivas aportadas por la comunidad para identificar los principales intereses temáticos Ethnicity

JPEG: the quadruple object

The thesis, together with its practice-research works, presents an object-oriented perspective on the JPEG standard. Using the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman as a theoretical and also practical starting point, the thesis looks to provide an account of the JPEG digital object and its enfolding within the governmental scopic regime. The thesis looks to move beyond accounts of digital objects and protocols within software studies that position the object in terms of issues of relationality, processuality and potentiality. From an object-oriented point of view, the digital object must be seen as exceeding its relations, as actual, present and holding nothing in reserve. The thesis presents an account of JPEG starting from that position as well as an object-oriented account of JPEG’s position within the distributed, governmental scopic regime via an analysis of Facebook’s Timeline, tagging and Haystack systems. As part of a practice-research project, the author looked to use that perspective within photographic and broader imaging practices as a spur to new work and also as a “laboratory” to explore Harman’s framework. The thesis presents the findings of those “experiments” in the form of a report alongside practice-research eBooks. These works were not designed to be illustrations of the theory, nor works to be “analysed”. Rather, following the lead of Ian Bogost and Mark Amerika, they were designed to be “philosophical works” in the sense of works that “did” philosophy

Pictures in words : indexing, folksonomy and representation of subject content in historic photographs

Subject access to images is a major issue for image collections. Research is needed to understand how indexing and tagging contribute to make the subjects of historic photographs accessible. This thesis firstly investigates the evidence of cognitive dissonance between indexers and users in the way they attribute subjects to historic photographs, and, secondly, how indexers and users might work together to enhance subject description. It analyses how current indexing and social tagging represent the subject content of historic photographs. It also suggests a practical way indexers can work with taggers to deal with the classic problem of resource constraints and to enhance metadata to make photo collections more accessible. In an original application of the Shatford/Panofsky classification matrix within the applications domain of historic images, patterns of subject attribution are explored between taggers and professional indexers. The study was conducted in two stages. The first stage (Studies A to D) investigated how professional indexers and taggers represent the subject content of historic photographs and revealed differences based on Shatford/Panofsky. The indexers (Study A) demonstrated a propensity for specific and generic subjects and almost complete avoidance of abstracts. In contrast, a pilot study with users (Study B) and with baseline taggers (Studies C and D) showed their propensity for generics and equal inclination to specifics and abstracts. The evidence supports the conclusion that indexers and users approach the subject content of historic photographs differently, demonstrating cognitive dissonance, a conflict between how they appear to think about and interpret images. The second stage (Study E) demonstrated that an online training intervention affected tagging behaviour. The intervention resulted in increased tagging and fuller representation of all subject facets according to the Shatford/Panofsky classification matrix. The evidence showed that trained taggers tagged more generic and abstract facets than untrained taggers. Importantly, this suggests that training supports the annotation of the higher levels of subject content and so potentially provides enhanced intellectual access. The research demonstrated a practical way institutions can work with taggers to extend the representation of subject content in historic photographs. Improved subject description is critical for intellectual access and retrieval in the cultural heritage space. Through systematic application of the training method a richer corpus of descriptors might be created that enhances machine based information retrieval via automatic extraction