Wednesday, January 12, 2005

I Want More Play in My Work #

For the first time in some weeks, I now feel that I have some time to kick back (even if for only an hour or two) to reflect on the new year, specifically the hopes I have for 2005 personally and professionally. Since I'm at work, I will focus first on professional aspirations. Over the Christmas break, I took the chance to play with a number of ideas and write some code that have both direct and indirect relationship to my professional work. Setting aside questions of why I was working during vacation (a simple answer: I don't make strong distinctions between some of my professional and personal interests -- for better or worse), I want to ponder how my play points to the way I would like to work in 2005. Over Christmas, I worked on two work-related topics. First, I kludged together a system to get EXIF-based timestamp into the photos I have been taking with my Treo 600 "smartphone". Ever since I got my hands on the Palm device/cellphone/cameraphone, I have been avidly taking snapshots of daily life. More recently, I started uploading them to Flickr. The built-in photo manager in the Treo 600 shows the date and time at which a picture is taken; however, that information is not inserted into the images as an EXIF header, as is widely done by most new digital cameras on the market today. I was determined to programmatically extract the timestamp information from the phone (which had to be available in some form -- but in what form?) and write the EXIF headers into the photos. I didn't used to care about EXIF headers because I had never found use for them. Now that I am posting on Flickr to explicitly organize my pictures and share them with others, I am starting to find the EXIF metadata useful. For instance, the timestamps allow me to sequence the photos temporally, even if the Flickr uploader manages to upload my photos in some seemingly random order. On a grander scale, timestamped pictures in Flickr would allow one to pull together, for instance, every photo taken from 2-2:10pm on January 1, 2005 if that were your desire, provided that the EXIF timestamps are accurate (but that's a story for another time). I will publicly document how I kludged together my timestamping system at some future time. I use the word kludge because I ended up having to combine a variety of disparate applications with a bit of Python programming layered on top of code I found on the Web. In the process, I concluded that the EXIF standard is badly documented, that support for it in many programming language libraries is marginal. I was disappointed that EXIF, which seems to be very important standard to me, is so weak -- and that even a technically savvy and determined user like me has to work so hard to use it. Yet, I became motivated to do so. I used to think that there was not a big difference between having metadata wrapped around an image versus metadata embedded in images -- but this little experiment showed me cases in which embedded metadata have clear advantages. You might be wondering what getting tags into my cameraphone pictures has to do with the use of digital resources for research and teaching, ostensibly the subject matter of my professional work. Plenty. I have been taking personal photos, pictures of people and things and events I care about. I could easily have also been taking pictures using the same techniques if I had been engaging in formal research or journalism. Sure, as a "serious researcher," I might have spent some money to buy a fancier cameraphone (though the Treo 600 qualifies as a fancy gadget to many) and thereby might have avoided the painful post-processing insertion of timestamps. In my case, I am engaged with research, but my research is not of a subject matter requiring photography per se. Rather, my research concerns how digital photography and digital images can be employed to support the research process in general. I needed a good proxy for such research so that I myself could get into digital photography at a deeper, more engaged level than if I were to just theorize about it without any concrete personal experience. I would certainly benefit from interacting with researchers who use digital images as primary materials in their own research. Moreover, I'm sure that there are many, disparate uses of images depending on the discipline in question, the roles played by the images, how the images are generated. Working with and reflecting on my own pictures is a start, not the end of my own research. In addition to my work with the Treo pictures over Christmas, I wrote about poetry on the web, (Anthony Hecht, Czeslaw Milosz, and Poetry on the Web). Reflecting on poetry was a similar process to my work with photography. I'm an amateur poet and poetry critic in the way that I am an amateur photographer. Yet even a little work and a little reflection on my own practices as a poet and as a photographer working in the digital age have grounded my work in trying to build tools and software infrastructure for professional poets and photographers working to incorporate digital content and authoring in their work. Moreover, I will continue to write on my wiki and in my weblog as a way of furthering my thinking, sharing it with others, and exploring the strengths and limitations of such personal writing spaces. So here is one new year's resolution: spend much of 2005 working close to ground on the scholarly practices, envisioning how we might remake them (mostly in modest, incremental ways), and then building very specific prototypes to demonstrate these new ideas.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/12/05; 8:57:57 AM from the Interactive University dept. Discuss