Morris Eaves (Professor of English, University of Rochester) is author of
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
After centuries of image deprivation, we now bathe in a sea of pictures, most of them digitized at some stage. In the 1990s, as humanists began to sense the advantages of networked computing on the web, they conceived major new editorial projects that would depend to an extraordinary degree upon the documentary power of pictures. Despite evident progress in devising sturdy and responsive standards, images, and tools, stubborn problems persist in several key areas that are explored here through an overview of issues that arise as the William Blake Archive acquires images, prepares them for reproduction, and makes them available for manipulation by its users. Editing electronic images in so unsettled and unsettling an environment generates the provisional success — weak success — that is utterly characteristic of X-editing, electronic scholarly editing in our time. Our dependence on current technology and the expertise of others is not a remediable condition. We must play the game as it presents itself, making the compromises that are necessary, and move ahead.
Thinking about the problems that pictures bring to the table.
After centuries of image deprivation, we now bathe in a sea of pictures, most of them
digitized at some stage. In the 1990s, as humanists began to sense the advantages of networked
computing on the web, they conceived major new editorial projects that would depend to an
extraordinary degree upon the documentary power of pictures. That move seemed logical enough at
the time and, indeed, at the prime spots there were, even then, white beaches and pristine
visual fluids: artifacts so scrupulously reproduced that by 1993 — remember, this was in the
dark days when a high-end personal computer
was a Macintosh Quadra, or an IBM-compatible 486 running Windows
archival
(versus transmissive
) images of the VASARI and MARC projects
But it would be a mistake to suppose that pristine beaches and pure water are the norm. Nearly fifteen years since Robinson’s report, day-to-day editorial reality on the picture front remains rocky and polluted. For texts there is, and has long been, the Text Encoding Initiative to offer reassuringly systematic recipes — but no counterpart in an Object Encoding Initiative. To give you some sense of what I mean, I want to take up an indicative selection of picture issues as they arise for us at the William Blake Archive. We acquire images, prepare them for reproduction, and make them available for manipulation by our users. Each little story that follows will be an installment in a larger narrative of modest success mixed with failure and uncertainty — so far neither indubitable success nor abject failure but always considerable uncertainty. This is the dim, disturbing landscape that I have taken to calling, inelegantly, X-editing.
In the past there was print, and a modest few rules of thumb that governed the practice of
many public and private collections when it came to the reproduction of their property, usually
as monochrome photographs that were converted into a highly constrained number of mediocre
halftones. But in our post-print era, intellectual property requirements are a highly charged
package of changing laws and anxious, opportunistic, tentative interpretations.[Y]ou are unlikely to find on Kindle any books that benefit from illustrations. Permission is so difficult to obtain for online books that most presses aren’t trying — and many believe that Kindle doesn’t yet provide optimal viewing for all illustrations
In the early days — say 1993-1995 — of trying to clarify our own foggy founding notion of
somehow harnessing the power of computers (to overcome some of the obstructions that had
prevented Blake scholars from seeing the full range of Blake’s artistic output), we landed
eventually on the slightly more mature idea of a William Blake Archive. We — co-editors Robert
N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, and I — knew simply that we had to start somewhere, so we began on
the strength of cooperation from only three collections and some beautiful new photography left
over from a just-completed six-volume print facsimile project
From one perspective this coalition of the willing is a powerful, even inspiring, and perhaps unprecedented lesson in the collective power of international scholarly responsibility. Most collections understand the Internet better now than they once did. Less optimistically, however, our coalition is a house of cards propped on a rickety network of formal and informal understandings — much less secure than, say, the scaffolding of intellectual property law. To carry the day we bank on a combination of intensive diplomacy, collector guilt, precedent (the critical-mass factor), and performance. But in the worst of times we may be putting our faith in the wrong place. The coalition may deteriorate. We don’t know, we don’t think we can know. We don’t have the knowledge or money to pursue legal issues. Here as in so much else, we persist in the vague hope that the Archive’s community will endure long enough to provide a useful bridge to the next great editorial settlement, whatever it may be.
The Archive is known for its meticulous care of images and adherence to a strict set of
established guidelines. Perhaps the most significant features of the Archive are its uniformity
and its conformance to explicitly stated standards (
These days we scan transparencies on far better scanners, and the best museum photographic services can now produce far more accurate and uniform image files from their own digital cameras than they could a decade ago. But we still correct images one by one. And they must still be compressed for transmission over the web, despite greater bandwidth and faster machines. And, in a world where digital technology seems to advance far more rapidly than many of us can adjust to it, the compression format of choice is still JPEG, which was a real step forward when the standard was first fixed...in 1992.
The JPEG image-compression algorithm is ubiquitous. We’ve been using it for over ten years to create our thousands of images in pairs: a lower resolution 100dpi inline
image for main pages (our Object View Pages, that is, all pages that reproduce an image that Blake created — whether a print, painting, drawing, or manuscript) and, two clicks behind it, a 300dpi enlargement for detail junkies. (In normal circumstances, most collections limit the reproduction of their images to 72dpi for the web.)
But poor, reliable, lossy
edges,
which are associated with graphics,
as distinct from photographs
on the one hand and texts
on the other. For capturing the natural world as we perceive it most of the time, this calibration is not bad. But JPEG groups pixels to render lines far less clearly and subtly than it can render colors and tones.
Blake, on the other hand, was devoted to the idea of artistic lines and convinced that
Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature
annotations to Wordsworth’s Poems, E 665
Our best hope was the long-anticipated JPEG 2000.
http://jpeg.org/jpeg2000/index.html,
accessed 26 June 2009
progressive downloads,
which ingeniously draw, from a single image file, images at selected levels of quality from faster and lower to slower and higher. With JPEG 2000 we would no longer have to produce image pairs at all; one file per image would suffice for everything, including details.
Hence we welcomed the chance to participate in clever experiments with JPEG 2000 that Vladimir Misic conducted for his dissertation in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester. Using what was then the latest draft of the core code of JPEG 2000 and assembling a group of problematic Blake images, he devised a system that separated each image into its elements, processed the tone and color with JPEG 2000 and its edges with MRC (Multi-Raster Content) technology — developed by Xerox for sophisticated processing of graphic elements in fax documents — and then recombined the result for display in a JPEG 2000 viewer plug-in
At the time — 2002-03 — JPEG 2000 seemed just over the horizon. We planned to mount a JPEG
2000 demonstration on the Archive site. But imaging on the web then stalled at JPEG. The
latest news is mixed: by some accounts, JPEG 2000 is held back by submarine patent issues and
low browser support.JPEG 2000 has been published as an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 15444. As of 2008, JPEG 2000 is not widely supported in web browsers, and hence is not generally used on the World Wide Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 accessed 26 June 2009)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000, accessed 26 June 2009.
[I]n
early 2007, some commentators on the Web called attention to the fact that JPEG 2000 encoding
is not being built into camera chips nor is JPEG 2000 decoding native to Web browsers. This
has led them to compare the adoption of the format in unfavorable terms to JPEG_DCT, the
earlier JPEG codec, which is native to virtually all digital cameras and browsers
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000143.shtml, accessed 16
Nov. 2007
Implementations of JPEG 2000 have been increasing steadily during 2005 and 2006.
Michael Gormish, as part of his Gormish Notes on JPEG2000, now maintains a small
http://www.crc.ricoh.com/~gormish/jpeg2000adoption.html
wiki
for
his tracking of JPEG2000 adoption, rather than a single page, because developments to record are increasingly frequent
But what we supply, fine JPEG images in pairs, is not, in any case, what our users receive.
Along a perilous chain of transmission lie a host of image robbers: service providers,
operating systems, browsers, video cards, display settings, displays, and the user’s own highly
variable eyes and brain. Restricted bandwidth squeezes file size, while humanists hang further back on the technology curve than scientists and thirteen-year olds. Color control across systems has improved, driven by such powerful forces as digital cameras and web retailing — will that shirt I’m ordering look cool with my new jeans? (Try, for example, the compare function on the North Face site: http://www.thenorthface.com/na/gear-shop-category-2.html) Even so, color control is far from perfect, and many users still have slow connections and bad monitors with who-knows-what settings. We re-learn this lesson every time we proofread our own forthcoming publications on computers spread across the country. We may try to reach a collaborative decision about one of Blake’s etched, amorphous punctuation marks: comma, period, exclamation point, question mark? Tiny differences make all the difference as these squirrelly marks morph from instance to instance, copy to copy. Or we try to decide whether Joe Viscomi should readjust the paper tone,
the color of the paper on which Blake printed or painted or drew his images — one of the most telling colors in a picture, and often starkly wrong in otherwise impeccably
Blake Archive images arrive on the desktop in the embrace of a highly manipulative environment
that allows users to use and abuse their pictures according to their scholarly needs. They can zoom in and out. With a click or two they can adjust images to actual physical size or something handier. They can read a transcription of any verbiage we have been able to extract from the image. With two clicks they can easily compare versions of the same
work — any plate from (now eleven) copies of
However, our dreams of seamless, fast, sophisticated scrutiny hide hard realities. The lower-resolution 100dpi OVP image quickly pixilates when zoomed, forcing the user to load the 300dpi enlargement. The ImageSizer, which allows a user to calibrate the scale at which images are delivered to the desktop, can’t cope with Blake’s largest images. The Compare function is rigid, creating a lot of cannots: the user cannot resize images within it nor choose to compare images that we haven’t already chosen. Compare was devised to juxtapose multiple copies
of the same
illuminated books. Anywhere outside that category — watercolor drawings, paintings, engravings, printed works — we have to hard-code the application to tell it what to include in a comparison. The kinds of comparisons a scholar is likely to want are far beyond the capacities of our little Compare window.
Our eyes are on the Virtual Lightbox, a clever Java application and applet developed at the University of Kentucky and the University of Maryland by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. The Lightbox promises much greater flexibility to users with less frontloading at our end http://www.mith2.umd.edu/research/?id=12. Our project manager, Will Shaw at the University of North Carolina, has extensively revised the code for Lightbox and successfully installed a test version in our Work in Progress site. Add: And there is more good news in a function we have labeled
The biggest drag on our imaging system, however, may come from Java in general and Inote in
particular. All our OVP images are delivered to the page in a Java environment. Images that
would otherwise take almost no time to arrive on the desktop take several seconds in Java time.
The performance of Java has markedly improved, though the various claims and counter-claims for
its speed are hard to sort out. But the wait for me, I’m starting up
icon —
that cup of coffee with a wisp of steam (http://java.com/en/download/index.jsp) — will become all too familiar to any regular user of the Blake Archive (Wikipedia,
In her memoir, Julia Child writes that she began to suspect that French
bread was the recipe I worked hardest on that the fewest people bothered to try
Why we did we bother to invent an image searching tool? Simply to help restore the palpable imbalance — which we have endured in the print environment for centuries — between our sophisticated means of access to texts and our very crude and rudimentary access to the contents of images. Search 10,000 text files? No problem. Search 10,000 images at a level deeper than artist, title, general subject, medium, and location — a huge and heretofore unsolved problem. Or, we wondered back in 1993, did a system for doing that already exist?
In the early stages of the Blake Archive we got word of Iconclass, which seemed to pop up as a spoiler on grant applications (why aren’t these Blake people using Iconclass?). We soon discovered that Iconclass was freely traded as a label — it seemed to name the image-searching game for art historians, but we’d never heard of it. Humbled, we investigated and found many signs pointing to Iconclass, but the closer we got, the further away it seemed. We discovered that, in art history, 20th-century attempts to make images as searchable as texts had been dominated by efforts to solve this problem by textual means that had eventuated in Iconclass, whose noble lineage included the Index to Christian Art. In the library we discovered a visionary reference work designed to make all images in the world searchable by their iconographic details. Begun during World War II by a Dutch art historian and librarian, Henri van de Waal (1910-1972), who spent the rest of his life on it, the first full published list of verbal details and numeric codes ran to seventeen fat printed volumes when completed by van de Waal’s assistants and successors in 1985.
By the mid-1990s the Iconclass camp promised electronic tools that would ease the pain of
assigning elaborately hierarchical alphanumeric codes to actual images (the Libertas browser
represents the current state of play: http://www.iconclass.nl/libertas/ic?style=index.xsl). So we looked around for
existing applications and realized that the user base for purposes like ours is miniscule. Some
cataloguers had used a handful of top level descriptors, and a very few had gone deeper (see the
list at http://www.iconclass.nl/libertas/aboutbb.html#image). But the full
potential of Iconclass was untapped.for the
daily management and the further development of the Iconclass System
http://www.iconclass.nl/
We still don’t know, but at the time we paused over the huge form of Iconclass long enough to
consider the consequences of kissing it. We certainly shared a major goal: objective
description of images as distinct from the interpretive
aims that had dominated
image description
in Blake scholarship.entangled
character of looking-at, looking-for,
and the quest for meaning in a technological environment that allows
access to more visual images than ever before
But we wanted to regress to a system that is primarily a means rather than an end, to provide
tools that could make basic identifications possible: to find a picture by its content (a
bearded old man with a walking stick that I saw on a CD?), to figure out what something is
(sheep or dog? sky, water, or dirt?), and, serving the researcher’s needs for comparison and contrast, to find out if there is other similar content elsewhere in Blake’s work.
As entangled as the spiraling processes of identification and interpretation are, and for all the hermeneutic loops that entertain academic minds, we didn’t seriously doubt our ability to make rough but useful distinctions between descriptions and interpretations that would suffice for making the descriptions and keywords that would support Image Search. Using visual and literary cues, we could make educated guesses in descriptive sentences and tie those to keywords that a user could select from a list of search terms. But we would not allow ourselves to go the next step and create a running commentary, a coherent interpretation of the meaning of these elements in the artistic work. We would therefore not feel any obligation to, let’s say, tie our descriptions of individual images in Blake’s
nude,
male,
curly hair,
blacksmith,
hammer,
standing,
facing left,and so on.
We had seen that Iconclass could handle a myriad of minute details. Its structure may have,
as one of van de Waal’s assistants wrote in a posthumous tribute to the master, the simplicity of genius
We would instead make our Image Search tool an inside job — custom tailored to Blake’s work
and to confirmed scholarly habit. Rather than start with a preliminary list of keywords, we
grew the list of terms image by image: we needed male
for the first plate of the first work we marked up, Blake’s
Job’s wifeuntil several years later, when Bob Essick was marking up Blake’s
book of termsjust a bit. We would link our descriptions of details, composed in normal sentences, to those keywords, and the keywords to the quadrants of a visual grid laid over the image in Inote. A user would search the keywords — either one by one or several at a time — and that would lead to a list of hits, which would lead in turn to descriptions, which would lead to the images, which would display the descriptions as verbal annotations to the visual evidence.
As the list of keywords grew, it had to be organized. Like everything else about the Image Search tool, the categories that have emerged are rudimentary but fairly intuitive. They more or less track the ancient hierarchy of the great chain of being or the game of Twenty Questions. Within those divisions, they are alphabetical. The more terms we stuff in, inevitably, the more puzzling and daunting the interface becomes to new users — if there are any.
As a proof of concept, we thought our experiment worked — to alleviate, if not solve, a
stubborn picture problem. We were excited to be able to find what we had tagged in the images,
excited to do something unprecedented in Blake scholarship, and excited to see our image search
engine grow along with the Archive, so we kept at it despite the labor involved.
The dependence of Image Search on in-house skill and judgment is its Achilles heel. But we faithfully kept it up to date until we came to a crossroads where new editions that were in every other respect ready for the Archive outran our ability to generate the descriptions and keywords for Image Search, and we faced a long, painful conversion of the site from SGML to XML. So we fenced off the category that Blake scholars call the illuminated books. We have maintained Image Search in that one large category only. For all others, including drawings, paintings, prints, manuscripts, and printed books, we created Preview, a stopgap label for new works that incorporates every Archive feature except Image Search. The word preview betrays our frustration and ambivalence. Would there be more Image Search to come? We weren’t able to commit; but we weren’t able to just sink the thing. So the resort to Preview felt a bit like failure, caused by our devotion to what was perhaps a flawed concept. And we knew that most users would neither notice nor care.
Then a series of major developments put us back on track. Blake Archive XML dawned in 2006. After more than a decade of close collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, we moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Joe Viscomi had assembled a superlative new team, and we began to publish our big backlog of finished work and launch major new projects.
Meanwhile, out of the blue, came an inquiry from a highly respected Blake scholar and colleague, Alexander (Sandy) Gourlay, that brought Image Search back into focus: would we be interested in publishing his
commentary...as compact as you like, primarily objective/descriptive
email 11 May 2006
on Blake’s 537 watercolor illustrations to Edward Young’s once-popular poem,
We were intrigued. The designs are striking and significant; the
So for us Sandy’s question came down to this: could we teach our system to a visiting Blake expert who would apply it to a huge batch of pictures that were outside the illuminated-books category? We supplied a simple template and a review of Image Search. Sandy’s first tries ran aground in ways that were familiar to those of us who had suffered through the same difficulties: too many new terms, too little consistency, and too much effort to capture meaning. He complained that writing the descriptions left him thoroughly depressed about prospects...It’s partially the ratio of labor to useful productivity
and partly the sense that Blake, in pictures, and Young, in words, lived in two different universes...each with its own language...very different from the illuminated books.
We felt his pain. We knew, as Bob Essick wrote, that
trial and error is the best way to learn this sort of thing
email, Essick to Eaves and Viscomi, 13 May 2006
. So we responded with empathy: Everything about the terms and the descriptions feels arbitrary...and the sea of markup-able elements seems too deep to fathom.
Ultimately Sandy decided to create a separate web site devoted to his project. We were sorry to lose his expertise, but we understood the frustration of a scholar-critic with something to say about the meaning of
But, perhaps perversely, the failed little experiment inspired us. We continued our discussion. Was Image Search worth salvaging? Yes: the experiment reminded us that it worked pretty well to meet the limited demands we had in mind. Perhaps it even met the good enough
standard that engineers sometimes apply. Image Search could accommodate any of Blake’s works, even those as different from the illuminated books as his
Was it time to generate new descriptions for the several copies of as-yet unpublished
We may live to regret our decision. Image Search is parochial, but it is fairly self-consistent and built on standard bones — imaging bones, markup bones — in a project that has been highly aware of standards and best practices when they exist and compliant with them whenever compliance works for us. We hope to fulfill our original aims of creating an image search engine that will sustain advanced research. But here as elsewhere we proceed as shopworn veterans who have learned one more hard lesson about pictures and their problems.
Beyond even our low and localized aspirations for the near term, what might we consider?
Internet pioneer and Google vice-president Vint Cerf recently imagined the arrival of an
exciting moment less than a decade away — September 10, 2017 — when, In a breakthrough for Web searchers everywhere, new indexing tools have been
announced that allow images, video, audio clips, and other nontextual content to become part of
the organized information of the World Wide Web
And, of course, there is always automated searching. Computers have inspired the thought that image searching could be automated in a way that would make it easy for users of, say, Corbis http://pro.corbis.com, the Bettmann Archive http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/BettmannArchive.asp,
or AP Images http://apimages.ap.org/ to locate anything they might be looking for in any of the millions of images in their commercial databanks. Research proceeds apace on multiple fronts with enormous stakes. The co-founder of Palm is now the co-founder of Numenta http://www.numenta.com/, one of whose pilot projects calls for it to learn
the properties of a large set of images and search their contents automatically. There are bits of promising (if proprietary) news from other quarters — demonstrated by Riya http://www.riya.com/, for example, Blinkx http://www.blinkx.com/, and Ask http://www.ask.com/. Google recently filed a patent application for a technology that would recognize texts within images (street and store names on maps, for instance) — with potential application for searches in Google’s Book Search and Street View
So far we have seen no evidence that any automatic system in the foreseeable future will be
able to shoulder any of the work that our modest little Image Search does. But there is yet
another kind of potential in visual searches. Once, as I was trying to explain to a member of
the JPEG Consortium why in the world such an elaborate array of keywords is required to respond
to the questions about Blake’s pictures that most scholars ask, he broke in: Yes, but do they ever want the answer to another question:
He made a quadrangle with his fingers. Not Is there anything else in this group of pictures
is this a gowned or nude male or female standing or walking with arms raised in Golgonooza, Stonehenge, or London?,
but is this [visual area] on this painted or printed or drawn surface
Is this [combination of texture, color, light, and shade] an instance of a technique that Blake used elsewhere or only here? Do these colors, or these crosshatching patterns, appear frequently? In that arena the potential for automatic searching in the near future or perhaps even now seems far easier to envision.like
[any other image areas]?
Meanwhile there is no reason to stop worrying about the problems — the smaller problems of digital humanities projects, the larger problems of scholarly communication as a whole — that pictures bring to the table of our troubles. At this point, between ten and fifteen years into the game, our imaging standards, images, and imaging tools are responsive and sturdy enough to continue to provoke the combination of uncertainty with optimism (even, occasionally, vision) that has been the fundamental dynamic of web-based humanities computing. In technical areas we are, much of the time, pathetically dependent on the expertise of others whose investments are elsewhere. In print media scholars have been dependent on typesetters, printers, and publishers, of course, but in a technological environment that changed very slowly by comparison. Our uncertainty and dependence are not remediable conditions of our work — and supposing otherwise could be paralyzing. We must simply accept the expertise, make what we can of it along with the compromises we must make, and move ahead. It is never enough to say this once. We must say it again and again.