Pearltrees – Visual bookmarking

Pearltrees, out of France, offers a kind of visual mapping of the internet. It is a form of social-bookmarking, like Delicious.com – however, it is more than a text-based database of saved bookmarks and tags. One’s bookmarks (or Pearls) stand in visual relation with other pearls and on contextual branches. Even more interesting, one may browse and discover nearby Pearltrees based upon similarity in content and metadata.

The dimensions that I find even more compelling, are that as an internationally used site that is visually and contextually arranged, not only does it seem to be used by many artists, designers and other visual and intuitive thinkers, but it offers intriging geo-political dimensions as well. No longer limited by the wall of text (which may be in a language that one is not savvy in) – one can visually browse foreign political, social, cultural, historical content based upon relational and contextual braccia. Just as one learns languages best by immersion and context, exposure to this visual arrangement of foreign links strengthens not only one’s understanding of that language, but increases exponentially one’s intuitive grasp of the creator’s content.

A brief sample from Dec. 4, 2009 of current Pearl categories contained many political, technical, artistic and theoretical subjects: Data Visualization, Social Media, Twitter, e-Democratie, Photos ‘Creative Commons’, Hackers/Hacking, Languages semantique, Teacher Resources, Google.

Concerns:
-There does not seem to be privacy settings similar to Delicious.com whereby one can choose to share a bookmark or not.

Functional review:
-There is the ability to import one’s Delicious.com bookmarks which I was initially thrilled about – yet after doing so I discovered that Pearltrees essentially threw the new Pearls on randomly created branches that did not seem governed by contextual relevance. I do not know if this is a problem of the metadata itself – I was not able to discern a logical pattern to how these Pearls were created nor grouped based upon my Delicious tags. At this point I removed my import and will hand curate the Pearltrees.
-Moving and connecting the Pears to ‘Treebranches’ feels like maneuvering a kite around a flock of other kites: awkward and sticky, the Pearl-visualized-data eagerly gravitates to nearby branches like tail of a kite enjoying getting tangled. This is a frustration.
-A feature that would be nice: the ability to mouse-over a Pearl in order to see the listed metadata.

Collection Space

Collection Space is another digital repository project supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, like JSTOR and ARTstor, but with very important differences. CollectionSpace emerged from scholarly institutional collaboration “with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information.” Which is to say – It’s an open-source software that will allow for museum collection management and dissemination but with many Web 2.0 twists. This is not your regular museum registrar database. CollectionSpace’s project team currently includes web-developers, designers, and architects from Cambridge, Museum for the Moving Image, UC Berkeley School of Information and the University of Toronto.

This venture was inspired by the large information gap that existed for 1/3 to 1/2 of collecting institutions in the U.S. (historical societies, archeological repositories, museums and others) having neither their collections online or in many cases even catalog records. CollectionSpace addresses these needs through working to develop open-source software solutions providing stable, authoritative but flexible collection architecture “from which interpretive materials and experiences – from printed catalogs to mobile gallery guides – may be efficiently developed, and that can serve as a cost-effective alternative to proprietary collections management systems for museums in need, regardless of size or scope.” Think perhaps ARTstor for museums owning, managing (and publicizing) their own rotating collections.

The project began as a series of collaborative workshops with museum, archival and library professionals followed by a two-year period of software development complete by beta-testing by the same communities that helped advise its design.

CollectionSpace Release 0.2, debuted October 6, 2009. This version allows storing “multiple record types with flexible schemas.” They have an extensive Project Wiki filled with a variety of documentation, handouts and powerpoint presentation.

Funding is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Program in Research in Information Technology which “supports the creation of “enterprise” administrative and infrastructural software by means of distributed, collaborative open-source development projects.”

It aims to support registrars, curators, educators, collections managers, and administrators. It seeks to change earlier system models which seem to be digital representations of paper models. CollectionSpace promises to bring processes like cataloging, loans, media handling, location tracking “into the Web 2.0+ era.” It seeks to move from “records-based navigation” to “action-based navigation.”

Visible Archive Series Browser

Originally published on Digital Curation class blog, 9/23/09

Two days ago Vimeo demonstrated the “Series Browser”: a visualisation of approximately 65,000 series from the National Archives of Australia’s collection. Mitchell Whitelaw created this as a prototype and part of his Visible Archive – “a research project on the interactive visualisation of archival datasets.”

I am very excited about the prospects these kinds of visualization technologies can have on digital scholarship, particularly in the areas of the arts and history. The browser is interactive, with visualized archival series (represented by squares) arranged both chronologically and in terms of relations to other series. When one scrolls over a series a bubble appears with general scope and content information. The size of the series is illustrated by how big the square is. An inner square represents the volume and the outer square represents the physical shelf space that the series occupies. By selecting and zooming in on a series – lines demonstrating relationships with other series appear (different kind of link relationships are categorized by different colors).

One can also browse and research by agencies outside of series to gain broader context. All this is handled through interaction with the visualized data.

Three hours ago Mitchell launched a video demo describing the A1 Explorer, a similarly interactive visualization of the A1 series in the National Archives of Australia. In this we are looking at what appears to be a kind of tag cloud – as a word-frequency visualization of the contents based upon the item titles. When you hover over one of the words, lines linking it to related words appear. The thickness of the connecting lines is also an additional layer of information. Selecting a text item displays a list of items belonging to that category.

Another aspect of this example is the histogram which displays visually the number of items appearing in the collection per year. This demonstrate the distribution over time but also works as another port of entry into exploring the archive. The text cloud and histogram are also linked in that hovering over a term will display how many of such items appear in the collection per year.

An additionally cool functionality of Mitchell’s visualization is that if there is a term that is dominating the text cloud – if you select and click on it you can remove it from your view and the cloud will adjust accordingly, allowing you to see and explore the remaining items in the collection. If you select an item from the list it will load a digital image of that item from the archive.

I couldn’t help but think about how cool this application would be for navigating my links in delicious.com, but really – the applicability of this for all manner of archives is immense. I hope to see this technology catch on!

Flickr launches Flickr Galleries

Originally posted on Digital Curation class blog, 9/16/09

Sept. 14th, I found out on Mashable that Flickr launched a Galleries application: http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/flickr-galleries/. What interests me the most is that it differs strongly from the already existing “favorites” ability (which is more the accumulating of images that interest one than “curating” of images). Their Galleries limit one to only 18 images (pulled from available images on Flickr), and one may title and write about what one finds meaningful about them.

Please explore the Galleries that people have created here: http://www.flickr.com/galleries. One can comment on the gallery, but not rate it or add it (which I think would be great features). Two of my favorites are Moleskinerie and tea. I would love the ability to enter metadata on gallery collections as a whole – as part of cataloging a curated exhibit goes beyond each individual image to address the relationship the images have to each other and how they interact.

The architect that I code metadata in his image database for – has been explaining to me his vision for a metadata hierarchy or schema. His vision seems to be one that is personal, intuitive and based upon his own use of images as visual inspiration. It is fascinating to work through and help develop this kind of metadata functionality in a workable way. For example: He wants a category called “Activities” – in which would include courtyards, outdoor cafes, public squares, people. He would like a category “Skylines” which would include architectural facades against the sky.

Going back to the Galleries on Flickr – I am inspired by seeing the arrangements and limited selections selected by individuals, named brief and poetic titles. I find these to be creative and mental exercises that not only allow others a glimpse into how others see the world, but allow others the chance to craft and curate one’s own expression through the pairing, juxtoposition, arranging and poetic guidance of images that speak to us.

Flickr user “nonac” has created numerous Galleries on Flickr and what I especially love about them is that they contain written text – the voice of the curator. The eyes have it.

I expect to follow great things on Flickr because of this new capability – but would like to see gallery-specific tagging in addition to the ability to favorite these collections. The potential to comment on and discuss these arrangements as well as the possibility for artists to collaborate via this application is very exciting.

Can this creative use of digital/social-tagging and curating be extended to other creative uses of digital content online? I find YouTube ripe with creative usability problems. Amazon.com allows one to create book lists. I am very interested in how one might move beyond the “accumulation” level of online content collection to the “curating” level – and how that might play out in other creative online platforms.

Image socialbookmarking sites as Digital Curation?

Originally published on Digital Curation class blog, 9/8/09.

Recently I have been intrigued by sites such as http://imgfave.com that aggregate photos/images through socialbookmarking and personal uploading. Imgfave allows the user to ‘favorite’ what image appeals to them, and then displays the collections of others who have fave’ed that particular image.

One may add those images to particular ‘collections’, and one may become a ‘fan’ of (or you may ‘follow’) other users. There are different “feeds”: “Popular” (most fave’ed), “Everyone,” “Friends,” and “My Profile” that one may browse and work from. One also may link images or one’s profile to Facebook.

The only major drawback with the site is that it lacks metadata. That is, until I discovered its rival: http://vi.sualize.us/.

Visualize uses metadata heirarchies – It has a section of Popular tags with general categories such as: photography, illustration, design, nature, art. Each contain sub-categories of qualities from: “vintage” and “humor” to elements or examples such as “typography” or “landscape.”

There is also a section “Most used tags” to guide one. These are listed in alphabetical order, with most used ones in bolder, larger font. You can view (and RSS subscribe to) “popular pictures feed” and “recent pictures feed.”

Each image displays a file name or title, when it was added, how often it’s been “liked,” comments on it, and its tags. And it appears that not only the ‘creator’ or person who uploaded the image, but everyone can tag the image.

This blog article gives a list of 10 social bookmarking visual sites: including also Picocool, We love typography, and others.

At a glance – the browsability seems more enjoyable and sublime with imgfave.com than with vi.sualize.us/. I am not sure if this is because the thumbnail images are smaller with vi.sualize.us/ or because the random, metadata-lacking feed in imgfave makes the experience more prone to serendipity and thus feel more direct and personal than one mediated by a metadata schema.

I think in regards to the size of the image, what imgfave does best is feature larger images that one needs to scroll down to view. So in scrolling down, one is discovering the images, experiencing them each individually. In vi.sualize.us/, on the other hand, one is presented with rows of smaller images, displayed three across, and typically 2 1/2 rows will fill one’s screen. This in combination with all of the text lends itself to a visually overwhelming experience, whereas imgfave feels far more like a poetic and artistic discovery. In imgfave one does not know what one is “looking for” but favorites those visual items when one sees them. Yet, the only real drawback is then, once having found that image (or others like it), the lack of metadata makes it difficult to further seek out these kinds of pictures.

Another feature in imgfave that I enjoy is its bookmarklet widget: Similar to the del.icio.us widget in the toolbar, when one sees an image online one clicks the <3imgfave text in the toolbar and all the images on that page become surrounded with a red border with a button in the center prompting one to ‘add to imgfave.”

An interesting argument in this comparative discussion might be: “What about Flickr?” Why was Flickr not mentioned as a “visual social bookmarking site?” Flickr has marvelous social networking features, from the ability to add contacts and create communities and image pools. It also has a tagging dimension (although one far less standardized than vi.sualize.us’s fine art/design metadata schema (although vi.sualize.us’s IS customizable). There is a component in Flickr whereby one can ‘favorite’ other people’s images. However, when one clicks on one of the images that one has favorited, one does not see recommendations of images from others who have favorited that same image. This is one of the things that intrigues me – following this trail. Does it yield reliable “data?” Sometimes, there is still a signal to noise ratio – but it provides a slightly more relevant result than searching randomly or by ranking.

The most important question however – “Is all this Digital Curation?” This is something I am still investigating. I believe personally that digital curation in these examples would necessitate a combination of the associative discovery factor in imgfave with the aesthetic metadata elements of vi.sualize.us, along with the social networking/collaborative potential in Flickr – and ultimately, the ability in using these features to observe and discover emergent visual trends and patterns, and to not only come up with innovative stylistic metadata to describe these things, but to have that information emerge via tag ranking as an influence to how we communicate about contemporary visual culture as a whole.