Refining Our Notions of What (Digital) Images Really Are

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

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

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.

As may be obvious already, the panel is motivated by its participants' shared
desire to subject digital images to the same degree of intellectual scrutiny
that has been brought to bear in recent discussions of electronic text
encoding and text-based editing -- exemplified by the frequently-referenced
series of papers by Steve DeRose, Allen Renear, et al. from which we derive
the session's title. The panel is predicated on the assumption that the
humanities computing community at large does not yet engage with digital
images and imaging technologies at anywhere near the same level of
sophistication as electronic text, not least because the underlying
computational structure of images is so radically different from that of
machine-readable text. These computational differences in turn reflect and
recapitulate certain elemental differences in the epistemology and ontology
of images and text. (Consider markup languages in this regard: markup
languages allow one to describe text with more text, but there is no
comparable procedure for describing images -- one cannot "markup" an image
with another image.) We do not propose to address the manifold
epistemological differences between word and image in any comprehensive way,
but rather to suggest a variety of computational approaches to image data
while discriminating among a range of editorial strategies for incorporating
images into digital library collections, electronic editions, and electronic
archives.
In a recent article Julia Flanders maintains that "[t]he role that images
currently play in electronic editions seems to move between decoration,
scholarly substantiation, and bravura display" (309). This has been largely
true thus far, but new tools and techniques have lately begun to allow us to
treat images with far greater subtlety. Moreover, even the seemingly
straightforward notion of a digital "facsimile" involves basic editorial
decisions which too often go unrecognized: should the digital images be
color-corrected, and if so what measure of chromatic fidelity should be
employed? Should the facsimile be presented on the screen at its true
physical dimensions, a prime consideration in a field such as art history?
(The William Blake Archive uses Java technology to resize images on the
fly.)
But the heart of the issue, as Flanders and others have recognized, is the
need to begin treating images as structured data rather than as simple
supplements to machine-readable text. Various strategies to accomplish this,
ranging from descriptive SGML-based image annotation to search technologies
employing sophisticated pattern-matching logics are gradually coming
available, and humanists now need to begin thinking through the implications
of images as structured data, in the same way that recent years have
produced vigorous discussions of text-based electronic editing and
text-encoding. The panel will suggest starting points for such a discussion,
as well as provide examples of projects that have taken early steps in this
direction.
The panel will also consider forms of visual knowledge that lie beyond the
familiar horizon of facsimile reproduction. As Jerome McGann has recently
demonstrated, for example, the algorithms and filters available in common
desktop packages such as Adobe Photoshop have the potential to expose formal
elements of an image's structural composition through processes of
computational deformation. Or else consider modeling and visualization
tools, which have a long history of applications in the hard sciences: a
visualization of search results or the narrative structure of a text is no
less an "image" than a facsimile of a manuscript page, and the increasing
ease with which digital tools allow us to generate such visualizations
suggests that our thinking about visual materials in electronic editions and
digital libraries will soon evolve to encompass this new, non-referential
class of 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

1
2
3-26
1990

Julia
Flanders
Trusting the Electronic Edition

Computers and the Humanities

31
4
301-310
1998

Matthew
G.Kirschenbaum
Documenting Digital Images: Textual Meta-Data at the
Blake Archive

The Electronic Library

16
4
239-41
August 1998

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
Editing

RichardFinneran
The Literary Text in the Digital Age

Ann Arbor
The University of Michigan Press
1996

Allen
Renear
Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Text

Kathryn
Sutherland

Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory

Oxford
Clarendon Press
1997

Allen
Renear et al
Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem
of Overlapping Hierarchies

Nancy
Ide

Susan
Hockey

Research in Humanities Computing

Oxford
Oxford University Press
1996

Note: This short list is intended to portray neither
the broad range of technical literature on digital images and imaging
technologies, nor critical/theoretical work on visual representation, but rather
to suggest the panel's positioning in relation to an ongoing and parallel
discussion of text-encoding and text-based electronic editing.