Women Architects and World Fairs

Author: Linnéa L. Havsfjord (Page 1 of 2)

Digital assignment: 3D modeling

On my way back towards Carrboro, we always drive past a little patch of green grass with several statues and installations placed what almost looks like random. Some of them are more complex, moving on their own. When we got the assignment of doing a 3D project in

All the statues are made by Carrboro metal sculpturist

For my next attempt, the weather was cloudy, but even so the light didn’t really want to come out properly anyway, just as with my first attempt. Even though cloudy I think this one came out even more poorly than my first attempt. Here Metashape told me that out of my 29 photos, four of them could not be properly aligned and that they were cut from the rendering; it didn’t give me more information or clues as to why they couldn’t be aligned (I thought I was going pretty straight and slow but maybe not). My own guess would probably be that it also had to do with the light not coming out properly, making it difficult for Metashape to align them properly. This one however as you can see, did not turn out well as it couldn’t properly render the back of it and turned out worse than the first one.

Just for fun, I did a version with all the 71 photos from both sessions that you can find below, hoping it may make it a bit clearer, but I was wrong. As you can see the back has a whole in it that I couldn’t properly fill. I was surprised that it turned out well surface wise, as the lightning was very different in the two sets of photos, so the front part of it I would say still looks decent.

Apart from my models not turning out perfect, I thought the software with the workshop and guidelines provided were comprehensible and easy to understand. It was also very fun to see step by step how all these photos slowly turned into an actual model. I could see this being used in numerous ways and would be excited to try it out myself, even though I am not sure how I would use it just yet. I can imagine that trying to troubleshoot or go deeper into the possibilities of the software will require a lot of learning, but by simply following the software step by step (grateful that you can’t accidentally jump over a step in the process for example) and the guidelines is for now enough to continue on doing 3D models.

Immersing in virtual realities; potential futures and climate change

I have for a long time been very interested in the potential of 3D and virtual realities; both personally and academically. Video games is an interest of mine, both from an artistic perspective but also let’s face it; it is also a favourite activity with my step-kids. In “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Virtual Reality Re-Creations and Academia” (2006), Diane Favro writes about the idea of “edutainment” and history being used as an added attractive element of video games but more there for the dramatic effect rather than historical accuracy. Archeology, history (and treasure hunting) has been frequently used as themes within games; today we see popular series such as the reboot of Tomb Raider and the just finished series of Uncharted.  Some elements seen in the 3D visualizations and collections for our readings are remarkably similar in its design and interface. Here is a GIF I created from a walk through video made by

GIF from gameplay, Uncharted: Lost legacy and still photo from Smithsonian X3D.

As Foni et al. (2010) argues, historical themes in video games lacks the accuracy required, and if any it is just a by-product of the dramatized narration of the game. A new subgenre has however emerged of what they call “serious games” that implements video game components, but the focus is on education or training rather than the entertainment value. The virtual realities or interactive story games has come either from small indie producers such as Red Redemption that in 2011 released the video game

Virtual realities and games has been used within studies of climate change communication for the last few years; Large claims have been made around scholarly projects, an example is this article from last year with the bombastic title from the media outlet Forbes;

Stanford’s project on ocean acidification using virtual realities.

Artists such as Marina Abramović with her piece Rising (2018), where visitors are invited into a VR world of the rapid rising sea levels. In Abramović artwork, the visitor is at the end of it emerged within an apocalyptic world, framed as a potential catastrophic future for the planet.

Both Favro and Johanson (2009) debates around the uncertainties of attempting to render 3D visuals of historical sites or architecture. Johanson begs to question what is actually meant when we talk about accuracy when it comes to reconstructions; to see them as knowledge representations rather than just reconstructions of the past and with that creating new ways of learning and immersing with the body of knowledge. This balance and question of accuracy is not only within historical renderings but is shared with the battling of uncertainties when creating future potential visualization. No matter how much data or calculations are produced, whatever is formed is still just a potential future and can not be known for certain until it is the present. The more scholarly and educational projects also have to battle the difficult line between being entertaining as a tool that may reach out to larger audiences, whilst still being scholarly and depict accurate scenarios. The apocalyptic scenarios has been a common video games setting since the creation of video games and I have always been fascinated by these dramatized depiction of what a world would look like after years without human interaction, or after anthropogenic catastrophe. Another one of Naughty Dog’s latest games are Last of Us, known for its stunning landscapes, that portrays a planet earth that has been without humans for more than twenty years. Other visualizations of anthropogenic climate change is Metro 2033, where the world has gone through drastic climate changes due to nuclear accidents. 

Landscape shot from the video game Last of Us

Landscape shot from the video game Metro 2033.

Visualizations of future climate and our surroundings are incredibly fascinating and it always makes my mind wander; what will the world look like without humans? What does these dramatized visuals from video games aimed at being part of entertainment tell us about how we visualize the apocalypse and our future? And as the scholarly and artistic projects, what other narratives are they portraying in contrast to the entertainment formats? As Favro argues, the “re-creations call for a theorization of historical experience” where re-creation models can further look into sensorial experiences not just focusing on sight. How could this idea be interpreted not in re-creations of historical sights, but in depicting our potential futures and future climate change? How will it smell, taste, sound? Could further sensorial experiences within virtual realities and visualizations aid scholars and artists attempt to create understanding or further knowledge production? Even though I find the possibilities thrilling, I also feel hesitations regarding who the educational projects and artworks are for, but that is probably a blogpost of itself and also even more outside the realm of the topic of this blogpost.  

Elsa Schiaparelli – life and legacy

Above is timeline about Elsa Schiaparelli; her life, career and legacy, made in TimelineJS. Schiaparelli has always fascinated me (and I’m all but alone in my fascination), as she throughout her career walked the line between fashion and art, merging the two in amazing ways. For this timeline I have added tidbits about her life and career, mainly focus on collaborations and works that we can see being present in our times as well. I had difficulty adding several pictures in one slide, coming to realization that is was probably not possible (please correct me if I’m wrong!), as here it would have been really great if I could have added pictures side by side of Schiaparelli’s works and contemporary work where you can see her influence (even within her own revived fashion house).

TimelineJS was easy to use as it works together with a google spreadsheet; making your posts within the timeline easy to organize. However, they advise against using more than 20 slides, as to make it easier for the viewer to grasp and go through the timeline. I would also argue that it is a good tip for the maker as well, as it got a bit confusing for me when I in the end of my timeline realized I mixed up a few of the slide chronologically, making a hassle to go back and work through to make sure it was correct. They also advise you to create a timeline which in some form goes chronologically, as it otherwise will be confusing for the reader. This made me instantly think of narrating a person’s life and career with the timeline, as it obviously brings an inherent chronological order. The one thing I was apprehensive about is the lack of freedom when it comes to the aesthetic adjustments. TimelineJS enables you to change the colour of the background, as well as some fonts that you can choose between. I would have liked to have changed layout, add pictures more freely as well as deciding font color. However, whilst writing this, I do understand that part of the relatively easy interface would have lost part of the accessibility would have been lost if more changes were enabled.

Quantitive analysis and tidy data

As Ted Underwood points out in his text

A majority of the time is as

‘• Column headers are values, not variable names.

• Multiple variables are stored in one column.
• Variables are stored in both rows and columns.
• Multiple types of observational units are stored in the same table.
• A single observational unit is stored in multiple tables.’ (Wickham, 6).

I have used Excel and other tools to analyze data sets before, but have always had difficulty in how to structure data to get the desired outcome. It has always been with some meddling that is forgotten after and can’t be replicated (also going back to previous weeks readings, to remember to write down the process, in order to be able to replicate a process and also what to avoid).

My focus has primarily been on qualitative analysis, where large data sets has been more of a nuisance. I agreed with the discussions during class, whereas the question of what these large data sets actually could be used for? As Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, with David Israel and Seth Erickson project

Some of the tools we have gone through during this week’s class, such as _Voyant_; a platform that enables keyword search and comparison of texts would be useful for upcoming projects. An example would be to do a content analysis where keywords could be analyzed in relation to time; when were certain keywords used more and not etc. From this a more qualitative discourse analysis could be concluded thanks to the distant reading done with Voyant or similar a similar tool. Similar to the Google tool Ngram Viewer, which enables you to see usage of phrases in corpus of literature, where you can also focus on specific periods of time. Using these kinds of tools makes it easy to get a broader grasp of word usage that I could see myself using in first step of analysis. Important to keep in mind is also what Underwood points out; these kind of tools may give you the impression that you don’t need to do any programming of your own, due to the large body of tools already out there. However, these available tools offer more of a scope of what is possible, but with own projects, it will most likely require you to programme in order for you to effectively focus your methodological approach.

Bibliography

Hadley Wickham, “Tidy Data,” Journal of Statistical Software, Submitted. http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf.

Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, with David Israel and Seth Erickson, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 11:3 (Autumn 2012).
http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn12/fletcher-helmreich-mapping-the-london-art-market

Ted Underwood, “Where to Start with Text Mining,” The Stone and the Shell. http://tedunderwood.com/2012/08/14/where-to-start-with-text-mining/

The Swedish Brillo scandal

In 2007, the art world and fans of Andy Warhol were shocked by the story uncovered by Swedish news paper Expressen; more than a hundred of Andy Warhol ‘Brillo’-boxes, sold for thousands of dollars were fake made after Warhols death.

The map below is created with Google Maps, a location based timeline of the events, from the creation of the Brillo box by James Harvey to Warhols version; to the subsequent uncovering of counterfeit boxes and its repercussions. The layers are divided into time periods; the creation of the Brillo box as a commodity and art work (-1968) the creation and first exhibitions with the counterfeit boxes (1990-1993), the fake boxes on the market (1994-2006), to the eventual discovery and aftermath (2007- ). I find it really interesting to be able to map out both timelines of ownership and artifacts travels, which I could see myself using in my own work. An example of usefulness is in the question of ownership of artifacts in the Global North originating from the Global South, which could be furthered analyzed with the help of map visualizations.

A sense of place in a changing environment

This week has been an experience in both annotation for youtube, oral history and a program called

The map below is an aerial view of the territory we did, with tagged locations for our sketch maps.

Our methodology was using sketch mapping together with narrative walks. Sketch mapping is freehand drawn maps, preferably on a blank paper or on a map with very few details. Less distraction of predefined spatial features enables that a greater focus and attention is paid to places and spatial dimensions that are of importance to the person drawing. Sketch mapping as a methodological tool is frequently used by behavioural geographers, and is a form of understanding relations and perceptions between humans and the studied location. Therefore forms of sketch mapping (and also cognitive mapping) has been adopted within environmental studies, due to it being able to compel the informants to consider their relation to their own surroundings. We used the theoretical concept of a sense of place, a term often used within geographic studies as well as art and literature, as a base for our project; what is our emotional space and its connections to the spatial dimensions? We wanted to argue that sense of place works to find and legitimize local values of importance instead of purely economic values used when formulating policies within climate change mitigation. In ArcGIS, we added coordinates of locations connected to their sketch maps, and related it to potential environmental changes already occurring and potential futures.

We decided not to record our interviews, as we were often on the road together or having a herd of 70 husky dogs in the background, but took extensive notes and photographs connected to coordinates; spatial maps and sketch maps. After this week’s readings, in regards to Linda Shopes Making Sense of Oral History on oral history, I now in hindsight wish we would have been more mindful of collecting these stories in voice or video recording. The Arctic with its glaciers as a ‘nature’s archive’, as it was with extractions of glaciers that helped scientists be able to define periods of carbon dioxide levels and its increase. It is also one of the regions where change is happening now and very radically so. Our climate is changing and the stories of what it used to be and how it felt will be valuable to record, recording not the spatial importance, but the emotional and sense of place.

The maps below are our sketch maps with location tagged within the maps that are in relation to the aerial map.

Interview and sketch map with Olof, lived and worked in Jukkasjärvi for 10 years, working at the

Sketch map from Åsa, lived her whole life in Arctic parts of Sweden, owner of

Sketch map from talking to Stephanie, French who’s been working and living in the area for almost 15 years, has her own business

Sketch map from Ida-Maria, who is Sámi and has created her business around showing tourists her and her family life as Sámi,

Bibliography

Linda Shopes, “Making Sense of Oral History,” Oral History in the Digital Age. http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/08/making-sense-of-oral-history/

The concept of ‘Fair Use’ as a European in the US

Through our more digitized life as scholars and individuals, it is hard not to at least in passing reflect on how you utilize images. It can be with hesitation about if you are using the images correctly and respectfully, or just choosing not to use them to be extra cautious. In any case, policy on ‘fair use’ is of vital importance as a guide and tool for respectful and educational usages of visual and written material we publish and utilize within our projects. Coming from a European perspective, with the new legislation of ‘Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market’ looming over the European Union, the debates regarding copyright and fair use is at the moment tense topics in Europe. The legislation has furthered the confusion and uncertainty regarding copyright, making most individuals and scholars risk averse to an almost extreme. College Art Association (2015) in their


Omeka

Utilizing a platform such as Omeka for digital projects can certainly have its benefits. Since I have my web hosting through the website builder

Perusing and browsing

Museums and archives are more than ever trying to create their presence online by offering digital collections open to the public within just a few clicks. This opens up new ways of engaging with a museum’s collections than just visiting the actual museum.

There are numerous ways in which a museum can form a user-friendly or educative experience by way of collection interfaces. Whitelaw (2015) argues for the limitations in having keywords being the main way in to the archives. According to a Dutch survey presented by Whitelaw, a large part of visitors (21%) to certain museum sites, visits the sites to simply browse the collections without a specific goal in mind. Keeping an interface that primarily offers access through keyword search doesn’t correlate well with the user who would like to casually browse the collections. The casual browsing or searching for an image that fits an individual purpose ties into Isabella Kirton and Melissa Terras (2013) article “Where Do Images of Art Go Once They Go Online? A Reverse Image Lookup Study to Assess the Dissemination of Digitized Cultural Heritage”, where their method of reverse searching images from selected museum’s online collections shows how the images were reused. Pictures from the studied museums were used for blogs, poems or simply general discussions on various topics. What their article is showing is the multitude of ways that online archives imagery are repurposed by users and how an image of a painting or artifact is often applied to invoke an emotion or fit a narrative outside of the image itself. The ways of appropriating the online archives could therefore be argued not beneficial by the standard keyword searching interface that Whitelaw highlights as the most common. An example of an interface using keywords as the main way into the archives is the Swedish National museum. They are the main custodians of Swedish art, and also holds large collections of Scandinavian and international artworks. With over 700 000 artifacts from the 1500s up until contemporary times, the collections are vast and with a wide scope. The primary way of exploring their archive is through keyword search; both with a single keyword or more advanced search where year, artists’ name or country of origin can be searched for. Apart from that, the website have certain highlighted collections of the moment on the front page: here you can for example find text and imagery about Swedish artists in Arabic, as well as a portrait collection about Greta Garbo. By clicking an image, there is some information attached to the image, but there is no option to continue a search departing from the selected image, apart from the artists name if any artist is named. Enabling text translated into several languages is arguably a step to a more open and democratic way of accessing the archives: but the way in as keyword search is limiting. The highlighted collections are easier and more pleasurable to browse, with a longer text in both Swedish and English attached. These collections are curated by the museum in a similar form of a physical collection in a museum, where information and artifacts are attached together to create cohesion and a concept. Not fully enabling searchable archives with a more open interface, these kind of highlights, curated by museum staff offers a pleasurable browsing experience, whilst still maintaining a vital part of the curatorship and knowledge that comes with a museum visit.

Bibliography
Isabella Kirton and Melissa Terras. “Where Do Images of Art Go Once They Go Online? A Reverse Image Lookup Study to Assess the Dissemination of Digitized Cultural Heritage.” Museums and the Web 2013: Proceedings (2013). http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/where-do-images-of-art-go-once-they-go-online-a-reverse-image-lookup-study-to-assess-the-dissemination-of-digitized-cultural-heritage/

Whitelaw. Mitchell. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1 (2015). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html

Guidance in the vast world of digitizing

The American historians Roy Rosenzweig (past away 2007) and Dan Cohen published the first edition of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web in 2005, where they start by asserting that ‘The future is digital’ (2005). This is presented as a guide, not so much technical, but rather for how and why artifacts and analogue material can and should be digitized. In our current time of rapid development within everything technology, 2005 is a long time ago: but Cohen and Rosenzweig has developed a thorough guide that is still useful to someone who has worked with digitizing previously and or who has just stepped over the threshold (me personally being part of the latter category). Some of the key points Cohen and Rosenzweig brings forth are in regards to the financial costs of digitization that needs to be carefully thought through beforehand, particularly to limit the under- and overestimates. The costs for potential in-house work, where staff needs to be trained within the new technology, or out-sourcing where numerous other potential costs that is not going to appear in the actual bills: such as the potentially time consuming task of collecting and preparing of the material. Digitizing can be utilized as a way of displaying collections that otherwise may not have had the opportunity to be accessed or created to a single collected archive rather than scattered. It enables for people outside of the realm of bigger archives and funding opportunities to establish archives of history and artifacts that previously may not have been deemed valuable enough to archive long term. Because even though Cohen and Rosenzweig takes us through a thorough perception of the technological advancements being made, they do not focus as much on the possibilities for smaller actors and the opening of opportunities that digitalization has. Bringing this into my own first real attempt at digitization, it is a cover of one of the 47 books about ‘Lotta’ written by Merri Vik (actual name Ester Ringnér-Lundgren). This one being first edition (1971) of ‘Ge aldrig upp, Lotta!’ (Eng: Never give up, Lotta!). As Cohen and Rosenzweig points out, going from analogue to digital is and may always be a task deemed impossible to be perfectly aligned. Even though this fact seems rational from the start; the difficulties of actually getting just the right colors, saturation and relation to each other was still more difficult than I had expected. Similar to the process of creating a standardized process which would have to be implemented for this hypothetical project of digitizing and archiving all 47 books. It is not for the faint hearted perfectionist. I therefore did what Cohen and Rosenzweig points out as a common mistake when starting to digitize: not properly accounting for the time and intellectual costs that can occur after the actual scanning. These books and their covers offers me a comfort and reminiscence of the most important women in my life: my cousin who is more of a sister and our mother’s that are identical twins: their mother and our grandmother, on whose couch I used to sit and read my cousin’s copies before I started buying them myself. I know I am not the only one with this emotional response to this collection of books, as there is a small Ester Ringnér-Lundgren association with approximately 300 members that is very active. Their prime focus of their association is to keep the knowledge, interest and books alive. The insightful guide that Cohen and Rosenzweig has created don’t only limit the purposes and opportunities of digitalization to larger institutions, but also offers key insights into how smaller establishments and more grassroot organizations can digitize and create their own collections. Guides like this opens doors: also the fact that guides such as Cohen and Rozenswig’s and others are easily accessible online without a paywall, enables smaller associations and archives to approach digitizing projects. It also enables archives of artifacts that from a larger institutional perspective is not deemed valuable enough to digitize, but there are opportunities for others to keep it alive; lets face it, teenage culture is not often on the top list of importance. We will never know what the future is going to be deemed important enough for archives, but being biased towards the emotional and artistic value of the books and their covers, I am more than happy to know that they in some way will survive for future kids and teenagers to dive into.

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