Ian's Digital Weblog

Chris and I have begun auto cropping large batches of images. Photoshop CS3 does have an intriguing auto crop command, but it does work effectively enough for our purposes, typically only resizing part of the image. Chris has experimented with auto cropping images divided by even and odd (left and right bound pages of the newspaper demarcated by year and month), and found it effective when compared to the time taken to crop them by hand and convert them from tiff to jpeg one by one. Most of the time is now spent fixing images where text is cut off by the auto cropping action. The result isn't quite as precise, but for this specific project, they don't have to be. We've found that by auto cropping images we can sometimes finish in about 2 hours one year's worth of newspapers as opposed to 4 hours when manually cropping (although we sacrifice some quality). So what we have is a workable solution for the rest of the semester (why didn't we think of this earlier?!), but a long term investigation of more sophisticated software or more precise means of cropping is still worth looking into. Last week, we also corrected a number of images that did not have banding for the Daily Iowan. Content DM makes correcting such errors pretty simple. We simply recalled the images after changing the options, reuploaded and approved the images.

This past week, I also attended two of the David Eads presentation on Drupal, a content management software. Most of the attendees seemed pretty firmly entrenched in IT, tossing around sophisticated technical questions with aplomb, while I often had no clue what they were talking about. But while I may not have garnered a lot from the technical explanations of the software, I thought his explanation of the implications of open source software was intriguing (I love discussions of upcoming trends and their subsequent effects on society). I find it fascinating that the internet, originally intended as a tool for collaboration, has in a sense, vacillated back and forth on this idea of community and what defines a community. The internet seems destined to forever remain in large part proprietary in nature, and yet, wikis and enormous communities of users, like the ones that use Drupal, continue to bring disparate groups of people together. The larger social implications of people (are we naturally inclined to do so?) working together are (although not unusual) quite profound. Now we have the technology to make communication and publishing easier than ever.

Some of the advice doled out by Eads included:
-Pick a vendor you like rather than a technology (emphasizing importance on working with the right people)
-Folksonomies are a great example of leveraging technology in a creative way. Another example might be the naming game Google uses to disambiguate images
-Change the mindset of I'm going to be everything to everybody. It's better to be something to somebody.
-In the future of the web may be in the Semantic Web or getting better metadata about various pieces on your page.
-The web will become a more seamless media experience (on this I wasn't quite clear what he meant. In the days of the nascent internet people seemed to believe the next thing would be something better than TV. Well we now know the internet is nothing like TV. So will the next big thing be something like the internet, but better or more seamless? Professor Hsieh discussed the implications of intuitive touch screen technology in computing. Will the next big thing be something like the iphone? Internet that is portable?).