Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sun, 8 Nov 1992 19:37:38 -0500
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         ricki@UNIXG.UBC.CA
Subject:      visual stuff
Comments: To: LESTER@FULLERTON.EDU
Comments: cc: QUALRS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu

RE: Visual Ethnography and Knowledge

Responding to <LESTER@FULLERTON.EDU>'s comment in Marsha's message

Dear Les, (is that your name?)

I just read what you wrote as transmitted to me by Marsha's message. I
thought it interesting that I have just written about this subject myself.
I find this kind of synergy or whatever one calls it, very
interesting.....I will send you what I wrote in this message and cc our
userlist in case there are others out there thinking about this subject....


ps (I also design multimedia tools for analysing vdeo data   Mac-based
software called Learning Constellations) and I teach Video Ethnography.)

Here's my latest thinking on this subject:

The section comes from a paper called


"Semantic Layering Tools for Video Analysis"


DRAFT!!!
NOT FOR REPRINT OR ELECTRONIC COPYING AT THIS TIME, PLEASE.
If you are interested in the whole paper, please send me a message and I
will get it to you hardcopy sometime in December.

Section 2. Defining the Obstacle:
Interpreting Visual Images is More Difficult than Interpreting Text

What needs to happen in the development of software tools so that
eventually we will be able to interpret video as intuitively as we do with
text? In order to begin to answer this question, we need first to first
define a central obstacle: that interpreting visual images is fundamentally
more difficult than interpreting text.

The problem is that we have yet to find a method for interpreting visual
images. Landau in About Faces: The Evolution of the Human Face  explores
the evolution of facial gestures of humans and primates. In this book, one
finds a multitude of illustrations of facial expressions and a meaning
assigned to each. As is clear from the title, Landau believes that these
gestures are the result of our earlier history, linking us with primates to
some degree. (One example is the facial gesture with the lips exposing the
teeth. This "smile" was once the gesture telling the enemy to stay away.)
The problem with Landau's interpretations of facial gestures is that they
pay too little attention to individual, gender, and cultural differences.
The issue facing researchers using visual data is to find a way to know
what a given gesture or visual representation means for the person who is
doing the action. If we begin to make meaning from our visual data, we need
less to have a universal taxonomy of what gestures mean, and more a method
of exploring the meaning for that person within a given culture.

What does it mean to interpret visual images and attach a meaning to what
we see? The job of interpreting signs is as old as our humanity. The
earliest records we have that people made sense of the world through
interpreting images are the paintings on cave walls. Some paintings told
stories about great hunts; they taught others where to look for food or
shelter; and they communicated to other travelers the best route to another
settlement. In this last example, these early paintings were navigational
tools for exploring the physical and spiritual terrain. In fact, what we do
today with multimedia software tools that use visual images is quite
similar. We construct narratives; we educate; and we  try to design
pathways for navigation through data.

Our historical obsession with the power of the visual representation is
perhaps most clearly described in the bible: one of the ten commandments is
not to create or worhsip a graven image. In pre-bibilical times, each
god/dess had a physical manifestation. In becoming a monotheistic religion,
Judaism and then Christianity forbade the worship of the representation of
dieties or even the representation of one diety, such as the golden calf.
The fear of the priests was that people should not have the power to create
their own representations.  Elliot Soloway claims that "those who create
the images are empowered" [ ].  In other words, those who create the images
or the icons of a culture will affect those who see and interpret those
images. (This works in much the same way as pop culture icons continue to
affect younger generations.)

The legacy of the early non-pictoral texts is that they lessened the
multiplicity of interpretation which was intrinsically connected to the
power of visual icons. However, it should be pointed out that the Byblos
alphabet of the ancient Semites was a system requiring a great deal of
interpretation as it is a system of letters standing for sounds that have
no letters for vowels. (Illich and Sanders say that meaning is "breathed
into" the Byblos text by the reader, reminiscent of Jerome Bruner's
statement about the reading of any text that the text is "loosened in the
mind of the reader.") To this day, biblical scholars pour over ancient
texts finding nuances and changes to existing interpretations. In the
Byblos text, meaning is understood by deduction of the structure of the
word in relation to other words within the context of the whole sentence
and chapter. Adding prefixes and suffixes to  a three lettered root called
the "shoresh" changes the gender, number, and tense of the word. The
shoresh may also contain information about prepositional phases.

When Greek merchants took this writing system back to Greece, they altered
the script in two fundamental ways:

"[1] While for the Semite beth has a semantic association, because for him
it means "house," for the Greek is it merely the name of a letter that
stands for a sound... ("b")...[2] The consonants are now placed between
vocals...Whiile the consonants had been used to record units of meaning
that the scribe had picked from the flow of speech, the Greeks froze the
flow of speech itself on the page. The [Hebrew] scroll had been sounded
thus far through an act of interpretation of the letters... The Jew
searches with his eyes for inaudible roots in order to flesh them out with
his breath. The Greek picks the sound form the page and searches for the
invisible ideas in the sounds the letters command him to make" [Illich and
Sanders, p 12-13] (brackets and numbers added).

What Illich and Sanders are saying is that the historical movement in
representing knowledge has been away from interpretation to a system of
frozen and irrefutable meanings. In the ancient bibical texts with letters
representing sounds instead of pictures representing ideas, meaning has "to
be fleshed out with the reader's breath." This text-driven system that
sought less interpretation and more exactitute than in the previous
Egyptian hierogliphics around 3000 BC, or in the Mesopotamian ideographs
where "the word presents itself without any indication of its sound" [ ].
The Greeks took this further. 	In short, with the introduction of a ancient
documents representing utterances and not pictures and ideas, meaning was
less likely to be assigned by the reader and more likely to be assigned by
the author. The challenge of the re-introducing the visual into our texts
is that interpretation is once again put back into the eyes of the viewer.



Dr. Ricki Goldman-Segall
Director, MERLin (Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab)
Assistant Professor, Dept Math & Science Education
Faculty of Education
2125 Scarfe Building
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada  V6T 1Z4

tel: (604) 822-2086
fax: (604) 822-4714
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU