I'm starting to read this book that my boyfriend's grandmom got him called Twentysomething essays by Twentysomething writers. The essays were chosen as part of a Random House contest and in the note from the editors, they relate the complexity of trying to group and organize the thousands of entries they received because in the end each essay could, in one way or another, fit into each of their preconceived categories.
"The problem was that such “everything-ness” seemed to spoil any claims of twentysomething solidarity. Our generation has often been accused of political apathy, of lacking the unity of ideology and purpose that the Boomers—our parents—were so famous for. According to popular opinion, we are all supposed to be deeply polarized by the Red/Blue divide. But, in reality, the spectrum is much wider and more colorful. We are not apathetic; we’ve simply learned to make more subtle distinctions."
It's these subtle distinctions that make the finding, collocating and evaluation of information, especially on the web, extremely difficult.
FaceTag is a prototype for a new tool that combines the benefits of folksonomic tagging with faceted classification. Folksonomy tagging is the process whereby users label items with their own keywords such as the labels I use below each post on this blog, or on YouTube and Flickr. Some of the issues with tagging is that it can be inexact or overly personalized, for instance I may label this post as "fun" but you might find it to be "awful".
Faceted classification on the other hand analyzes items by distinct characteristics which can then be divided into subclasses. FaceTags facets are Resource Types, Language, Activities/Subjects, Usage, People, Date. As tags become connected to these characteristics, browsing and searching becomes richer.
Showing posts with label classification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classification. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Monday, July 2, 2007
Image Classification Fun!
Recently the Wall Street Journal (my new favorite paper) featured an article Computer Scientists Pull a Tom SawyerTo Finish Grunt Work (June 27, 2007; Page B1). The gist was that computer scientists have come up with a new way to tackle the massive task of classifying images in large databases by making a game of it. Anyone who has tried to find an image using yahoo image search or google image search or any other large database of images, will have an idea of just how important this classification work is!
In this game, two random users will be shown one image and are asked to type in words to describe it. When their words match they "win" and the word is chosen as a descriptor on the assumption that there is at least a level of congruency. Of course this leads to a lowest common denominator situation and the classification will tend to remain relatively basic.
Labeling images is not a process so easily resolved by games but the idea is extremely interesting. Dr. Choi, a professor of mine, illustrates the complexity of the matter by referencing the classic 'is it an old lady or a young woman' picture.
Complicating matters further is cultural context. A study was done* whereby a three panel cartoon drawing was shown to young British and South African children. The first panel shows a young child wearing a ball cap, standing under a sun, holding a watering can over a flower. The second panel shows the child, under the sun, with his hat off and liquid droplets coming off his head. The final panel shows the child sitting down, under the sun, shirt off, pouring the watering can over his own head.
The British children understood the panels to be related and to be telling a story depicting a child watering a plant, the sun making him hot, and by pouring the water over his head, cooling himself off. The young South African children on the other hand were not inclined to view the pictures as related and took each one as a separate entity. They also did not understand the liquids to be water or sweat and thought it was perhaps blood and overall the entire scene made little sense to them. Interestingly, even in my own class there was debate over the last panel, some thought he was pouring the water over his head to cool off, others thought he got the idea that he wanted to grow like the flower.
So you see....classifying images...not so easy.
*Levie, W. Howard. Research on Pictures: A guide to the literature. In The Psychology of Illustration, edited by Dale M. Willows and Harvey A. Houghton, 1987, p.
In this game, two random users will be shown one image and are asked to type in words to describe it. When their words match they "win" and the word is chosen as a descriptor on the assumption that there is at least a level of congruency. Of course this leads to a lowest common denominator situation and the classification will tend to remain relatively basic.
Labeling images is not a process so easily resolved by games but the idea is extremely interesting. Dr. Choi, a professor of mine, illustrates the complexity of the matter by referencing the classic 'is it an old lady or a young woman' picture.
Complicating matters further is cultural context. A study was done* whereby a three panel cartoon drawing was shown to young British and South African children. The first panel shows a young child wearing a ball cap, standing under a sun, holding a watering can over a flower. The second panel shows the child, under the sun, with his hat off and liquid droplets coming off his head. The final panel shows the child sitting down, under the sun, shirt off, pouring the watering can over his own head.
The British children understood the panels to be related and to be telling a story depicting a child watering a plant, the sun making him hot, and by pouring the water over his head, cooling himself off. The young South African children on the other hand were not inclined to view the pictures as related and took each one as a separate entity. They also did not understand the liquids to be water or sweat and thought it was perhaps blood and overall the entire scene made little sense to them. Interestingly, even in my own class there was debate over the last panel, some thought he was pouring the water over his head to cool off, others thought he got the idea that he wanted to grow like the flower.
So you see....classifying images...not so easy.
*Levie, W. Howard. Research on Pictures: A guide to the literature. In The Psychology of Illustration, edited by Dale M. Willows and Harvey A. Houghton, 1987, p.
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