“Refining Our Notions of What (Digital) Images Really
Are”
Matthew
G.
Kirschenbaum
Department of English Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities University of Virginia
mgk3k@virginia.edu
Joanna
Drucker
SUNY Purchase
Jerome
J.
McGann
University of Virginia
Joseph
Viscomi
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Worthy
Martin
University of Virginia
Summary
This panel brings together authorities from the fields of art history, literary studies, textual editing, and computer science -- all of whom also command significant applied knowledge of printmaking and the graphic arts, or electronic production and editing, or both -- to discuss the aesthetic, ontological, and computational nature of digital images (within the context of much broader traditions of visual representation). Panelists will address both technical issues pertaining to the creation, manipulation, and dissemination of image data, as well as the current state of the critical/theoretical models undergirding our understanding of digital images, and do so with particular reference to the role of images in electronic libraries, editions, and archives.Full Rationale
The panel has two related objectives:- 1. To advance its audience's thinking about digital images as structured data by reporting on recent technical developments in such areas as file formats and data standards (PNG, JPEG 2000), image editing, image annotation, computer visualization and modeling, and image searching and retrieval based on pattern-recognition technologies;
- 2. To advance the humanities computing community's current understanding of digital images as modes of visual representation, and, in conjunction with the topics listed in item number one above, to scrutinize the prevailing theoretical and philosophical assumptions behind our thinking about digital images.
Panelists (In Order of Presentation)
Johanna Drucker has been printing artists' books using letterpress and offset production techniques since the 1970s. She holds a doctorate from the Berkeley Visual Studies program and has published widely as an art historian and graphic design critic. She has held appointments at Columbia and Yale, and currently directs a visual design program at SUNY Purchase. She will become the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1999. Drucker has recently been conducting extensive investigative work on "the ontology of the digital image," which will form the basis for her remarks at this panel. Email: jabbooks@earthlink.net Jerome J. McGann, University Professor at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, has long been an advocate of "image-based" electronic editing, and his work on the Rossetti Archive has involved extensive investigation of methods for annotating and encoding images as structured data. More recently, McGann has been engaged in a series of "deformative" exercises, using the filters in common image editing software to expose the formal properties of digital images. Email: jjm2f@virginia.edu. Joseph Viscomi is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He worked as a curator and graphic artist before reconstructing and reproducing -- accurately for the first time -- Blake's illuminated printing techniques. As an editor of the electronic William Blake Archive, Viscomi's work focuses on color correction and image editing. He will address the twin chimeras of radical subjectivity and false positivism when engaged in image editing, and will also discuss image editing vis-a-vis traditional editorial theory. Email: jsviscom@email.unc.edu. Worthy Martin is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia and Technical Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. His fields of expertise include machine vision, pattern recognition, and image databases, and he has published widely in these areas. Martin will address the question of digital images from a computational perspective, focusing on how computers "see" and process pictorial content. Email: wnm@virginia.edu. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Organizer and Chair), is completing his dissertation in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is also the Managing Editor of the William Blake Archive. Kirschenbaum will become Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 1999. In this session, he will briefly assess the current range of software for comparative and analytical operations on structured image data as well as outlining provisional specs for a new image-based software tool entitled LOOKSEE. Email: mgk3k@virginia.edu.Format
The panel is allotted 90 minutes. After a short set of introductory remarks from the panel chair (5 minutes), each member of the panel will be asked to speak for 10-12 minutes, developing one or two specific talking points from their particular background and expertise (total time for five presentations: about 55 minutes). With these initial presentations concluded, panelists will be asked to briefly respond to one another's remarks (clearly time will not permit every member of the panel to respond to every other member, and so the objective here will be to foreground a few major points of agreement and dissent). The remaining 20-25 minutes of time will be given over to open discussion with members of the audience.References
Steve DeRose et al. “What is Text Really?.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education. 1990. 1: 3-26.
Julia Flanders. “Trusting the Electronic Edition.” Computers and the Humanities. 1998. 31: 301-310.
Matthew G.Kirschenbaum. “Documenting Digital Images: Textual Meta-Data at the
Blake Archive.” The Electronic Library. 1998. 16: 239-41.
Jerome McGann. “Imagining What You Don't Know: The Theoretical Goals of
the Rossetti Archive.” General Publications, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. : ,
Jerome McGann. “The Rossetti Archive and Image-Based Electronic
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Allen Renear. “Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Text.” Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Allen Renear et al. “Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem
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