Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Digitizing Art

My primary interests and hobbies center around art, so I wanted my digitization project to have something to do with working with fine art, either at UT or a local museum. My work is actually taking a similar form to the sample project another student did in our class. I've met with Karen Holt, the head of the Visual Resources Collection at the Fine Arts Library, and I've selected an artist, slides of whose art I will be digitizing for use by the Fine Arts department. My bachelor's degree is in Art History so I'm very familiar with both slides and digital artworks up on screen in the classroom; it's edifying to see where UT's slides live, as well as the database that catalogs them, and the sources of digital images used in PowerPoint presentations. There are some interesting issues that I'll be learning about, including licensing rights through slide vendors. Fair use covers most of the images that are used in Fine Arts education, but there are still some boundaries. I hope to learn more about rights and licenses as my project progresses.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Gotcha



I just came across this article and got very excited because I know what it's talking about!
Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time

Unwittingly, millions of people every day help correct OCR'd texts via reCaptcha for the New York Times, Google, and beyond by squinting at squiggly words and transcribing them, like we did in class with our TOI transcripts. I love how subversive this is, in a totally positive way. It's just cool. (Despite Google's legal boundaries in its book project...ouch.)