words and this project is rooted in that dilemma: How do people share their individual interpretations of a visual experience when their representational tools are word-based? Collecting Material Memories One way people have attempted to represent (and potentially preserve) their thoughts, experiences and memories throughout history is by creating and handing down hybrid collections combining both images and words, compiled to reflect aspects of themselves. Designating and saving representative illustrations, likenesses and written language into material remembrances continues to satisfy a basic human hunger. Examples of this urge to compile and perpetuate assemblages of personal meaning include Greek hypomnema (personal notebooks), 15th century Italian hodge-podge books and 17th century commonplace books (Curtis, 2011). Modern examples of this type of meaningful cultural “material memory” collection tend to be divided between (a) personal collections of privately expressive documents (photo albums, family bibles, daily diaries, scrap books) and (b) public collections of culturally valued images, usually designated as either artistic archives with presumed didactic value (museum collections, for example) or commercial commodities purchased for consumption only by an approved audience (corporate graphic art archives or municipal police mug shot catalogs). Large Institutional Image Collections: Language and Control Issues The challenging relationship between language and images can be observed on a grand scale in large traditional image collections, in particular collections paid for and accessed by institutions such as museums or corporations which have traditionally been selected
critical degree. Pinterest users who fail to take advantage of home feed filtering (which automatically occurs as soon as images from other users are followed) may have erroneously concluded that the randomly unfiltered flow of indiscriminate images on an public login grid is all that Pinterest contains. Using a Facebook analogy, assuming that the unfiltered Pinterest login grid reflects all available content within Pinterest is similar to opening a Facebook account but then failing to add friends. The login page on either site rarely delivers value without some level of personalization and interaction on the part of the user. Pinterest users principally customize their home feeds by finding and following the images of others. Social Collecting: The Emergence of ‘User-curators’ Zarro and Hall (2012) define Pinterest as a “social collecting” site, and describe how users become “user-curators” and “patron-curators” (p.2). This user-centered perspective allows comparisons of pinner activities to traditional library service tasks as shown in Figure 4, but Zarro and Hall (2012) also note that “the cataloger and patron roles are one and the same in the social collecting model” (p.3). Figure 4. Pinterest Activity and Library Technical Services The ability to arrogate cataloging authority is presumably not the central reason that millions of people create image collections on Pinterest each month. User-curators appear to employ Pinterest to collect and share concepts, large and small, which take the form of images linked either to other Pinterest collections, to sites outside Pinterest
Example: images of two vehicles Table 5. Rosch’s Superordinate Image Category A subordinate image category as shown in Table 6 contains images which are subsets of the basic category. These individual images tend to share many overlapping, predictable attributes with other member images in this distinct category. Subordinate category: subset of the basic category predictable attributes overlap Example: images of two 1969 Chevrolet Camaro RSs Table 6. Rosch’s subordinate image category examples Rosch (1978) summarizes the three levels of categorical abstraction: “Very few attributes are usually listed for superordinate categories (‘furniture’). Significantly greater numbers of attributes are assigned to basic level objects (‘chairs’). Subordinate level objects ( ‘black yew splat-back George II 1740 Windsor armchair’) do not have significantly more attributes assigned than do basic-level objects.” In a study conducted by Rorissa and Iyer (2008), user assignment of image category labels was found to generally be generic, interpretive and to belong to the superordinate to the basic level. In this project, patterns emerged in the pin names collected showing few image names had characteristics of the generic superordinate category (‘furniture’). Significantly greater numbers of primary pin names are assigned to basic level objects
Actress portraying a mythological character: Individual; concrete signifier roles in Edwardian Europe Generic: neutral background About the contrast between light and dark Generic: a person modeling a theatrical costume About how a woman of this period transmitted a sense of tragedy Table 8. Example of applying Shatford Layne’s image attributes to an image Creating a matrix using a combination of Panofsky’s subject matter categories, Rosch’s levels of abstraction and Shatford Layne’s attributes provides a framework to begin examining Pinterest image names, and to analyze the density and complexity of the language being used by user-curators when naming their large, personal digital image collections. The Panofsky/Rosch/Shatford-Layne matrix is used as a tool for identifying meaning in a pin name, in a way similar to the individual approaches traditionally used to describe meaning in images as shown in Table 9. Primary: Pre-iconographical description Secondary: Iconographical Analysis Symbolic: Iconographical Interpretation Describes the form of the image or subject Requires familiarity w/ events or objects Requires insight into historical conditions Panofsky’s three strata of subject matter or meaning Primary or natural subject matter Artist’s motifs ( unshadowed color photo of wooden chair with white background) Secondary or conventional subject matter Types: 20th century auction catalog ad Themes: commercial, realistic, neutral Intrinsic meaning/symbolic value Synthetic intuition: object which when displayed unoccupied can represent isolation or emptiness Rosch’s levels of visual categorization Basic object Members share most attributes Chair Superordinate object Shares some attributes Furniture Subordinate object Shares few/no attributes Stickley Brothers Mission Oak style quarter sawn oak side chair circa March 1923,
Additionally, studies which support the ‘kitchen porn’ theory of Pinterest content appear to base their conclusions on surveys of the most “popular” pins or users, reducing the complexity and depth of 70 million user experiences to the top eight pinners, for example. Simplifying a multifaceted image collection site, particularly one using 31 languages and including millions of curator-users, by reducing usage to “popular” participants suggests that the use of any collaborative site can be evaluated by averaging the heaviest users. This averaging approach does not take into consideration the size, depth and relevance of the Pinterest curator-user community and seems to provide a “quick and dirty” method of supporting preexisting conclusions about Pinterest content, as well as Pinterest users. Machirori suggests that Pinterest user-curators are being manipulated “by men” and details the perception that women remain content consumers, ( a pejorative role) while men retain the title of content owners (a more desirable position to attain): The arguments against women’s wholesale uptake of Pinterest echo the body of western feminist rhetoric that places a premium on women’s movement from more private and domestic spheres of interaction into more public, male-dominated and politicized spaces. The debate is therefore not only about whether women own social media and technological innovations. But it is also about what they are using them for. Indeed, have Facebook, Pinterest and other sites provided the emancipatory cyberfeminist promise for women to explore the fluidity of their identities? Or have they merely served to further entrench women’s position on the margins of public discourse? In essence, it appears that a limited range of interests and pursuits have been packaged and marketed to women, by men, so much so that the dominant use and consumption of social media lies with women, while ownership and innovation remains the preserve of men” (p.112). This type of political rhetoric, particularly when broadly applied to a largely uncontrolled public image collection site, does not appear to be based on any observable behaviors of user-curator. Based on the data collected for this project, using
Matar (2014) details how Wittgenstein’s language games allow users to shift the ‘normal’ requirements of word or sentence construction to fit specialized circumstances. “Grammar, usually taken to consist of the rules of correct syntactic and semantic usage, becomes the wider—and more elusive—network of rules which determine what linguistic move is allowed as making sense, and what isn't” (p.3.5). Primary Grammar: Perhaps not surprisingly, 75% of the resulting primary pin names (which described natural or factual subject matter requiring little or no specific cultural knowledge) fit in to either in Rosch’s “basic” level of categorical abstraction or Shatford Layne’s “subject” attributes. No primary names were nonsensical. 6 names contained ascii art. Intrinsic Grammar: The widest variety of surface grammar variations occurred in the intrinsic strata. Intrinsic surface grammar variations occurred 347 times and included the examples shown in Table 21. commands (9) exclamations (11) questions (9) titles (8) fragments (115) (noun=28) abnormal constructions (49 ) personal statements (37) statements (79) titles (8) comments (15) generic stories (3) tags (4) Table 21. Observed Intrinsic Surface Grammar The examples of observed grammar construction in Table 22 demonstrate the range of inventiveness involved across all strata in the Pinterest pin naming process: Example PRIMARY SECONDARY INTRINSIC :::Antique Photograph :::: abnormal constructions 2 abnormal constructions 32 abnormal constructions 49 Go see this. commands 0 commands 8 commands 9 This hurts. comments 1 comments 25 comments 17
appeared under numerous (more than ten) pin names and pinners, but not under Mary Howard. Some pins were entirely missing: either no longer in Pinterest or no longer readily findable (given the time constraints of this project) under the saved pin name, pinner name or board. Pinners randomly changed the locations of boards and pins. For example, the pin “Tree” on the board “Tree” by Suneel Sethi was not practically able to be located, since the board “Tree” was no longer displayed on Suneel Sethi’s gallery. (25 boards, 19,636 pins). Looking through 19, 636 pins for “Tree” was not viable given the time constraints of this study. “Find on screen” tools in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE behave unpredictably in Pinterest. Being able to “find” one word on a screen containing over a thousand scrolling images would aid in searching, but browsers return unreliable results with the FIND tools, missing instances of exact matches while including inexplicable items. Chrome “find on page” filters seemed most powerful, while Internet Explorer 9 had the weakest searching capabilities, in terms of locating text on a page or returning faulty matches. In summary, trying to recapture collected images with their original names after more than 120 days presented the problems of names being changed indiscriminately, names being so common that they returned unviably large search results, images being deleted, users changing locations of images and browser search tools performing inadequately when asked to find within large scrolling Pinterest displays.
APPENDIX A ALPHA DATA SET Data collected: January – March, 2014 Search Term: PANOFSKY LEVEL: Tree PRIMARY: Names which are factual, recognizable and do not indicate specialized knowledge American Civil War SECONDARAY: Names which rely on a theme, a literary allusion, specialized knowledge, formulas, allegories or other layers of meaning beyond the immediately factual and recognizable
PRIMARY SECONDARY INTRINSIC Image names which are factual, recognizable, and do not require the viewer to have specialized knowledge of the culture related to the image Image names which rely on a theme, a literary allusion, specialized knowledge, formulas, allegories or other layers of meaning beyond the immediately factual and recognizable Image names which are culturally specific, interpretive or are non-contextually defined Primary pins Secondary pins: Intrinsic pins: