A Picture vs. A Thousand Words
This week's task of mining Flickr for subject-relevant photos recalled our work in Week 3, getting started in del.icio.us. The reading that went along with that best for me was Chapter 6 of Connect!, in which Zelenka discussed web searching, tagging, bookmarking, and in particular the concept of Orienteering. By now we've been through the ringer with this stuff, to some extent, and with a collectively better understanding and experience on how to go about the search, I look forward to the group's end results with images. Even though we're searching only one site and starting from set terms, using the Advanced Search options, following groups within which we find one good image, and deviating from or expanding upon the initial terms still follows the Orienteering concept and should give us a very nice, pertinent gallery.
Another point (that I feel pretty lucky not to have run in to with photos this week) is the problem of parallel content becoming identical content. We started approaching a visual representation of that when we used Thinkature in Week 4 to develop our preliminary site structure. Boxes and linkages got very crowded by the time we all made our inputs. With Flickr photos the content really can be identical, not just alike. Plenty of them will serve to depict multiple subjects so we will have to be keenly selective. By all doing this at the same time though, I think it also provides an opportunity to refine for ourselves what our topics are really about, and how that translates visually versus textually. My own topic, Environmental Concerns, is not well and dramatically represented in a variety of ways in many photos. With this event, there weren't catastrophic spills or chemical plumes or anything like that. There were cars and chunks of cement in the river, but one or two photos pretty well covers that - especially when those photos also pertain to every other subtopic. So, the Flickr search was a good exercise in refining that focus.
Now, I've got my thousand words, but there are all these pictures too. Time to work on striking the balance.
Comments
Jim, I do agree with your title "A Picture vs. A Thousand Words." It is important that the information we provide from our text correlates with the photos that we present to our audience. They should balance well with each other. Like with your topic I could see that it would be somewhat difficult to provide images that pertain to the environmental factors of the collapse. It would be important that the photos used make sense with your page/s. I do find Flickr to be a great site in the fact that you can search by tags and even used the advanced search option to narrow the results. It will be neat to see what images our class comes up with.
Posted by: Tracy J | April 4, 2008 10:48 AM
When people get really in depth and focused in their subtopic pages, I don't believe that there will be a problem with replicated visual imagery. When people were just tagging pictures in general related to the 35w bridge collapse, that is when images were replicated.
Posted by: Hilary Stowell | April 4, 2008 04:49 PM
I'm wondering about not replicating but agreeing where the best use of a photo or photos is... When searching the flickr collection of photos, I came across many good photos that would illustrate the topic of citizen journalism because the photos were taken by local citizen journalists. At the same time, the photos are great shots of the scene immediately after the bridge fell and would probably work well for the sections on victims, emergency response or perhaps even explaing the cause of the collapse. Hmmm. Well, I guess it will be another exercise in collaboration! There's a lot to choose from so many it won't be a big deal.
Posted by: Sara | April 5, 2008 10:12 AM