DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture: Photocutionary Acts, Selfies and Public Knowledge

This paper is drawn from the DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture Selfies and Public Knowledge: DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture, Selfies and Public Knowledge: Technology & Situational Document

[For the system, alternate title: If It Sort of Looks Like a Duck: Reflecting on Bad Photographs and Chains of Custody]

Though the system will not permit it, our abstract is an out-of-focus photograph of ducks at 1900 pixels wide and black and white, which is approximately 20% the size of the original color photograph we use for our title. By most technical standards, it is a bad picture. Straightening the horizon, cropping the image to emphasize the two foremost ducks, brightening the image to highlight the feet, and adding a caption that indicates activity might yield a “better” picture for some viewers. This piece captures nearly 20 years of conversations about good and bad pictures, and continues the conversation from the 2016 Proceedings about bad words

If It Looks Like a *uck: A Provocation on B*d Words

For some decades, we’ve been considering (and using) “b*d” words. Such a large part of the document space is made up of words; it seems necessary, upon occasion, to explore the crooked little paths and messy gutters occupied by some words. We invite your company on such a little exploration now

More Than Meets The Eye: Toward an Ontology of Proximity

Words cannot describe photographs in the same sense that key words or subject headings can describe verbal documents because words are not native elements of photographs. Words can describe anecdata – reactions and associations that might be functional. Some form of data is coded in some medium, transmitted, received, and decoded. Some forms of coding and circumstances of message making and decoding require little proximity of the recipient to the message maker, while some forms utterly depend on proximity. We explore 10 photographs and interactive data accumulated through interactive exhibition to explore proximity and functional meaning. These examples demonstrate three levels of generality: any image with a particular object or characteristic will do; an image with certain qualities and intriguing connections is wanted; the photograph must show particular qualities or have a backstory that is explicit as to why this is the most useful image. We suggest that a first order taxonomy of proximity comes into play. We expand the idea of a taxonomy of proximity into the more inclusive, environmental notion of an ontology of proximities – referring to types of connections, types of uses, and circumstances of discovering the threads

What Makes a Movie

Perhaps when the conditions of film projection will change, through technical progresses which promise to allow us to have access at will to films, it may be possible to walk leisurely, to wander, to loaf about, stroll and loiter …delighted to explore the ordered depth of a film, to appreciate a thousand details in a sequence while experiencing the unique character of the whole. This quote from Baudry looked forward from the conclusion of our early piece “Access to Moving Image Documents,” published before the availability of digital computational tools. The digital environment has provided the stage for Baudry’s vision, as well as for the resolution of Bellour’s observation that film is ‘unattainable, in the sense of introuvable, by being literally and figuratively unquotable, everlastingly slipping through in the instance of being identified, seized for closer scrutiny.’ The digital environment enables access at the frame level, with idiosyncratic movements through a filmic text being now almost trivial. However, the mechanics of access to the smallest units of video documents does not, in and of itself, resolve the issues of just how to wander, loaf, and delight; nor does such access necessarily make obvious how we might make sense of videos

Translation Disease: Proximity Gone Awry

We present here considerations of three trans-medial translations that have caused dis-ease. We look at novel to film, poem to cantata, and novel to film to television series translations to examine various strains of dis-ease. Upon early consideration, we realized Wilson’s call for a “turn to the functional” provides a means of determining whether a translation is “inadequate” – has gone awry. We then fit the concept of translation into our model of proximity as a way to consider whether a “putative translation really [is] a translation of some text.” Ultimately, we argue that one person’s disease may be another’s may be another’s cure

Embracing Monsters

We propose monsters are documents. Monsters show us, make evident to us, teach us. An exploration of five monsters, both popular and unknown, reveals they fit within a standard model of message making; the binary nature of that model separates meaning from message enabling explanation of evolving interpretations of a monster. We examine the coding and decoding of monster documents through a functional ontology lens. We posit that monsters defy protype and thus serve as attempts at documenting the undocumented. Simultaneously monsters present clues to understanding through imagery that spans the unfamiliar and the familiar allowing the recipient to engage in sense-making suggesting clues to new information

More Than Meets the Eye: Proximity to Crises through Presidential Photographs

We look at three photographs, each made at a time of profound crisis, in order to tease out notions of proximity. Vision gives us proximity at a distance. Photographs may give us a similar proximity. Human vision depends on experience built up from individual events of seeing. Can a photograph made in a fraction of a second by someone else at some other time and some other place provide anything more than data about some surfaces in front of the lens? Can words and other images from the photographers enhance the viewer’s proximity to the original? Can we make use of the photographers’ accounts of their proximities for enhancing the understanding of individual viewers? We examine various aspects of proximity and photography in the context of images of U.S. presidents in times of crises – mechanical and conceptual restraints on photographic representation, external sources of contextualizing information, forms of proximity of the photographers to the presidents, and the strengths and weaknesses of existing metadata

Webs of Proximity and Just-in-Time Information

Disciplinary webs of proximity frequently overlap at the periphery of a topic where interests intersect for problem-solving. Failure to account for disciplinary differences can result in dis-ease – tension that interferes with meaning-making. This can be especially problematic in just-in-time information settings. An unexpected social media case study involving severe weather reporting and algorithm-driven system censorship makes evident the role of a constellation of pragmatic factors that can enhance or hinder just-in-time information delivery. Employing webs of proximity, we probe the severe weather censorship event with complementary bodies of knowledge and disciplinary perspectives. Intersectionalities are discussed through lenses of proximity and epidata. Entanglements of commonality between differing web plots are represented in a negotiation vestibule. The possibility of the communication channel itself being noise is presented. The vestibule highlights opportunities for negotiation points to attempt functional meaning-making