Recognizing and Curating Photo Albums via Event-Specific Image Importance

Automatic organization of personal photos is a problem with many real world ap- plications, and can be divided into two main tasks: recognizing the event type of the photo collection, and selecting interesting images from the collection. In this paper, we attempt to simultaneously solve both tasks: album-wise event recognition and image- wise importance prediction. We collected an album dataset with both event type labels and image importance labels, refined from an existing CUFED dataset. We propose a hybrid system consisting of three parts: A siamese network-based event-specific image importance prediction, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that recognizes the event type, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based sequence level event recognizer. We propose an iterative updating procedure for event type and image importance score prediction. We experimentally verified that image importance score prediction and event type recognition can each help the performance of the other.Comment: Accepted as oral in BMVC 201

Action Today for Tomorrow: Examining How Building a Video Montage Over Time Impacts a Family

I started shooting one second of video every day almost four years ago. The short clips are amalgamated into a video montage at the end of each year. This paper is an inquiry into that practice and how it can impact a family. On a broader scale, the paper shows any individual how the consistent act of taking one second of video each day can help with the inherent malleability of memory, support effective dialogue, provide a platform for reflection on one’s life and promote mindful living. The project is a reaction to the ubiquity of smartphone technology, and an attempt to use the technology in a meaningful and intentional way. The paper is based on my reflections and observations but is also informed by concepts and theories that point to possible future implications of the practice

The Influence of Photography, Tourism, and Media on Self-Actualization

Humans are fundamentally social creatures who are inherently interconnected with their surrounding communities. This interconnection profoundly influences an individual's way of life. Lifestyle is intimately intertwined with societal progress and encompasses various aspects such as social hierarchy, self-image, and self-actualization, all of which contribute to the quest for personal identity. In the present era, travel has become a necessity for many individuals. Sightseeing expeditions serve not only as a means of fulfilling personal desires but have become imperative and significant, as they encompass multifaceted objectives aimed at asserting one's existence. This desire to manifest one's presence is inseparable from the contemporary advancements in technology and the abundance of information. Ever since the advent of photography, tourism has become intricately entwined with the act of documentation, serving as a tool for preserving memories of travel experiences

Exhibiting Human Rights: Making the Means of Dignity Visible

This dissertation examines the visual communication of human dignity. With the opening of human rights museums, such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, human dignity’s visual communication has been exposed to new issues of corporeal and mediated expression. In response to photographic mediation and theory, which often poses individuals as central claimants or possessors of human dignity, human rights museums openly suggest that communities and relationships between individuals are central to human dignity’s visibility outside of the law. As such, I propose that curatorial mediation is important to the contemporary apprehension of human dignity because its notable forms – atlases, albums, and museums –help to shift conversations from individual human persons to communities of human beings. Exhibiting Human Rights: Making the Means of Dignity Visible theorizes human dignity as a relational property, which entails thinking about larger constellated strategies of representation. I theorize human dignity as a product of life shared with others, across families, communities, cultures, and borders, seen most dramatically in curatorial forms. Combining museological notions of curation with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the constellation, this thesis demonstrates how a theory of human dignity founded on relation also grapples with its tendencies towards rationality and immateriality. Working from these forms and concepts my key questions include: How has human dignity been visually depicted? How can a focus on curation help to support a relational theorization of human dignity? And, how can an emphasis on the history of the affiliation between human dignity and curation help us to understand human rights recent move into museums? Curation, I argue provides a framework that acknowledges how our means of existence create demands on others, thus expanding conversations about the ends of human dignity. Three case studies aid in the development of my argument: 1) August Sander’s People of the 20th Century (1910-1964); 2) UNESCO’s Human Rights Exhibition Album (1950); and 3) The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (2014). Shifting attention towards exhibitionary projects offers creative and constitutive language that speaks to the communities and alliances foundational to human dignity’s contemporary communication and significance

Whose Community Museum Is It? Collaboration Strategies and Identity Affirmation in the Amache Museum

The Amache Museum is a preservation project that has multiple communities involved in preserving Amache history. It represents Japanese American as well as American history and is owned and maintained by the Amache Preservation Society (APS), which is comprised of local Granada High School students. By approaching the Amache Museum as a community museum and noticing its distinct collaborative strategy, this thesis investigates the community collaborations and the identity affirmations within the museum, and addresses the question of whose community museum the Amache Museum represents. My research explores the overlapping conceptual models of the Amache Museum: community museum and ecomuseum, and utilizes the realities of a difficult heritage to discuss identity affirmation through the use of individual and collective memories. Through participant observations, archival research, semi-structured interviews, and a questionnaire survey, this thesis identifies three community collaborations, as well as community members\u27 thoughts of the importance of the museum for the Japanese Americans and Granada community. Recognizing that the museum and Amache site may be incorporated in the U.S. National Park Service in the future, this thesis also presents a glance at the potential positive and negative aspects if the governing agency is involved, and provides recommendations for future management

Method and madness at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, Massachusetts is unique in history and design. Originating as a privately held collection, the Gardner Museum reflects its namesake’s eccentricities and stands in stark contrast to the backdrop of contemporary Boston. Although much has been written about the individual masterpieces held within the Gardner collection and there are numerous biographies of “Mrs. Jack,” as Gardner was sometimes called, little work has been done to investigate the museum in light of contemporary research in museology and the practices of collecting and display. Understanding collecting and curating as modes of knowledge production, this study seeks to discover the types of knowledge produced by and within the Gardner Museum. Because the museum highlights forms of knowledge other than that associated with textual criticism, I focus on the affective and historical material transfers at work in museum practice. As such, this study offers an opportunity to explore the nature of a performance-based method or orientation to scholarship. I both make use of and question “performative writing” as a mode of presentation, so that what emerges is an understanding of a method that, like the Gardner Museum, seeks to discover ways of knowing beyond (but not in lieu of) processes of representation and signification. In a sense then, performance methodology becomes both an object of study and my method. In bringing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into relationship with the disciplinary problem of performative writing, I have conceived of my research and writing practices as processes of collecting and curating

Researching Everyday Childhoods

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Sussex, UK. How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent ‘post-empirical’ and ‘post-digital’ frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people’s lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book’s chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies – ‘Face 2 Face’ and ‘Curating Childhoods’ – and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies

Researching Everyday Childhoods

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Sussex, UK. How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent ‘post-empirical’ and ‘post-digital’ frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people’s lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book’s chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies – ‘Face 2 Face’ and ‘Curating Childhoods’ – and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies