Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

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

The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature and Film

Maurice Halbwachs first proposed a collective approach to memory in the early twentieth century, but the vast majority of subsequent scholarship investigates memory’s social properties from a theoretical point of view. This project instead proposes that memory functions as a social phenomenon in significant and real ways, primarily understood through the social relations that arise within social frameworks, which provide a structure against which people’s memories come together to form important memory-narratives that configure individual and social consciousness. Once people transform memory from individual thought-image into socially structured language, memory takes on social properties. Memory relies upon social frameworks to form and maintain memory-narratives, but also on sites and objects to create a more tangible connection to the past through such narratives. With the growth in such external memory in recent years, i.e. museums, memorials, etc., people cannot remember the past to the degree they once could. In other words, people have come to rely more on things than on people to reconstruct the past in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Consequently, people cannot remember the past to the extent they once did. Post-apocalyptic literature and film intervene by addressing the heightened anxiety people feel regarding the changing experience of memory. This project examines how such unique narrative provide the necessary spaces through which to better understand the social nature of memory, as well as the threat external memory imposes upon acts of remembering and forgetting. They utilize the imagined future space, one often devoid of people (social frame-works) and places (geographical signifiers) to show memory’s underlying social characteristics and how changes to social frameworks occasion changes to people’s mnemonic capability

Stone authority violence: relating body, materials, remembering

In this doctoral thesis I experiment with images of damaged ancient figurative sculpture, physical space and a specific set of materials in order to generate a fresh understanding of how one’s personal experiences mingle with the residues, presences and traces of others peoples’ pasts, presents and perhaps, futures. Two questions drive this thesis. How are materials and material culture caught up with remembering? And, how are the broken stone and bronze bodies of Antiquity entangled with our contemporary social dimension? First investigating early photography’s association with violence and then considering the material properties and qualities of ancient figurative sculpture I investigate the relationships between materials and remembering. This research then goes on to coin and explore the the concept of premembering which through the development of this thesis I have come to define as a distributed system of memory-related cognition that extends beyond the individual and is enacted through a process of active externalism that embraces both the properties and qualities of materials in processes of mutual participation. Then taking this highly personal and psychic sensation to a social level, I examine premembering as the materially triggered understanding of events, circumstances or conditions that one may have not directly experienced, but which one’s culture already knows and stores up for all its future participants. Finally, considering this notion of premembering within the context of Michel Serres’ conception of collective acceptance, complicity and intentionality (in relation to violence), I consider the contemporary socio-cultural legacies of damaged ancient figurative sculpture and question how, through the conflation of the properties, qualities and sensed histories of materials, premembering might be considered a future-shaping force that can be made manifest in original artworks

Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology

This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, Memories for Life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines

ON THE CUSP OF INVISIBILITY: THE LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY, MARGINALIZED STUDENTS, AND INSTITUTIONAL SPACES

This dissertation considers the potential for decolonial possibilities for and democratic participation of students in three rhetorical and institutional spaces: the writing center, the classroom, and the archives. The Lower Río Grande Valley, the site of the study, is located at the Southernmost end of Texas, and is situated between the almost 2,000-mile-long geopolitical border spanning from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California and the internal checkpoints that run parallel to and 70 miles north of the border. The Lower Río Grande Valley has remained a Mexican American cultural province and zone despite six phases of colonization. Little is known of Mexican American uses and practices of literacy, rhetoric, and identity in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. This is even more apparent in regards to Mexican Americans of the Lower Río Grande Valley. On one level, this dissertation focuses on the historical and current state of colonization in the Lower Río Grande Valley. On another level, this dissertation is interested in the presentation and representation of culture through place making, meaning-making practices, and knowledge production. Part historiographical and archival, part ethnographic and decolonial, this rhetorical project brings into focus a region and student demographic that has remained on the cusp of invisibility in society, the academy, and the discipline of rhetoric and composition. The contribution of this research includes developing spatial and temporal awareness, increasing attention to local and regional cultural differences, and articulating decolonial possibilities

British Independent Record Labels, Memory and Mediation

PhD ThesisThis thesis examines the changing relationship between the material culture of music (in the form of recorded music objects) and memory (as it is sedimented in, and mediated by, the work of a selection of British independent record labels). The principal aim of this work is to explore the significant but often-overlooked material paradigm of recorded music, from Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 up until the early twenty-first century, increasingly characterised by the digital archiving, collecting and consumption of music. Drawing from a broad range of cultural theorists (including Benjamin, Straw, Sterne, Kittler, Gitelman and Huyssen), this research seeks to situate recorded sound within broader discourses on memory and mediation, technology and cultural transmission. The thesis is structured around the analyses of several British independent record labels from the recent past and the present: Sarah Records (1987- 1995), Ghost Box Records (2004-) and reissue record labels, including Finders Keepers (2004-). By focusing on specific record labels and situated configurations of the material culture of music, both physical and digital, I identify and map various aspects of the music object and clarify the particular socio-technological contexts within which such configurations arise.Whittaker Scholarshi

Film Websites: a Transmedia Archaeology

Websites have become a familiar feature of contemporary cinema and they contribute to the overall audience experience. Yet as a hybrid of storytelling and marketing, they have often been seen as little more than promotional ephemera, and they have rarely been critically examined. Film websites are fragile, and their presence as artefacts to study is threatened by a range of commercial and cultural factors. Consequently, film websites have not been well preserved, and many disappear before they have been appraised. Through the development of a transmedia archaeological approach, this thesis establishes that film websites are worthy of consideration as a form of entertainment and as cultural artefacts in their own right. This thesis critically evaluates the film website and its cultural conditions from several perspectives. As a form of transmedia - a term, an academic concept and a production practice that has evolved since the early twentieth century and this thesis sets out a way to understand the development of this important concept and draws on recent scholarship in the field to critically evaluate key ideas. Through media archaeology, which is an emergent historiographical perspective. Some media archaeological propositions are developed into practical tools for the analysis of film websites. Whilst those propositions tend to draw on a tradition of materialist and technological viewpoints, in this thesis they are extended to include approaches that examine the audience experience. As film website design has developed, formats have standardised and one convention to emerge is the in-movie story world website. A particular narrative trope (or, in media archaeological terms, topoi) is the ‘evil corporation’, which is common in science-fiction, western, and social commentary films, but takes on specific significance when the film website enables ludic and interactive forms of what has been described as ‘extended cinema’ (Atkinson, 2014a:16). Using ideas gleaned from world-building the ‘evil corporation’ topoi is analysed in some detail. In archival settings where film websites are preserved, partially held, or lost. Through case studies where archival presence yields insight into the development of the film website form. Online awards provide a case in point as they valorise website design, and through their archives of annual winners, can be understood as a ‘shaper’ of practices, defining what film websites are, and may be in the future. Importantly, it is found that archives don’t simply preserve artefacts. Embedded in film website fan bulletin boards are ‘traces’ of audience encounters with promotional campaigns. Qualitative analysis techniques are used to 'scrape' these locations and interpret the 'conversations' in an analytic manner to examine audience experiences of nostalgia for the future

Behind the computer screens:The use of keystroke logging for genetic criticism applied to born-digital works of literature

The digital environment in which present-day literature is composed, significantly changes the materiality of the sources available for genetic criticism, since common word processors tend to hide the writing operations. This makes it a difficult endeavour to reconstruct the writing process, but does it herald the feared end of genetic criticism??Behind the computer screens argues that this will not be the case as long as genetic criticism adapts to working with digital files. As one of the ways in which genetic criticism can adapt to the Digital Age the study examines the use of one method in particular: keystroke logging. To explore the possibilities of keystroke logging, the study analyses literary writing processes logged with the keystroke logging software Inputlog.When examining all this keystroke logging data, the writing process can be studied at an unprecedented level of granularity, such as the sequentiality of text production and revision. The fine-grained data of keystroke logging therefore allows for a new type of what this study calls ‘nanogenetic’ research, including examining typing habits, the triggers of text production and revision, aspects of discovery in writing, and the transformation of sources during the writing process. The study also explores how genetic narratology may be enriched by keystroke logging data. It examines how and when details of aspects of the narrative text are integrated into the text and how they change during the writing process. When authors are willing to record their writing processes with a keystroke logging tool, the future of genetic criticism seems full of possibilities.<br/