Finding Images on Flickr: Advice Document from JISC

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has just released an advice document, Finding Images on Flickr. With hints on using images you find on Flickr, sorting your search results, date searching, finding images using maps, finding photos taken by specific camera models, subscribing to photo feeds, and more, this document contains a lot of useful information. A section on further resources provides related links such as JISC's Photo Sharing Sites and Images in Blogs and Wikis, Flickr's How to get the most out of Flickr, and Creative Commons' Questions for people thinking about using a Creative Commons-licensed work.

Image: johnb/uk, old/cameras, 2009. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

VRC Flickr Page: New Building and DMB Collective Images

The VRC has posted images on Flickr of our latest tour of the new Visual Arts Complex building (June 30) and of the July 3rd DMB Collective show opening at Vertigo in Denver. Please visit the VRC's Flickr group page to see these snapshots.

To view the latest VAC images as a set, enter "June tour" in the "search this group's pool" field at the upper right. When you get the search results you can scroll through them in "slideshow" mode by clicking on the Slideshow link on the right side of the page. To view the DMB opening images as a set, enter "DMB" in "search this group's pool."

If you are a faculty or staff member, student, or alumnus/a of the Department of Art and Art History, please consider joining the "Visual Resources, Art and Art History, CU-Boulder" group. You need to register for a free Flickr account in order to join the group and contribute content.

ARTstor Celebrates One Million Images

ARTstor celebrates its fifth anniversary and one millionth image this month. ARTstor has come a long way since its launch of 300,000 images in July of 2004. ARTstor's latest newsletter outlines some of the important developments that have occurred in ARTstor, as well as the exciting plans in store.

Subscribers can now download images at screen size for use in PowerPoint. ARTstor now offers over 350,000 images of modern and contemporary art. Scholars can take advantage of the Images for Academic Publishing services at no charge. One of the most promising developments in the works is Shared Shelf, an enterprise cataloging and image management system that works in conjunction with ARTstor, which institutions will use to provide more seamless access to visual resources.

In just a few years ARTstor has become an integral resource for many disciplines at the University of Colorado. Congratulations to ARTstor on an incredible five years, and many thanks to ARTstor for listening and responding so effectively to the user community.

Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection 101

Here's a little more on information literacy. Howard Rheingold's recent article, Crap Detection 101, is full of great tips for wading through online "toxic badinfo" and identifying credible information online.

These tips include easywhois.com for finding out who owns a Web site, factchecked.org for verifying online facts, Newstrust for news literacy tools, and many others.

As one commenter noted, Rheingold's article failed to mention that librarians are excellent at detecting and filtering out bad information. Remember that the Research and Instruction librarians at the University Libraries are experts at helping faculty and students with research questions. In addition to walk-in inquiries at the research desk, their "Ask Us" service offers consultations by e-mail, phone, or chat.

Image: Justin Hall, Howard Rheingold, from Howard Rheingold's Web site.

ArtBabble: Online Videos About Art

If you are looking for online video content about art, be sure to check out ArtBabble. Launched earlier this spring by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble is "intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives."

Now partnering with IMA is Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the New York Public Library. IMA intends to continue adding content from these and other institutions, hoping that it will become an online destination for videos about art.

Videos on the Web site may be found by keyword searching or by browsing different categories. The "Series" tab includes Shaping the New Century: An International Design Symposium, Behind the Scenes at MoMA, Art21--Exclusive, NYPL: Design by the Book, Roman Art from the Louvre Webisodes, and more. The "Channels" tab contains alphabetically arranged keywords for finding content on the site, each of which is accompanied by the number of relevant videos in parentheses. Examples include Ancient Art (17), Ceramics (4), Contemporary Art (93), Exhibitions (51), Film (5), Painting (10), Talks (23), and Video Art (4). The "Artists" tab contains a list of over 150 artists currently represented by videos on the site. This includes contemporary artists, such as Lita Albuquerque, Dawoud Bey, Chuck Close, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Kerry James Marshall, Pipilotti Rist, Jessica Stockholder, and Richard Tuttle. It also includes some historical figures, such as Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, and Piet Mondrian. The "Partners" tab enables browsing by the project partners listed above.

Twitter Search in Plain English from Common Craft

Common Craft has recently released a new video: Twitter Search in Plain English. As with their other videos, Common Craft uses charming paper prototyping and plain talk to provide an overview of the topic in a short and concise way. It's a follow-up to their Twitter in Plain English introduction.

I have mentioned Common Craft before -- they have created a range of these videos on technology topics such as social bookmarking, RSS feeds, wikis, and podcasting. See their Web site for more examples.

Tech Overload

While the technology of social networking sites has allowed us to teach and interact in ways that were unthought of a decade ago, there is growing concern that we are spending too much time 'wired' to other humans as opposed to interacting face to face. The health awareness journal Energy Times recently put out an insightful article, Our Rewired Brains, illustrating the pros and cons of using technology as our primary means of connecting to other people.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Almost all of us have heard the term "Web 2.0," perhaps ad nauseum. If you are not sure what this term means, don't worry -- you are not alone. Here is a must-see short video created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. While Wesch released the final version in March of 2007 (eons ago in technology time), it is still remarkably fresh. In less than five minutes, Wesch has captured the essence of Web 2.0 and its social and cultural implications. It's well worth your time!

Data Visualization and Mashups: Tag Galaxy

Data visualization and mashups are both hot technology topics, and we might encounter and use them frequently without even recognizing them. Data visualization is simply the representation of data in visual form. Mashups may be defined very generally to mean the combination of elements to create new entities and services. Among other things, mashups might occur in Web applications, music, or videos. A good example of a Web application that embodies both data visualization and mashup technology is Tag Galaxy. It is one of many Web applications that take advantage of Flickr's open API (Application Program Interface), which allows third parties to access and manipulate images and data within Flickr to create new applications with novel functionality (i.e., mashups). Tag Galaxy invites you to search for a Flickr tag (a keyword that a Flickr user has assigned), and renders the search results of matching Flickr tags and related tags visually like a solar system (i.e., data visualization). This allows a user to observe the relationships among Flickr tags (and their associated images) in a novel and visually compelling way. This might prompt new image searches with previously unanticipated keyword combinations, which may in turn yield unexpected yet valuable search results.

The thumbnails shown here are from a search I conducted in Tag Galaxy with an initial tag query of ruins. The constellation of tag results include the terms temple, Rome, Italy, Mexico, castle, ancient, abandoned, and architecture (first image above). I selected temple, and in the next set of results chose angkorwat. On the following results (second image) I double clicked on the sun-like object representing the combination of tags I had followed, ruins+temple+angkorwat, and arrived at a "planet" comprised of images with these matching tags, which I can rotate with my mouse to observe in its entirety (third image). To see more search results I can scroll through more batches rendered in this "planet" form. I can click on any of the individual images to see a larger version and its title, with a link that take me to its home within Flickr.

Tag Galaxy and Cooliris (which I recently discussed here) are just two applications that use Flickr's API to search and display Flickr data in new ways. Some other useful tools are highlighted in the recent article by Ben Parr over at Mashable, titled 7 Totally Unique Flickr Search Tools.

35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop

Over at Six Revisions, Jacob Gube has posted an article with links to 35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop. While it's geared to beginners, including the most basic "Getting Started" materials, it also highlights some tools that should be of interest to users with a bit more experience, such as manipulating images with scripting.