viz. - Reviews

Image Database Review: NOAA Photo Library

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:05:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traces its roots back to the oldest scientific agency in the United States: the Survey of the Coast established in 1807. Today's agency has a much broader purview, providing forecasts for the National Weather Service, maintaining orbiting satellites to monitor the Earth's climate, managing the nation's fisheries, and conducting scientific research. The database containing the photographic documentation of these varied activities provides the subject of this week's review.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The web interface for the NOAA Photo Library is presented to the user through a basic html webpage. The entry screen displays an Image of the Day. The NOAA Photo Library organizes some its holdings with a number of Collections. The Collections are linked in a frame to the left of the screen. The site also provides a simple search box that the user accesses through a link on a line of menu tabs that run below the "NOAA Photo Library" banner. The search function permits the user to input one or more terms, but it provides no advanced keyword searching, limiting or sorting functions. The search function is provided through Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Photo by Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Staff

The NOAA Photo Library contains many images related to oceanic and atmospheric research. Some of the Collections include "America's Coastlines," "Weather Service," "Fisheries," and "Coral Kingdom." There are also some interesting surprises among its holdings, including the "Treasures of the Library" collection which includes images from texts dating back to the 15th century relating to the study of the oceans and climate and a collection of historic prints on the "Histories and Methods of Fisheries" documenting American fisheries in the late 19th century.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

While the search function is limited, many of the photos have extensive "category" tags, and those tags can be used in the search to locate related images. Many of the Collections include sub-categories organized in albums, providing another means to navigate the extensive number of images that reside on the database.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

One valuable aspect of the NOAA collection and any collection of imagery authored by a federal agency is the lack of copyright attached to the works. According to section 105 of the Copyright Act, "Copyright protection...is not available for any work of the United States Government." Agencies often attach some limitations to the images they release. For example, NOAA suggests that their images should primarily be used for education purposes and require that their images be credited "to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. Where a photographer is noted, please credit the photographer and his/her affiliated organization as well." Other agencies, such as NASA expressly prohibit using images in a way that suggests NASA commercially endorses a product or service. Outside of such requirements, however, images may be used freely.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

Another strength of the Library is its inclusion of higher resolution images for many of the photos. In some cases, the original photos themselves were not high resolution images, so the higher resolution images provided on the website are of limited use, but for other images, such as photos of the historic book plates and more recent nature photography, the image quality is quite high.

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

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

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer

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.

Review: Food, Inc.

timturner — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:25:02 +0000

This weekend, partly out of personal interest and partly in relation to a project I'm working on for the CWRL, I saw the new documentary Food, Inc. What follows is a brief "review" of the film (in other words, my scattered response to it) and some ideas for incorporating the film in the classroom (I assume it will be released on DVD sometime in the fall). I won't be discussing the visual rhetoric of the film in depth, but will instead focus on the film as the visual presentation of an argument about food.

*****
The opening credits of Food, Inc. present viewers with a tour of the modern American supermarket and the cornucopia of brightly colored packages filling it. The audience is later informed by voiceover narration that this supermarket contains somewhere around 47,000 products. In one of the film's more sardonic moments, we are also informed that an astonishingly high number of these products are made with elements derived from a single ingredient: corn. This arc covered by the film, from the universal supermarket to the particular kernel, establishes its intention of uncovering the origins of the American food supply. Food, Inc. tells the story of industrial agriculture for an audience that, it presumes, is largely unfamiliar with where (or what), exactly, its next meal is coming from.

The film is particularly interested in exposing and documenting the adverse effects of factory farming (in fact, as one of my fellow viewers pointed out, the film was far more interested in meat than in vegetables), and included some gruesome images of the ways chickens, pigs, and cows are raised and slaughtered in this country. (Although there are many disturbing documentary images in the film, in fairness I think it could have been a lot more graphic than it actually was.) Yet these images are somewhat rare since, as the filmmakers argue, industrial meat producers are at pains to keep the means of production hidden from consumers. At one point, the narrators even mention that there is an effort afoot to make it illegal to publish photographs or video of factory-farming operations. This claim is not documented with evidence, but the film does introduce viewers to so-called "food disparagement" laws. These laws are in place in many farm-states, and they limit what food safety advocates can and can't say about food products and producers. I suspect that many viewers will be surprised to learn about the existence of such laws, but they were made famous as the basis of the well-known lawsuit brought against Oprah Winfrey by Texas cattle ranchers.

The film points to these laws above all to demonstrate another of its major arguments: that the food industry, by means of well-organized lobbying groups, wields considerable power over food policy in the United States. One of the film's more amusing animations chronicles the revolving door between industrial agriculture and the USDA, FDA, and Dept. of Agriculture. This portion of the film also includes one of its most powerful emotional appeals, the story of a two year old who died of e. coli food poisoning and his mother's efforts to lobby Congress to enact and enforce stricter regulatory powers for the agencies tasked with keeping the food supply safe.

Food, Inc. includes a number of familiar faces, most notably Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and a co-producer of this film, and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Pollan, cited in the credits as a "Special Contributor" to the film, adds much here. In fact, Food, Inc. essentially repackages the material of Pollan's books, presenting his arguments for an audience that hasn't, and maybe won't, read them. The structure of the film closely mirrors The Omnivore's Dilemma by presenting industrial agriculture, industrial organic, and local/sustainable organic farming in turns. At the same time, the argument of the film is less cerebral, and more immediate, than Pollan's writing. This stems in part from the fact that visual arguments may carry more weight than textual ones (since reading about acres of filth in factory farms, and seeing footage of mountains of manure, can produce markedly different physical responses in the reader/viewer), and in part from the fact that the film makes a concerted effort to move the audience with emotional appeals not present in Pollan's writing (such as the death of Kevin Kowalcyk from e. coli, or the plight of workers in a pig slaughterhouse).

The strengths of Food, Inc. are related to its weaknesses. The film effectively achieves its primary aim of informing the audience about industrial food practices and promoting an agenda of reforming (or revolutionizing) food production in the United States. It seeks to move its audience by deploying a number of different appeals, including both reason (there are plenty of facts and figures) and emotion. But the latter are not, perhaps by definition and certainly by design, subtle, and the film does promote its cause by linking it to the most helpless of victims (the toddler who dies of food poisoning, the sick cattle who are dragged to slaughter on forklifts). Such imagery may be justified by the urgency and gravity the filmmakers wish to convey, but some in the audience will undoubtedly accuse of the film of what is commonly referred to as "bleeding-heart" liberalism. To this criticism might be added the fact that the film is not balanced; it does not present the viewpoints of industrial agriculture, although not, perhaps, for lack of trying. In what becomes something of a running joke, Food, Inc. repeatedly informs the audience that representatives of X company declined to be interviewed for the film. This refusal of access by the leading industrial agricultural corporations is construed by the film as a conspiracy of secrecy, and at times the corporations are presented as shadowy overlords and de facto rulers of America's farming communities and food culture.

But of course, Food, Inc. does not need to present the views of its opponents; that is not the point of polemical documentaries. What it presents instead, effectively and compellingly, is advocacy for a particular point of view about the world we live in and the food we eat.

*****
Food, Inc. and Pedagogy
Instructors working with Pollan's In Defense of Food will find Food, Inc. a useful film to show to students since it recapitulates many of the arguments found in that book, albeit in a visual form. The film also raises additional, related issues, however, that instructors may wish to pursue in class, or encourage students to pursue in their research projects. These include, among others, the regulatory powers of the FDA and USDA ("Kevin's Law"), immigration and labor in industrial agriculture, and "food disparagement" laws (including the film's claim that factory farmers want to make it illegal to publish images of their farms).

It might also be useful to use the film to raise the introductory questions of visual rhetoric. For example, instructors might devise an exercise in which students consider and debate whether the film makes a more or less effective argument than the book. Does the addition of the visual dimension, including intensified appeals to pathos by means of graphic or emotional images, change the persuasiveness of the argument? What sorts of audiences are more likely to be moved by such images, and what audiences are less likely to be moved by them?

Additionally, the film might raise general questions about the visual rhetoric of arguments about industrial agriculture. I am thinking in particular of the notion of identification as it is introduced in rhetorical pedagogy, and of this film's reliance on images of suffering of animals to move its audiences. Such images are common, for example, in arguments in favor of vegetarianism or veganism or against factory farming in general (even when a change in diet is not advocated). How effective is it to ask audiences to identify with the suffering of animals? How much do such arguments, fairly or not, rely on the so-called "pathetic fallacy"?

Similarly, another pattern of interest is the film's pastoral imagery. The use of such imagery to market and sell processed foods is explicitly noted by the filmmakers--but to what extent do the filmmakers, in turn, rely on a romanticized image of the American farm that is, or is not, attainable today? What role does the topos of the country (or of the city) play in our debates about food and culture, and how does this situate them in relation to the long history of such debates in American politics and culture more generally, from Jefferson's agrarian republic, to Thoreau's Walden, to TV's Green Acres?

Views

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:08:16 +0000

"Views" is Viz.'s newest section, and will host permanent site content, primarily interviews of prominent visual rhetoric/communication scholars and reviews of their works.

Interview of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, the authors of No Caption Needed. Posted February 16th, 2009.

Interview of Roberto Tejada on Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography. Posted March 2nd, 2009.

Interview of Jan Eliot, Creator of the comic "Stone Soup." Posted April 15th, 2009.

Interview of Zack Booth Simpson, an Austin-based game designer, artist, and biology researcher. Posted January 21st, 2010.

Interview of Maureen R. Drennan, a New York photographer and finalist in the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition. Posted February 9, 2010.

Interview of Drs. Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis, late of the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, on performance analysis and pedagogy. Posted August 18, 2010.

Views

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:07:17 +0000

"Views" is Viz.'s newest section, and will host permanent site content, primarily interviews of prominent visual rhetoric/communication scholars and reviews of their works.