viz. - New York City

Image Database Review: New York City Department of Records Online Image Gallery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:49:22 +0000

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.

Mannahatta my city

emcg — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:52:54 +0000

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Next month, I’ll be making a long-awaited trip to New York City, my adopted hometown. To prepare, I’ve been studying Adam Platt’s latest restaurant reviews, reciting Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” nightly like prayer, and spending quality time with landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project.

A digital map of the island as it appeared in 1609, when Hudson first sailed into New York Bay, this visualization tool offers an intriguing argument about the city’s ecological future.

The (cleverly named) Mannahatta Project slyly repurposes the technologies employed by Hollywood disaster flicks to recreate the island’s former biodiversity and to model the 55 different ecosystems the island once supported. The model also takes into account the activities of the Lenape, whose 5000 years of settlement and cultivation also impacted the island's ecology. Project Director Eric Sanderson's TED talk provides an accessible overview of the complex, decade-long process of spatial layering, “geo-referencing,” and spinning of Muir webs involved in trying to re-capture the island's remote ecological past.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Sanderson insists that the project's goal is not to lament the loss of the 1609 Mannahatta but to see today's Manhattan anew, to come to understand the city as a habitat, with its own dense, resilient networks. Sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, the Mannahatta Project is pitched as a tool that will allow us to design sustainable cities. I.e., by digitally reconstructing Manhattan Island as it might have been in 1609, the Mannahatta Project opens up a cognitive space for imagining what (else) New York might become. Sanderson’s visualization of Manhattan in 2409 shows rooftop gardens growing produce, city-dwellers on bikes, streams instead of sewers, and greater popular density to leave space for reclaimed green areas. No longer would one have to choose, as in Whitman's 1865 poem, between "Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs...Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus" and Nature's "primal sanities."

Returning to the question Noel posed two months ago: does the Mannahatta Project work as a new, creative visualization of ecological crisis? Is the message too buried, indirect? Have we altered the landscape too drastically for an effective (and affective) recognition of Mannahatta in 1609 as our city? I think that the site's exploration tool succeeds in appealing to New Yorkers' fierce turf loyalty, allowing visitors to select a particular city block and access information about its former (and current) native wildlife. The project works to make these landscape alterations personal, intimate, but I'm curious if it has the same appeal for non-New Yorkers.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

P.S. Sanderson has also authored a shiny coffee-table book: Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.

Several in Eight Million

Andi — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:49:50 +0000

Screen shot of New York Times

H/T: Becky

I recently spent a large chunk of time browsing through the collection of profiles in sound and images, "One in 8 Million" on the New York Times website. I went there in search of examples of narrated slide shows for my students who are creating their own this month for our class on social documentary. The series focuses on the "passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions" of New York City's "parade of people" it labels "characters" (Series Intro). The series certainly does treat its individual subjects as quirky characters worthy of being paraded and I found myself endlessly trolling through profile after profile until it seemed the subjects were all the same in their uniqueness. "One in 8 Million" allows viewers into the lives of the "Ex-Bank Robber" or the "Blind Wine Taster" and suggests that each is fascinating for its quirkiness but the ubiquity of that quirky quality acts as the great equalizer here.

Rather than close-reading one of these profiles (it was too hard to chose just one!), I began thinking about how this project functions as a collection. The interactive component of the project allows the viewer to scroll through the collected narratives, see one photograph, and hear one snippet of narration from each profile. The collection comprised of black and white photographs recalls the "Family of Man" exhibit and yet the language used to describe the project ("parade" of "characters") and the labels by which each profile is introduced ("the Sneaker Connoisseur" or "the Urban Taxidermist") seems evocative of Arbus' focus on people she depicted as social others. Despite its awkward descriptive labels and language, this project invokes an inclusiveness in its attempt to collect a broad range of individuals.

Moreover, the collection implies a kind of comprehensiveness by which each profile serves a representative function. We might not all know an obsessive shoe collector, but surely we know someone similar. Browsing this collection left me wondering about the current popularity of projects such as "One in 8 Million" or the StoryCorps project. Literary critic Susan Stewart argues "the collection presents a hermetic world. The have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world--a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority" (Stewart, On Longing). Are these collections an attempt to appeal to a broad range of people because they represent a broad range of people? Are these collections attempts to claim an authoritative depiction by deploying a rhetoric of objectivity through sheer exhaustiveness? Why do we want to see one in eight million?

Eugene de Salignac’s photos of New York

John Jones — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:17:29 +0000

This Smithsonian Magazine article describes the discovery of the identity of the municipal photographer who captured many iconic shots of turn-of-the-century New York, Eugene de Salignac. The Museum of the City of New York will be hosting a show of his work that coincides with the release of a new book of his photographs. The article is accompanied by a gallery of some of de Salignac’s most well-known images.

via Boing Boing