Granularity and Scale
Get Ready, Get Set, Curate: Understanding the "Everyday Curator"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Santi Thompson, Michele Reilly
The proliferation of the world wide web and, with it, ways to communicate and share experiences virtually through social media sites, has changed the ways that people interact with online cultural heritage images. As the accessibility of the web increases over time, an individual’s potential ability to “curate” occurs from nearly anywhere - making it easier for everyday people to engage in the curation process. These amateaur curatorial practices may include how users transform digital objects as a means of self-expression, political, social, and personal commentary, cultural products, and artistic license. Recognizing how everyday users curate digital images enhances the digital humanists’ understanding of the contemporary cultural landscape. While conducting multiple research studies on the reuse of digital images over the web, researchers Michele Reilly and Santi Thompson found that social media users were collecting, organizing, and sharing images in a manner that was not unlike the tasks performed by archivists, librarians, and other cultural heritage professionals -- that there was something else occurring beyond reuse. This paper focuses on understanding the characteristics of those who are engaged in this everyday curation process. Using an existing Pinterest dataset, the researchers developed a rubric for understanding these “everyday curators.” This paper will: define curators; review the methodology used to devise and classify the everyday curator rubric; discuss the results of applying this rubric to the Pinterest dataset; and conclude with implications for digital humanists and cultural heritage professionals.
Spectator’s Self Image Reflected on the Work of Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ayse Nahide Yilmaz
The eye of the spectator gazes around the stream of images which are provided by art world and catches a certain kind of pleasure and knowledge. Without knowing that it transforms into a spectacle and controllable vehicle itself while looking around the galleries and museums, the spectator feels satisfied and triumphant over the works of art after exploring hidden meanings and offered pleasures. Then there comes a moment when the eye sees itself on a reflecting surface which is sometimes a mirror or glass included, sometimes a black screen, sometimes a shining metal. Either the artist intends to include this encounter or not, it is the moment that the onlooker has to alter a different kind of consciousness. It is about a confusion between subject and object and psychological pressure of exploring the self over an other’s representational domain. This paper will convey some works of art which employ such an encounter and focus on proliferating effect of the image with a reflection of the self.
Connecting Dots: Meaning Making through Aggregation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cole Robertson
"The significance of the image as revealed in the process of scanning therefore represents a synthesis of two intentions: one manifested in the image and the other belonging to the observer... While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them." Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Flusser’s example of how photographic meaning is made (through embodied engagement such as the saccade) is limited to an individual image, but also works when applied to aggregations and multiples of images. Each new image seen becomes part of an idiosyncratic yet shared system - one in which meanings pile on top of, rest alongside, or burrow within each other to form new types of pictorial vernacular. This paper will explore intentional and unintentional processes of meaning making through image aggregation.
