A3BairdCunninghamSmith

A3BairdCunninghamSmith

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• identify one focused topic within the chapter which is of greatest interest to your group!
• each group member: should identify one additional source relevant to the topic chosen!
• each group: provide a two page max summary statement in our course environment (mention the additional resources identified)
• prepare a short presentation to the class for the class meeting on Sept 17! the groups can choose how to present their results (oral only; use slides; one member, several members, or all members); time allocation (will be dependent of the numbers of groups: but somewhere between 4 and 10 minutes)

Form for your response

1. Herbert Simon

Will Baird, Dara Cunningham, & Matt Smith

2. Most interesting idea/concept you learned from the article?

Good work. See inline comments

Summary/definition of digital photographic history

Visual information is particularly compelling for human beings. Humans can gain much more information from visual information than from text. With the advent of cheap and nearly ubiquitous digital photo technologies, we have the ability to create image rich digital histories that can be shared worldwide. In this brief summary, we examine some of the trends and impacts on society that have evolved since the advent of the digital camera and the Internet.

Cameraphones, the Internet, and Automatic Sharing - Dara

A 2005 study gave 60 people good camera phones with free unlimited voice and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network connections. The camera phones were loaded with context -aware mobile media sharing software and the Mobile Media Metadata 2 system (MMM2).

#bubblec('MMM2 automatically uploads the image to the MMM2 system, where each photographer has a website where images can viewed, captioned, and organized', 'This is a VERY long quote and there is no comment or explanation at all. When you quote, especially when you quote more than a few words, you need to put the quote into relation to your own writing for it to make sense. Thereby, you also show why you chose the quote and that you understand what it says.') into "albums." Images can be shared with other MMM2 participants, or with anyone with email, either directly from the phone at time of capture, or from the website (accessible from the phone or from a computer). Recipients receive a URL and, in their email, a thumbnail. Once uploaded, an image can be treated like any other JPEG. (Van House, 2005)

This system has advantages over the previous systems in that the camera, and thus the image, quality is better than the average camera phone, the service is free, having the same phones and sharing system means no compatibility issues, recipients receive URLs rather than bandwidth-heavy images, and the MMM2 Web site supports image management.

What are the results of this study? What were the research questions?

The relatively new phenomenon of many people always having a camera at hand has already changed the world. With easy and quick viewing, uploading, and sharing, photography has become for many a frequent activity. Photos are being used in ways that they weren't before, like a daily photo "blog," or reminders, or personal artwork. With the little to no cost of the new photography, photos have also changed from being something used mainly for special occasions to something used like a conversation with those we know.

Collaboration - Dara

Digital photography is being used for collaboration in the business and academic worlds. Digital video, combined with email, digital documents, and information shared via Web sites, is contributing to distributed research collaboration and allowing businesses to have employees meet without travelling. http://www.springerlink.com/content/a23j8586q02x6tr6/fulltext.html

Disaster informatics and response - Matt

Digital photography and camera phones have made documentary photography more accessible and the emergence of online photo sharing has supported peer-to-peer communication as well as a community forum for disaster-related grassroots activity. The online photo sharing program, Flickr, has been studied by the Disasters Informatics research lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder since it was created in 2004. The study "strives to describe and study the changing information arena in disaster, where citizen-side information generation and dissemination activities are increasingly playing a critical role in disaster preparation, warning, response, and recovery" (Liu 1).Flickr allows amateur photographers as well as professional photographers to come together and share photos of different topics and pictorial experiences of their lives with photo-blogging where real-world accounts can be recorded with more ease of a visual representation than written blogs.

Flickr and other online photo sharing sites have given people a voice through their digital photography. Users give reactions to different events and different disasters. They are data collecting by simply taking eyewitness pictures. Users also are also creating an image that illustrates how they feel about the subject, whether it is political or a disaster situation, or just how they want to memorialize the subject through visualization.

In disaster settings Flickr has contributed to the social media and is woven into a phenomenon called convergence. This is indirect collaboration of the returnees; the anxious, the helpers, the curious, the exploiters, the supporters, and the memorializers who come together around the disaster to gather information in their own ways. With tagging it has been easier to associate data together by subject and geographical location and to form groups around events. Consumers are learning to be producers of this new media technology surrounding photo-sharing. It has become common now for eyewitness photos to be requested by formal disaster response agencies thanks to this new social media and technology surrounding digital cameras and camera phones which allows for citizen journalism to be a more significant part of disaster response efforts (Liu 2008).

Geo-tagging - Will

There is a growing matrix of ways that value can be added to common snapshots. These metadata have enriched the connection with the moment that was captured. In an interview for CNET news Stewart Butterfield pointed out that "Every photo was taken somewhere. That's almost always part of the story of the photo." He is co-founder of Flickr, which at the time of the interview (Sept. 2007) already was storing 36 million geotagged photos for it users; this was roughly 3 percent of their total archive.

Here is one example scenario of how this digital image metadata can facilitate collaboration between different groups. Users can submit picture messages (and optional GPS coordinates) to a portal. The pictures will be posted to the web site and a link to this submittal will be sent to the photographers email address on file. The photographer can geo tag their image on Google maps. This will populate a database of object locations. Industry knowledgeable contributors will then identify the queued object images.

For example a teacher could post the picture of a frog that he could not identify during a field trip in Georgia. Then a herpetologist might identify the frog in the picture and then later search for population dispersal of this alien frog that was introduced to the US in Florida a decade earlier. If an image is submitted with GPS coordinates, then it would be quality data on a particular topic. Another use might be documenting a sighting of the previously believed extinct Ivory Billed woodpecker. This could also be used by neighborhood watch members to document suspicious persons or drug activity in their community.

Images would need to be submitted into categories to facilitate identification and data quality in the db. A category designation might be something like Biology->Botany->Trees. Images of legal activity would be protected by anonymity by default.

Name tagging - Will

Name tags are another popular and powerful type of image meta data. In their most primitive form, they are simply another searchable key word included in the caption. This progressed to boxes overlaid on the image that are hyper links to the profile of person whose likeness is capture inside the box. This has progressed to image processing algorithms that will recognize faces in each image. Then further algorithms will guess who the face belongs to based on the images stored in the contacts list. This can be impressive and humorous as it makes both subtle correct answers and wildly incorrect guesses.

Crime Detection and Citizen Journalism - Dara

Digital video surveillance is being used both by law enforcement and by the general public to detect and record crime. Law enforcement is using cameras to directly enforce laws (for example, stop light cameras), for crime prevention (for example, highly visible security cameras), and to catch criminals after the fact (for example, reviewing public and private surveillance video). http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/PDFs/VideoSurveillance.pdf

While the government is viewing its citizens, its citizens are monitoring each other and law enforcement for criminal activity. Camera phones and other digital cameras have enabled the average citizen to capture events as they happen without fore-warning. Non-journalists have contributed some of the most sensational news stories over the past couple of decades (for example, Rodney King). The ubiquity of digital cameras has contributed to a near over-throw of journalists in capturing "breaking news," particularly as it concerns capturing law enforcement abuses.

With blogs documenting the death of Princess Diana, soldiers' digital images of the prison abuse in Iraq, and private individuals' mobile phones of the London subway bombing, citizen journalists' capacity to use cellphones, cameraphones, laptops, wi-fi cards, mobile satellite dishes, digital cameras, blogs, and the Internet has kept eyewitnessing central to the coverage of news events, even if it is no longer driven by conventional journalism. (Zelizer, 2007) http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/733375_731200513_786943177.pdf

#bubblec('Conclusion - Matt', 'The conclusion should be a collaborative work, after all it should take all individual contributions into consideration and create a coherent statement/standpoint out of these.')

With the new affordable digital photography tools available to the public today, including camera phones, and the availability of the internet the public has created an evolving new social media which creates a digital personal history for individuals as well as a reference history for future generations based on eyewitness accounts and representations of reactions of a population at the time of the event. This new social media allows for world-wide sharing of views and events from the eyes of the populous more so than the official news reporting agencies.

3. articulate what you did not understand in the article but it sounded interesting and you would like to know more about it

Why dont you list all sources that you mention and use in the survey? You did not NEED to do it, but I think that would make this section more useful.

Dara Cunningham Digital Imaging Topic Source:

Nancy Van House, Marc Davis, Morgan Ames, Megan Finn, Vijay Viswanathan, The Uses of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing, 1853-1856, CHI 2005, Late Breaking Results: Posters April 2-7, Portland, Oregon, USA. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1060000/1057039/p1853-vanhouse.pdf?key1=1057039&key2=4724541221&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=2801261&CFTOKEN=56210236

Will Baird Source:

CNET news "Geotagging links photos to locales" By Stephen Shankland September 4, 2007 4:00 AM PDT http://news.cnet.com/Geotagging-links-photos-to-locales/2100-1041_3-6205734.html

Matt Smith Source:

Liu, Sophia B., Leysia Palen, Jeannette Sutton, Amanda L. Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg. The Emergent Role of On-Line Photo Sharing in Times of Disaster. University of Colorado, 2008. http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/Papers/iscram08/OnlinePhotoSharingISCRAM08.pdf