Hal 9000 Tagged Photo Collection
Hal900’s Flickr gallery is located here. For this project, the division of our team’s workload was:
Jocelyn – took pictures, titled, tagged, and wrote descriptions for said pictures
Jamilah – took pictures, titled, tagged, and wrote descriptions for said pictures, provided her Flickr account for the team’s use
Abby – wrote the paper
We chose these roles because Jamilah already had a Flickr account, so it made sense to just use hers instead of all creating our own accounts. Jocelyn and Jamilah both had digital cameras already, which made it follow naturally that they would take the pictures and Abby, who sadly has no digital camera, would write the paper. Since photography is an art form that sometimes requires a context unavailable to the viewer, the duty falls on the photographer to accurately describe and title his pictures in such a way that helps the viewer to understand what he is seeing. This is why the photographers (Jocelyn and Jamilah) were also responsible for the picture titles, descriptions, and tags.
In retrospect, it might have made more sense to have a team account with a generic password so that Jocelyn could have uploaded her pictures directly to the site instead of having to email them along with their titles, tags and descriptions to Jamilah. Overall, it probably would have been less work. Also, if everyone on the team had access to the account, we could have all added tags to the different pictures so that different perspectives could have filled out the list of tags.
The IST-related pictures that our group chose were technological points of interest, selected for their photogenic qualities. Subjects ranged from air conditioning vents in the IST classrooms to keyboards, to the jumbled mess of wires behind all of the computers in the IST building. Certain objects were photographed at dramatic angles, and certain effects, such as blurring, black and white, and color inversion, were used to add interest and depth to the pictures. These effects made a picture of something as mundane as a keyboard, which IST students probably look at every day, seem interesting and different. Titles for some pictures are generally direct. The picture of a remote is titled simply “remote,” and the left hand side of a Dell keyboard is titled “Dell Left Hand Keys.” However, other pictures have less direct titles that still capture the essence of the picture, such as the picture entitled “Num Lock” which shows the number keys on a Dell Keyboard, or the picture “Time Passes,” which compares two different clocks found in a room, one on a microwave and one that’s an alarm clock. Descriptions elaborate on what the picture shows, adding more context for the image, and explaining some of the effects used (inverted, blur, etc.).
We tried to use as many tags as possible to make the pictures easy to find. As mentioned above, if other group members had had access to the account, we might have had more, but the ones that are there do cover a broad spectrum of possible tags. Flickr allows users to label their photos with as many tags as they like, and they can be changed, added to, and deleted from at any time. While viewing a picture, users can click on tags to see pictures that the same user has submitted with the same tags. Also, users can see every picture the public has submitted with the same tag. For interest, I clicked on the picture “Num Lock” and selected the first tag, “keys.” The rest of the pictures of keyboards came up in our gallery. The public pictures were an entirely different story. Not surprisingly, the first picture was of a piano. Pianos have keys; that makes sense. Interestingly, the next few were of pictures that came up were of crocodiles. After the initial shock, one realizes that these pictures were taken in the Florida Keys, but this just goes to show how very broad tags can be, and how homonyms can very quickly become tricky. A computer keyboard does not show up until the second page of pictures labeled with the tag “keys.”
This tagging structure gives users a broader base to search through pictures instead of just in titles, and a more specific method than searching through descriptions. Still, as with the “keys” example, it is an imperfect system. “Keyboard” returned more accurate results, but there were still piano keyboards as well as computer keyboards. The tagging structure does bring in a community element—being able to look at the public pictures relating to given keywords allows users to see where there are other people taking pictures of the same things. Because the tags are links instead of just words associated with the pictures, this encourages browsing around others’ galleries, bringing the community closer together than tags without links would.