Tuna Breath

JEB-ATC2003.05.01-07

(Click to see thumbnails of entire series -- slow server)

Seven oil pastels inspired by Rothko (and probably Kadinsky, although not stylistically) and spiritual simplicity.

Cray-pas Junior Artist Student Quality Oil Pastels (which i've had for years) with a varnish manipulation and glazing. I think i rubbed my finger-tip almost raw.

I don't consider the series closed, because i think i will want to try with acrylics, particularly with the addition of gloss medium.

***

Apparently, even several days later the varnish wasn't dry. I scanned the cards in, lifting two to reposition, and found that some of the "paint" had stuck to the glass. Four of the seven show clear damage.

I'm not sure how i'm going to touch the originals up -- the two that i moved, which then scanned with some damage, i touched up digitally. My spouse recommneds leaving them as they are, citing a wabi sabi aesthetic. Whether that meshes with the effect of silence[QV] or not is hard for me to discern. It is a nod to simplicity, perhaps, to not obsessively touch up and disturb what remains.

"silence": "Silent painting" is discussed by Donald Kuspit in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 with references to both Kadinsky and Rothko; compare with this exhibition description: "The exhibit highlights works created between 1950 and 1969, Rothko's classic period of large silent canvases which a unique contemplative quality sets apart from much of the work of his contemporaries from that period."

The Editions

JEB-ATC2003.05.01 : Wash
2003/08/12
digital image touched up due to peeling from scanner

JEB-ATC2003.05.02 : Lift
2003/08/12
[To Eliza 2003/10/19]

JEB-ATC2003.05.03 : Echo
2003/08/12

JEB-ATC2003.05.04 : Enter
2003/08/12
[To Marcella]

JEB-ATC2003.05.05 : Support
2003/08/12

JEB-ATC2003.05.06 : Remember
2003/08/12
[To Bronwyn]

JEB-ATC2003.05.07 : Invent
2003/08/12
digital image touched up due to peeling from scanner

From RLG's executive summary

*** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA JOINS REDLIGHTGREEN PARTNERS ***

RLG's Mellon-funded project code-named "RedLightGreen" is moving forward to pilot use. The entire RLG Union Catalog (except for the serials and archival-and-mixed-materials files) has been converted to RedLightGreen format and loaded into the database that will be at the heart of the system.

The University of Minnesota will join Swarthmore, NYU, and Columbia in testing how their undergraduates will react to a freely available and custom-tailored version of RLG's union catalog. The RedLightGreen database and discovery system will be promoted on the partner-testers' campuses during the upcoming academic semester.

For more information on this project, which has great potential to transform online catalog use, see http://www.rlg.org/redlightgreen/ and contact Merrilee dot Proffitt at notes dot rlg dot org.

FAQ: Where's my search term?

"Why isn't my search term in the result?"

A far too technical answer for an end user:

RedLightGreen depends on the cataloging expertise of librarians at major libraries throughout the English speaking world. A librarian catalogs a book or other item by noting important features (the author, title, publisher) and assigning subject headings. Other features may also be noted: a synopsis of a plot, chapter headings, or related books. RLG selects one of many records to represent an edition and collects many editions together to create a result in RedLightGreen. Your search term may be in one of the other records for the edition, or in records for another edition.

Most librarians use subject headings defined by the Library of Congress in the US. The subject heading is chosen to fit a pattern that can be applied to a wide range of topics. If two possible terms describe the subject, the one that fits the established pattern best is chosen. Librarians use a guide to determine which heading is the established heading. We've linked alternative headings to the records so that if your search term is not in the established heading, you can find the items with the synonymous established heading.

Finally, we use the power of the Recommind MindServer to examine patterns in word use, looking for contexts that are similar to the context in which your search term appears. It's possible a chapter may be devoted to your topic or that it addresses your topic from another field or point of view.

ShelfLife, No. 118 (August 7 2003) ISSN 1538-4284

The new ShelfLife didn't have any stories this week particularly relevant to RedLightGreen. Cliff Lynch's interview points to a disticntion between digital library services and digital library collections. It reflects the direction the DLF is going with DODL -- a large joint collection with standardized access point so that the services can be built on top. It also points to OAI, as OAI offers a way to build services over disparate collections.

One of our blue-sky plans for RedLightGreen is to add harvested OAI records to the union catalog data.

The Semantic Web article is yet another 3000 foot overview.

(read more for the table of contents of this week's edition)

ShelfLife, No. 118 (August 7 2003) ISSN 1538-4284
http://www.rlg.org

CONTENTS
The Library of the Future
Keep Your Standards High
Standing Up Against the Patriot Act
Two Library Test Projects Making Progress
The Promise of the Semantic Web
When Digitizing Content, Always Keep the Originals
XML: Extremely Confusing?
New Standards for Antitrust Review Urged
Harvard Law Library Digitizing Nazi War Crimes Documents

***********************************************************
ShelfLife, a weekly executive news summary for information professionals,
is a free service of RLG, the not-for-profit membership corporation of more
than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, museums -- and other
institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. RLG was
created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group. ShelfLife provides context
for RLG's major initiatives, which celebrate the power of knowledge to
grow, to live, and to last.
***********************************************************

Mind Reading and Other Unattained Miracles

There have been times, in discussing plans for RedLightGreen, that we reminded ourselves that there are users who ask questions like these. While some of these are out of scope and some -- well, we don't have any books here -- there are some that point to the problems that new library users have. (Even if my image of a "new library user," in the generic sense, is a child under the age five.) And some of these point to problems of those who have poor memories (I'll count myself in that group.)

A browse through some of these "sample queries"

I am disappointed to find our current engine returns nothing on "Robert James Waller Waltzing through Grand Rapids" or on "Waltzing through Grand Rapids." (I have a slim chance of remembering a book title, and even slimmer chance of remembering a person's name.) "Waltzing Grand Rapids" returns seven books. Stemming is not enabled on this test engine, so i try "waltz grand rapids." "Grand Rapids" is found in the place of publication of many of these results, and, yet again, points to the need to remove that data from the keyword search. I recognize that there is no way the current system would really know that "Grand Rapids" and "Cedar Bend" are both rivers.

The "civil war" search won't help the student who assumes that they can write a paper about the whole war, although there are plenty of books about the US Civil war. It does have the functionality to help them discern that, "oh yeah, there have been other 'civil wars' than the one i had in mind." The disambiguation is not as useful as I'd hoped it would be, but it's a start, appropriate for a pilot system. The person who asked, "Can you tell me why so many famous Civil War battles were fought on National Park Sites," might pose a query to the RedLightGreen interface as "civil war national park." This does return some results -- National Park Service publications about the US Civil War -- although I'm not sure one would ever come across the answer to the particular question in a book.

My search on "time machines" entertained me a great deal and illustrated why stemming is a critical addition -- without stemming, HG Wells doesn't show up until result 55.

Enough entertainment for the day.

Total number of "editions"

39,468,186 "manifestations" or "editions" will be in the RedLightGreen total data set. A little over three fourths of these are from RLG's Books file and will comprise the initial data set at launch. Other formats will slowly be added to the Recommind MindServer in evening/over-night loads.

The scare quotes are there because each record truly represents a RLG cluster. For purposes of copy catalogers, RLG's clustering algorithm is extremely conservative. The preference is for a record not to cluster if there is a slight but possibly relevant difference. For an average user, this produces some odd "repeats," even beyond the "repeats" that different editions cause. ("Repeats" was the term used by a student test subject confronted by listings for different editions.)

Minoan Crete and John Donne

"A search on Minoan Crete returns as the 59th result a sermon by John Donne. Examination of the editions reveals nothing about Crete. What's strange is that the results farther down the list seem mostly relevant to the search term again."

My first thought was that some widely published sermon with, say an imprint by "Minoan Press" or some such, was triggering this result. But no. It's a 1626 imprint. We have three "editions" in the RLG Union Catalog -- but they're likely all the same edition. And it's a total of ten holdings (mostly in microform).

Author: Donne, John, 1572-1631.
Title: [Sermon Preached To The Kings Mtie At Whitehall 24 Febr 1625]
A sermon, preached to the Kings Mtie. at Whitehall, 24. Febr. 1625 / by Iohn Donne. And now by his Maiesties commandment published.
Publisher: London : Printed for T. Jones, 1626.

It turns out that the publisher is transcribed in one of the entries as Iones.

After much poking around, the best guess i have for the linkage is that there are works in which Iones, the Protohellenic tribe, and Minoan and/or Crete are linked. I don't see it in the actual data -- the other two relevant works that come up in the search "iones minoan crete" don't seem to have the word iones associated with the record itself. It is possible that , as we use the Subject Authority file to supplement the record with additional access points, that there may be an Iones lurking there

This is one more strike against using the publisher data in the keyword search. Right now we have it ranked as very low -- we should take it our altogether. Yet, as we indexed the publication data, those terms go into the modeling and training done by the Recommind Mind Server. So perhaps the publication data will still produce noise in the results as items without the search term, but that the model thinks are related due to the presence of some term in a publication field.

I hope oddities like these will be overwhelmed by the mass of the data -- our sample database only includes 5% of the book records. Yet seeing all the early modern English spellings in all the sermons and such, I should prepare myself for a plethora of oddities once the full system is in place.

iones minoan crete #1 of 3 -- the other two definitely have to do with ancient Greece.
minoan #73
iones minoan #1 of 83
iones crete #1 of 6
crete #267
donne crete #1
saint Pauls crete #3 of 11 (One of the titles lists the sermon as delivered at Saint Pauls)
saint crete #8 of 16
Iohn Iones #3 of 36 -- lots of sermons, nothing on Crete
Maiesties #37 of 360 -- lots of sermons and very distracting titles.
isaiah crete -- three results, no Donne
iones -- many results, Donne isn't one of them

The Donne records include:
Record ID:ILNGAEY1101B-B
Record ID:CUBGGLAD184553073-B
Record ID:PASG544243-B