Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

From Descriptions to Duplicates to Data

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

  • 1875 Accesses

Abstract

Scholarly use of digital material moves from catalogues (locator services) to digital duplicates intended for human study to digital versions intended for computer analysis. We have been through this entire path for text, the easiest material to digitise, and we are now fairly far along with artistic imagery. More difficult content, such as costume and dance, will move through the same stages in the future. Perhaps the most important question is whether the nature of critical research changes as the tools change. Many early applications of computers were authorship studies, for example. More generally, does research based on computer analysis ask the same kind of questions as other research? Is it done on the same materials? So far, it would appear that the same materials are considered, and the same questions asked, but there are newer tools to apply. Algorithmic research can also study larger quantities of material, perhaps reducing the single-work focus of much cultural study.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Pollard, A. W., & Redgrave, G. R. (1926). A short-title catalog of books printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad, 1475–1640. London: The Bibliographical Society.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Wing, D. Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America and of English books printed in other countries, 1641–1700, 3 vols. New York: The Index Society, 1945–51.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Borgman, C. L. (1997). From acting locally to thinking globally: A brief history of library automation. The Library Quarterly, 67(3), 215–249.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Brunner, T. F. (1991). The thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Classics and the computer. Library Hi Tech, 9(1), 61–67.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Quay, A. (2012). Google engineer builds automatic ‘page-turning scanner’, uses vacuum cleaner. Taxi, 13. http://designtaxi.com/news/354337/Google-Engineer-Builds-Automatic-Page-Turning-Scanner-Uses-Vacuum-Cleaner/. Accessed 28 Jan 2013.

  6. Kiernan, K. S. (1991). Digital image processing and the Beowulf manuscript. Literary and Linguist Computing, 6(1), 20–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hind, A. M. (1912). A catalogue of Rembrandt’s etchings. New York: Fred Stokes.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Besser, H. (1990). Visual access to visual images: The UC Berkeley image database project. Library Trends, 38(4), 787–798.

    Google Scholar 

  9. ARTstor Blog. About ARTstor. http://artstor.wordpress.com/about-2/. Accessed 28 Jan 2013.

  10. Levoy, M., Pulli, K., Curless, B., Rusinkiewicz, S., Koller, D., Pereira, L., Ginzton, M., Anderson, S., Davis, J., Ginsberg, J., Shade, J., & Fulk, D. (2000). The digital Michelangelo project: 3D scanning of large statues.” In Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH’00), (pp. 131–144). New York: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kanade, T., Rander, P., Vedula, S., & Saito, H. (1999). Virtualised reality: Digitizing a 3D time-varying event as is and in real time. In Y. Ohta & H. Tamura (Eds.), Mixed reality, merging real and virtual worlds (pp. 41–57). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Baker, N. (2001). Double fold: Libraries and the assault on paper. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Egan, D. E., Lesk, M. E., Ketchum, R. D., Lochbaum, C. C., Remde, J. R., Littman, M., & Landauer.T. K. Hypertext for the electronic library? CORE sample results. In Proceedings Hypertext ’91 (pp. 299–312). San Antonio, 15–18 December 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Nielsen, J. iPad and Kindle reading speed. Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, 2 July 2010. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ipad-and-kindle-reading-speeds/. Accessed 29 Jan 2013.

  15. Siegenthaler, E., Wurtz, P., Bergamin, P., & Groner, R. (2011). Comparing reading processes on e-ink displays and print. Displays, 32(5), 268–273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Harris, P. (2012). Reading speed variations on paper vs. computer vs. Kindle. In 6th annual conference, vision performance institute. Pacific University College of Optometry, OR. http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=vpir6. Accessed 29 Jan 2013.

  17. Wacholder, N., Liu, L., & Liu, Y-H. (2006). User behavior during the book selection process. Proceedings American Society for Information Science and Technology, 43:1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Wang, J. (2006). Approaching pre-modern China through the computer: The impact of full-text databases on Sinological research. Private communication.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Lesk, M. (1985). Graphical information resources: Maps and beyond. In Proceedings of 8th annual ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’85), (pp. 2–8). New York: ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Humphries, T., & Thompson, S. (2012). A Hippocratic Intuition for Balance in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Transtechnology Research Reader, Plymouth University. http://trans-techresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Humphries-and-Thompson.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2013.

  21. Ester, M. (1990). Image quality and viewer perception. Digital Image Digital Cinema. Supplemental Issue. Leonardo, 1(23), 51–63.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Macdonald, L. The limits of resolution. In A. Seal, J. P. Bowen, & K. Ng (Eds.), EVA London 2010 conference proceedings. Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), British Computer Society, 2010. http://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/36085. Accessed 23 May 2013.

  23. Ester, M. (1993). Image use in art: Historical practice. Gateways, gatekeepers and roles in the information omniverse, Association of Research Libraries, Washington DC. http://web.archive.org/web/20110602124423/www.arl.org/resources/pubs/symp3/ester.shtml. Accessed 23 May 2013.

  24. Boland, R. J., Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2007). Wakes of innovation in project networks: The case of digital 3-D representations in architecture, engineering, and construction. Organization Science, 18(4), 631–647.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Allen, P. K., Troccoli, A., Smith, B., Stamos, I., & Murray, S. (2003). The Beauvais Cathedral Project. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (p. 10), Madison. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Krebs, F., & Brück, E. (2002). Historical buildings in 3D. In EVA London 2002. Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London. http://www.memo38.de/root_IE/main/d/d_01/3d-visualisation_of_lost_jewish_heritage.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2013.

  27. McNamara, M. Destroyed German synagogues reconstructed on web page. The New York Times, 24 September 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Lutz, B., & Weintke, M. (1999). Virtual Dunhuang art cave: A cave within a CAVE. Computer Graphics Forum, 18(3):257–264. See also the International Dunhuang Project, idp.bl.uk.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Packard, D. W. (1968). A concordance to Livy (Vol. 4). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Mosteller, F., & Wallace, D. (1963). Inference in an authorship problem. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58(302), 275–309.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  31. Morton, A. Q. (1965). The authorship of Greek prose. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 128(2), 169–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Wake, W. C. (1957). Sentence length distributions of Greek authors. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 120, 331–346.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Milic, L. T. Winged words: Carieties of computer applications to literature. In Proceedings Fall Joint Computer conference (pp. 321–326). New York: ACM, 14–16 November 1967.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Sowa, C. A., & Sowa, J. F. (1974). Thought clusters in early Greek oral poetry. Computers and the Humanities, 8, 131–146.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Harris, R. The personal computer as a tool for student literary analysis. VirtualSalt, 30 December 1994. http://www.virtualsalt.com/comptool.htm. Accessed 29 Jan 2013.

  36. Lohr, S. Dickens, Austen and Twain, through a digital lens. The New York Times, p. BU3, 27 January 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Michel, J., Shen, Y., Aiden, A., Veres, A., Gray, M., Pickett, J., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J., Pinker, S., Nowak, M., & Aiden, E. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitised books. Science, 331(6014), 176–182.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Datta, R., Joshi, D., Li, J., & Wang, J. Z. (2006). Studying aesthetics in photographic images using a computational approach. In Proceedings of European conference on computer vision, Part III (pp. 288–301), Graz, Austria, May 2006. Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3953. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Li, J., Yao, L., Hendriks, E., & Wang, J. Z. (2012). Rhythmic brushstrokes distinguish van Gogh from his contemporaries: Findings via automated brushstroke extraction. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(6), 1159–1176.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Polatkan, G., Jafarpour, S., Brasoveanu, A., Hughes, S., & Daubechies, I. Detection of forgery in paintings using supervised learning. In 16th IEEE international conference on image processing (ICIP) (pp. 2921–2914), Cairo, 7–10 November 2009. Piscataway: IEEE.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Li, J., & Wang, J. Z. (2003). Studying digital imagery of ancient paintings by mixtures of stochastic models. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 13(3), 340–353.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Graham, D. J., Hughes, J. M., Leder, H., & Rockmore, D. N. (2012). Statistics, vision and the analysis of artistic style. WIREs Computational Statistics, 4, 115–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Shamir, L., & Tarakhovsky, J. (2012). Computer analysis of art. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 5(2), 1–11, article 7.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Crandall, D., & Snavely, N. (2012). Modeling people and places with internet photo collections. ACM Queue, 10(5), 30–44.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Manovich, L. Trending: The promises and the challenges of big social data. 28 April 2011. http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Manovich_trending_paper.pdf. Accessed 5 Apr 2013.

  46. Rodriguez-Echavarria, K., Morris, D., & Arnold, D. (2009). Web based presentation of semantically tagged 3D content for public sculptures and monuments in the UK. In S. N. Spencer (Ed.), Proceedings of 14th international conference on 3D Web technology (Web3D’09) (pp. 119–126). New York: ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Flaherty, J. Harvard’s 3D-printing archaeologists fix ancient artifacts. Wired, 10 December 2012. http://www.wired.com/design/2012/12/harvard-3d-printing-archaelogy/. Accessed 29 Jan 2013.

  48. Agarwal, S., Yurukawa, Y., Snavely, N., Simon, I., Curless, B., Seitz, S. M., & Szeliski, R. (2011). Building Rome in a day. Communications of the ACM, 54(10), 105–112.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Dobrzynksi, J. Honoring art, honoring artists. The New York Times, p. AR1, 6 February 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Schilit, B. N., & Kolak, O. (2008). Exploring a digital library through key ideas. In Proceedings of 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’08) (pp. 177–186), Pittsburgh. New York: ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Rajaraman, A. More data usually beats better algorithms. Datawocky, 24 March 2008. http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.html. Accessed 4 Apr 2013.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Michael Lesk

Authors
  1. Michael Lesk
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Lesk .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, London South Bank University, London, United Kingdom

    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. Department of Archaeology, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Suzanne Keene

  3. School of Computing & School of Music, University of Leeds, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music (ICSRiM), Leeds, United Kingdom

    Kia Ng

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag London

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Lesk, M. (2013). From Descriptions to Duplicates to Data. In: Bowen, J., Keene, S., Ng, K. (eds) Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-5405-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-5406-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation