An Integrated Spatial Search Engine for Maps and Aerial Photographs on a Google Maps API Platform

A traditional library catalog does not do justice to maps and aerial photographs. Text can never fully describe them and maps' and aerial photographs' geographic coverage or perimeters cannot be displayed visually in the online public access catalog (OPAC), so searching based on their textual metadata without specific spatial reference data used also for display purposes is often not enough to locate relevant items. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's (HUJI) Geography Department has developed a spatial search engine for their scanned aerial photographs collection that allows users to locate one or more aerial photographs according to the area of the Earth's surface that was photographed and their accompanying metadata. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library, which holds a large unscanned print map collection, has asked to integrate a similar map search mechanism in the Department's existing search engine, and a new website was launched in December 2015 (http://ccg.huji.ac.il/aerialphotos/) showing the aerial photographs' center points alongside the maps' rectangle perimeter. The search engine retrieves maps and aerial photographs that intersect with a user-drawn rectangle. This article discusses the characteristics of these collections, the rationale behind searching for maps and aerial photographs together, and the process of defining and building this spatial search engine. This method allows users to view which items are available in their area of interest side-by-side, on a Google Maps background map.     

Infrared Ellipsometry Analysis of Heritage Photographic Prints

Focusing on the photographic archive of Julian Carrillo (Mexico), we study and characterize the photographic processes of a set of 13 photographs dated between 1884 and 1925. By using infrared spectroscopic ellipsometry, we classified a selected set of photographs according to its kind of binder. Thus, we recognized for each photograph, the presence of proteins, and therefore, the particular photographic process. Furthermore, we have identified the presence of baryta layer, the use of plasticizer, and the eventual coating utilized to protect the photograph, whose composition was based in natural organic components, mainly shellac, beeswax, or camphor.     

Janine Niepce's coverage of French women's lives and struggle for equal rights.

This article analyzes Janine Niepce's photographic documentation of the lives of French women, situating it in historical, sociological, and biographical contexts. It argues that for over 50 years she was the only photo-journalist to devote sustained attention to French women and the French women's movement. Drawing on her writings, 3 interviews, close readings of her photographs, and study of her contact sheets, the article offers a summary of her work, an interpretation of its meaning, and an assessment of its contribution.     

Influences of politics and economics upon photographic content in Chinese newspapers

During the mid‐1980s political pressure upon Chinese journalists decreased, financial pressure upon their newspapers increased and photojournalism gained importance. This study compares the content of photographs in three ‘official’ and three hybrid ‘official‐commercial’ Chinese newspapers. Photographs were found to be less important in ‘official’ newspapers. Subjects and values of concern to government and Party leaders appeared more frequently in ‘official‐commercial’ papers. This study also shows that in a period of political and economic reform, diversity exists in photographic news content and that photographs frequently serve public interests.     

Implementing an Image Database for Complex Russian Architectural Objects: The William Brumfield Collection

SUMMARY

With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Reference Materials Program grant for 2006–2008, faculty and librarians at the University of Washington (UW) are collaborating with William Brumfield (Tulane University) to preserve and catalog the latter's unmatched collection of Russian architectural photographs, create metadata describing the photographs, and make images and text widely accessible as part of an innovative web-based educational and research resource. Building on experience gained through the creation of an experimental pilot database, project staff are adapting emerging standards (METS and CCO) to a custom design that presents images from the Brumfield Collection within their architectural, geographic, and chronological contexts, both as interrelated views of individual structures, and as buildings that share certain structural and stylistic features with other buildings within and beyond the Russian cultural continuum.     

The Tyranny of the Empty Frame

This study explores the notion of the “tyranny of the empty frame” within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists—newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism—are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for “any image,” online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs—their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a “symbolic photograph” to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical–iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.     

Citizen Photojournalism

In recent years there has been an explosion of citizen-produced content appearing in mainstream media outlets. Terms such as convergent journalism, citizen journalism and user-generated journalism are all widely used in an attempt to define this growing phenomenon. This paper explores the specific genre of citizen photojournalism (CPJ). It is argued this is a definitive genre of its own and has important implications for audience perceptions due to the narrative or “storytelling” role of the visual mage. An “action genre” approach is used to examine how this new photographic genre has been enabled within current technological, cultural, political and economic environments That is to say, that photographic production processes, undertaken by amateur photographers are examined to identify patterns of activity that comprise the genre of CPJ. Through a review of existing literature on how citizens work in the field, and the way the resulting photographs are used in mainstream media, I offer a conceptual structure to delineate recognisable patterns of activity that comprise the genre of CPJ. The strength of this approach is that it allows me to describe CPJ in a way that reveals how external factors and the practice of citizens taking photojournalistic images impact upon the final product published in influential publications including popular press, books, magazines and internet publications.     

A Review of Lining Methods for Paper-based Photographic Prints from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

A photograph may be lined when its physical condition is so poor that an additional support is necessary to ensure its survival. Photographic prints may comprise a number of layers, often composed of dissimilar materials that react differently to moisture. As most traditional lining methods involve the use of water, lining can thus cause stresses within and between the various layers. These stresses are thought to exhibit as increased cracking of binder layers and increased curling of the photograph itself. This paper reviews the literature to date regarding the lining of photographs and examines possible future treatment pathways. From the literature, it would appear that the question of how best to line traditional photographic formats, such as albumen, collodion and silver gelatin prints, has not yet been answered. Standard water-based lining adhesives can cause damage to various types of traditional photographs. Heat and solvent-activated adhesives can also cause damage; however, they may allow better control over the physical changes that occur within some types of photographs during treatment. Further investigation of non-traditional adhesives for paper (e.g. waxes and synthetic polymers) is recommended.     

A Case Study of the Photographic Principle

Using The Philadelphia Inquirer as a case study, this article examines the visual behaviors of news professionals as they pertain to the importance and function of the social construction of news photos. The author posits the concept of the photographic principle to explain the process by which news professionals maintain photographic integrity—especially given the latest technology and its potential for misuse in constructing news photos. The photographic principle is defined as the guiding standard photo editors use to preserve the inherent value of news photographs. As the article shows, photo editors at the Inquirer provided the model on which the author based the concept of the photographic principle—a positive example of news workers who strive to protect the veracity of news photos.     

‘Real Pictures of Current Events’

Objectivity has been regarded as a central ideal of American journalism in the early twentieth century. The concurrent emergence of photography in the press is rarely associated with this development. The article explores the photographic legacy of journalistic objectivity by discussing a crucial phase in the development of reproduction media for images, the transition from wood engravings to halftones. The former was the dominant mode of ‘illustrated journalism’, the latter became the dominant mode of reproducing photojournalism in print in the twentieth century. The halftone process introduced an equivalence between photographs and their reproductions, obliterating the mediation that had taken place in a code of reproduction that was almost imperceptible. In the contested adoption of the halftone process, it is argued, a shifting valuation of photographs can be observed that prefigures the formulation of objectivity as a transparent code of mediation in journalism.     

Convergence,connectivity, ephemeral and performed: new characteristics of digital photographs

The recent convergence of digital cameras into mobile phones with Internet connectivity has provided the opportunity for individuals and organisations to adopt new image-making practices. The widespread use of photo-sharing and social networking platforms for sharing, accessing and storing digital photographs is presenting scholars in the social sciences with new areas of research that address the nature of digital photography. By examining the technological, social and cultural factors involved in contemporary image-making practices, scholars are presenting new concepts regarding the characteristics of digital photographs that impact archival activities aimed at managing and preserving trustworthy digital records. This article identifies and discusses the key concepts emerging from social science research on digital photography that are most relevant to the archival field. Analysis of the findings of these studies suggests that new technologies and social practices are changing how people use digital photographs and their expectations of permanence. Therefore, archivists need to be engaged in interdisciplinary discussions regarding the evolution of photographic practices and emerging characteristics of digital photographs in order to anticipate the management and preservation activities required to protect contemporary visual records for future use.     

Discrete and continuous conceptualizations of science: Implications for knowledge domain visualization

Visual depiction of the structure and evolution of science has been proposed as a key strategy for dealing with the large, complex, and increasingly interdisciplinary records of scientific communication. While every such visualization assumes the existence of spatial structures within the system of science, new methods and tools are rarely linked to thorough reflection on the underlying spatial concepts. Meanwhile, geographic information science has adopted a view of geographic space as conceptualized through the duality of discrete objects and continuous fields. This paper argues that conceptualization of science has been dominated by a view of its constituent elements (e.g., authors, articles, journals, disciplines) as discrete objects. It is proposed that, like in geographic information science, alternative concepts could be used for the same phenomenon. For example, one could view an author as either a discrete object at a specific location or as a continuous field occupying all of a discipline. It is further proposed that this duality of spatial concepts can extend to the methods by which low-dimensional geometric models of high-dimensional scientific spaces are created and used. This can result in new methods revealing different kinds of insights. This is demonstrated by a juxtaposition of two visualizations of an author's intellectual evolution on the basis of either a discrete or continuous conceptualization.     

The role of British newspapers in framing the public perception and experience of European radio 1930 to 1939

This article analyses how British newspapers in the 1930s created a particular frame or view of radio as an international medium. This frame was created around the idea of a duality, of radio being defined by both national and foreign broadcasts. By analysing coverage provided by the main national newspapers at this time, in relation to their specific radio coverage, such as programme listing and highlights, this paper delineates the form the frame took, what was included and was absent. Such a frame provides an understanding of how the newspapers viewed and valued radio in a period when international broadcasts were seen as an important part of what radio could offer.     

Framing photographs,denying archives: the difficulty of focusing on archival photographs

This article pursues the varying understandings of the photograph in archival literature. An in-depth review of the scholarship uncovers several possible reasons why archivists and those writing about photographic archives apparently continue to struggle with the photograph, including: the sheer difficulty that photographs as an elusive medium present; past debates about photography in art history, history, and archival literature; and the challenges that the photograph as an evasive document presents to the contradictory nature of archives themselves and to conceptions of archival science. Having evolved from an understanding of photographs that conflated content with meaning to postmodernist notions of contingent and plural meanings in which photographs participate, archival writings on the photograph hold promise as they begin to tread the waters that Schwartz charted in the last 15 years. This paper follows that historical progression in order to trace the discourse on photographic archives that has emerged over the past three decades.

The future is not what it used to be: Changing views on contemporary color photography

Attitudes and approaches toward the collection, use, and care of color photographs have evolved enormously since the official arrival of commercially viable color photographic processes in the early twentieth century. This article traces the evolution of collection, exhibition, and preservation practices for works of art in color photography over the last few decades, as represented by one institution, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.     

Textual DNA

For the first time, this paper studies the evolution of photojournalists' bylines compared to reporters' bylines, which proved a sensitive barometer of longitudinal changes in reporters' status, professionalism, creativity and authorship. Based on a sample of 8800 photographs and news items published across the twentieth century in five quality national dailies: New York Times, The Times of London, Le Figaro, Irish Times and Ha'aretz, this paper shows that photojournalists were discriminated against substantially, consistently and internationally throughout the entire century, lagging not only behind reporters, but also behind the growing centrality of their own photographs. This paper suggests that attribution of photojournalists was hindered by the perception of photography as an objective reproduction of reality that has a weaker claim to attribution; by publishers being attributed of photographic authorship; by the efforts of textual journalists to preserve their superior jurisdiction over news reporting, constructing the inferiority of photojournalism and restricting it to denotative functions; and by the conceptual separation between the growing significance of photography, and the secondary status of its creators, who remain visual creatures in a predominantly textual kingdom. Findings indicate how textual the DNA of the Western press is, which makes its survival more difficult in an increasingly visual world.     

上下文在照片档案叙事中的应用

照片档案叙事在历史、文化、记忆的建构中发挥着重要的作用。上下文影响着照片档案叙事功能发挥。上下文应用于照片档案叙事具有三个层面的价值：资源发现（Where）、内容理解（What）与意义阐释（Why）;通过构建上下文嵌入的知识图谱能够实现照片档案叙事元素节点化表示与应用,探索了照片档案叙事的新思路。本文以吴宝康先生照片档案为例,进行了更为具体的说明。