May 5-30, 2014 $175
Students in this course will explore the many ways in which photographic images are described and interpreted by both people and computers. The goal of the course is to broaden the non-specialist cataloguer’s ability to describe the subject content and material qualities of photographs, and to provide a greater understanding of current standards and approaches to image resource access. The course will begin with exercises aimed at helping students to identify and describe different photographic media and common deterioration problems. Students will develop an image record using either the VRA Core Categories or Dublin Core, and will apply authority data to these records using specialized controlled vocabularies such as the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Getty Vocabularies. Class discussions will focus on questions of data completeness and complexity, theories regarding image iconography and interpretation, and the feasibility of using crowd-sourced descriptive information, including social tagging and folksonomies. The outcome of this course will be a greater understanding of the varied approaches to describing visual content through written language, giving students the skills to incorporate flexibility into the cataloguing structure.
This course is a follow-up to “What do I do with all these Images?” Getting Started with Digital Image Collections, but it is not necessary to have taken that class in order to participate. While the previous course focused on building a digitization program, this course will focus on the description and retrieval of digital resources.
Course goals:
Improve cataloguer lexicon for describing image quality and content, understand theories of image description
Learn to identify and describe the common ways in which images deteriorate
Appreciate the “semantic gap” between visual and textual information
Improve understanding of controlled vocabularies, folksonomies and social tagging for image retrieval
http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/064-describing-photographs.php
