Digital Image

This paper considers the ontological significance of invisibility in relation to the question ‘what is a digital image?’ Its argument in a nutshell is that the emphasis on visibility comes at the expense of latency and is symptomatic of the style of thinking that dominated Western philosophy since Plato. This privileging of visible content necessarily binds images to linguistic (semiotic and structuralist) paradigms of interpretation which promote representation, subjectivity, identity and negation over multiplicity, indeterminacy and affect. Photography is the case in point because until recently critical approaches to photography had one thing in common: they all shared in the implicit and incontrovertible understanding that photographs are a medium that must be approached visually; they took it as a given that photographs are there to be looked at and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of spectatorship that the secrets of the image can be unlocked. Whatever subsequent interpretations followed, the priori- ty of vision in relation to the image remained unperturbed. This undisputed belief in the visibility of the image has such a strong grasp on theory that it imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodol- ogies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about images: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility casts a long shadow on im- age theory because it blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is invisible, latent and hidden

Notes on the Margins of Metadata; Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image

This paper considers the significance of metadata in relation to the image economy of the web. Social practices such as keywording, tagging, rating and viewing increasingly influence the modes of navigation and hence the utility of images in online environments. To a user faced with an avalanche of images, metadata promises to make photographs machine-readable in order to mobilize new knowledge, in a continuation of the archival paradigm. At the same time, metadata enables new topologies of the image, new temporalities and multiplicities which present a challenge to historical models of representation. As photography becomes an encoded discourse, we suggest that the turning away from the visual towards the mathematical and the algorithmic establishes undecidability as a key property of the networked image

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory

Search and Discovery Tools for Astronomical On-line Resources and Services

A growing number of astronomical resources and data or information services are made available through the Internet. However valuable information is frequently hidden in a deluge of non-pertinent or non up-to-date documents. At a first level, compilations of astronomical resources provide help for selecting relevant sites. Combining yellow-page services and meta-databases of active pointers may be an efficient solution to the data retrieval problem. Responses generated by submission of queries to a set of heterogeneous resources are difficult to merge or cross-match, because different data providers generally use different data formats: new endeavors are under way to tackle this problem. We review the technical challenges involved in trying to provide general search and discovery tools, and to integrate them through upper level interfaces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

CHORUS Deliverable 3.4: Vision Document

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit)