Journalistic image access : description, categorization and searching

The quantity of digital imagery continues to grow, creating a pressing need to develop efficient methods for organizing and retrieving images. Knowledge on user behavior in image description and search is required for creating effective and satisfying searching experiences. The nature of visual information and journalistic images creates challenges in representing and matching images with user needs. The goal of this dissertation was to understand the processes in journalistic image access (description, categorization, and searching), and the effects of contextual factors on preferred access points. These were studied using multiple data collection and analysis methods across several studies. Image attributes used to describe journalistic imagery were analyzed based on description tasks and compared to a typology developed through a meta-analysis of literature on image attributes. Journalistic image search processes and query types were analyzed through a field study and multimodal image retrieval experiment. Image categorization was studied via sorting experiments leading to a categorization model. Advances to research methods concerning search tasks and categorization procedures were implemented. Contextual effects on image access were found related to organizational contexts, work, and search tasks, as well as publication context. Image retrieval in a journalistic work context was contextual at the level of image needs and search process. While text queries, together with browsing, remained the key access mode to journalistic imagery, participants also used visual access modes in the experiment, constructing multimodal queries. Assigned search task type and searcher expertise had an effect on query modes utilized. Journalistic images were mostly described and queried for on the semantic level but also syntactic attributes were used. Constraining the description led to more abstract descriptions. Image similarity was evaluated mainly based on generic semantics. However, functionally oriented categories were also constructed, especially by domain experts. Availability of page context promoted thematic rather than object-based categorization. The findings increase our understanding of user behavior in image description, categorization, and searching, as well as have implications for future solutions in journalistic image access. The contexts of image production, use, and search merit more interest in research as these could be leveraged for supporting annotation and retrieval. Multiple access points should be created for journalistic images based on image content and function. Support for multimodal query formulation should also be offered. The contributions of this dissertation may be used to create evaluation criteria for journalistic image access systems

A Qualitative Representation of Spatial Scenes in R2 with Regions and Lines

Regions and lines are common geographic abstractions for geographic objects. Collections of regions, lines, and other representations of spatial objects form a spatial scene, along with their relations. For instance, the states of Maine and New Hampshire can be represented by a pair of regions and related based on their topological properties. These two states are adjacent (i.e., they meet along their shared boundary), whereas Maine and Florida are not adjacent (i.e., they are disjoint). A detailed model for qualitatively describing spatial scenes should capture the essential properties of a configuration such that a description of the represented objects and their relations can be generated. Such a description should then be able to reproduce a scene in a way that preserves all topological relationships, but without regards to metric details. Coarse approaches to qualitative spatial reasoning may underspecify certain relations. For example, if two objects meet, it is unclear if they meet along an edge, at a single point, or multiple times along their boundaries. Where the boundaries of spatial objects converge, this is called a spatial intersection. This thesis develops a model for spatial scene descriptions primarily through sequences of detailed spatial intersections and object containment, capturing how complex spatial objects relate. With a theory of complex spatial scenes developed, a tool that will automatically generate a formal description of a spatial scene is prototyped, enabling the described objects to be analyzed. The strengths and weaknesses of the provided model will be discussed relative to other models of spatial scene description, along with further refinements

Making mathematics on paper : constructing representations of stories about related linear functions

This dissertation takes up the problem of applied quantitative inference as a central question for cognitive science, asking what must happen during problem solving for people to obtain a meaningful and effective representation of the problem. The core of the dissertation reports exploratory empirical studies that seek to answer the descriptive question of how quantitative inferences are generated, pursued, and evaluated by problem solvers with different mathematical backgrounds. These are framed against a controversy, described in Chapter 2, over the theoretical and empirical validity of current cognitive science accounts of problems, solutions, knowledge, and competent human activity outside of laboratory or school settings.Chapter 3 describes a written protocol study of algebra story problem solving among advanced undergraduates in computer science. A relatively open-ended interpretive framework for "problem-solving episodes" is developed and applied to their written solution attempts. The resulting description of problem-solving activities gives a surprising image of competence among an important occupational target for standard mathematics instruction.Chapter 4 follows these results into detailed verbal problem-solving interviews with algebra students and teachers. These provide a comparison across settings and levels of competence for the same set of problems. The results corroborate similar generative activities outside the standard formalism of algebra across levels of competence. Notable among these nonalgebraic problem-solving activities are "model-based reasoning tactics," in which people reason about quantitative relations in terms of the dimensional structure of functional relations described in the problem. These tactics support different activities within surrounding solution attempts and usually describe "states" in the problem's situational structure.Chapter 5 holds these activities accountable to local combinations of notation and quantity, reinterpreting results for model-based reasoning in an ecological analysis of material designs for constructing and evaluating quantitative inferences. This analysis brings forward important relations between what material designs afford problem solvers and the complexity of episodic structure observed in their solution attempts. The dissertation closes with a reappraisal of the relationship between knowledge, person, and setting and, I will argue, puts us on a more promising track for a descriptively adequate theoretical account of constructing mathematical representations that support applied quantitative inference

Reading queer subtexts in children’s literature

The purpose of this project is to explore and to challenge heteronormative assumptions regarding childhood and adolescence. I will show how these assumptions affect the literature published and made available to young readers, and how, often, overtly queer texts are not available for young readers. Such omissions leave young readers, especially those with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgendered (LGBT) identities, to find depictions of queerness in subtexts underlying seemingly “straight” texts. While these queer subtexts can be recognizable to readers through the use of culturally and historically significant markers that are understood to represent queerness, even a text with a widely recognized queer subtext does not preclude straight readings. Similarly, a queer subtext can exist solely for a reader with no intentional work done on the part of the creators. Queer subtexts, ultimately, work in subtle ways to subvert heteronormative assumptions and, in the process, create recognizable representations of queerness

Imaging Interracial : performing racialized desire in interracial heterosexual hardcore pornography

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire. Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny both infiltrate and structure the pornographic media landscape – constantly being performed/re-performed, rearticulated, and re-imagined within this circulated visual economy. I wade into the internalized feelings of shame and anxiety particularly for white folks in confronting notions of racialized desire, while sitting with the messiness that any project that deals with desire will ultimately encounter. I approach porn tube sites like Pornhub, X-videos, etc as complex cultural sites, as living consumer-driven archives deserving of intense and nuanced critical exploration through artmaking. Reappropriating, recontextualizing, and manipulating found footage within my work has become an important tool in questioning agency and subjectivity within this space, as well as embracing the multiplicity that exists within any form of representational visual media. As I consider some of these critical theoretical concerns, I begin placing them in dialogue with my desires, consumption, and relationships through a multidisciplinary art practice that traverses video, photography, sound, and performance. In sharing my own pornographic engagement, I hope to suspend viewers in a space where they can reflect upon their desires and become more active and analytical consumers themselves. This writing and the artmaking it discusses only scratches the surface of what will likely be a lifelong practice and process of examining sexuality, race, and gender within this space and beyond