Aereo: An experimental bird’s eye view of the digital collections from the State Library of New South Wales

Presentation of Aereo: a project made for the 2019 DX Lab Fellowship of the State Library of New South Wales.

More info at: https://dxlab.sl.nsw.gov.au/blog/building-aereo

1. Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga - July 2020 An experimental bird’s eye view of the digital collections from the State Library of NSW
2. hello
4. Universidad de los Andes 2000
6. Carnegie Mellon University 2011
12. i was there — Photo: Paula Bray
24. collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/digital
25. about 2 million at the time of the fellowship about 4 million images
26. flickr.com/photos/prasenberg - Patrick Rasenberg
31. bounded by the physical space serendipitous exploration
32. how does this work digitally?
34. 554,030 results
35. *not really possible due to technical limitations in pagination depth 13,000+ “pages”*
36. this is a common paradigm
37. “pagination”
42. 13,000+ pages
43. you miss the forest for the trees
45. pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html
46. - Marcia J. Bates “the query is satisfied not by a single final retrieved set, but by a series of selections of individual references and bits of information at each stage of the ever-modifying search”
47. research as a serendipitous process
48. constrained by small set of results on view digital serendipity is limited
53. see the forest and the trees
56. “big picture” vs. detail
57. *that i could research, design, and implement in eight weeks this is my attempt at addressing this*
59. “An experimental bird’s eye view of the digital collections from the State Library of NSW”
60. but first some background
63. dependent on text metadata
68. comprehensive metadata is hard
69. we could automate metadata creation
70. we could automate metadata creation som e* *the one that computers are good at
71. already being done at the Library
72. sl.nsw.gov.au/blogs/tiger-using-artificial-intelligence-discover-our-collections
73. collection.sl.nsw.gov.au
76. computers get (a lot) wrong
80. *there are way more problematic tags (that reflect algorithm biases) take it with a grain of salt*
81. Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context
82. computer “learns” how to “see”
84. = “dog”
85. an issue in a collection with centuries-old stuff cannot see… what it hasn’t seen before
86. *non-W.E.I.R.D. stuff (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, “Democratic”) cannot see… what its creator didn’t train* it to see
87. useful for finding similar-looking things, not for the categories themselves but it is consistent
90. with computers, avoiding closed or proprietary algorithms a way to group images together
91. image-net.org
92. ml4a.github.io/guides - Gene Kogan
95. or, in math parlance, uniform manifold approximation and projection (umap) “similarity metadata”
96. dhlab.yale.edu/projects/pixplot
97. dhlab.yale.edu/projects/pixplot
100. SFMoMA Artscope - Stamen (2014)
101. bertspaan.nl/semia - Bert Spaan
102. amnh-sciviz.github.io/image-collection - Brian Foo
103. we can also use color as metadata
105. mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorsummarizer
107. artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/artpalette
108. collection.cooperhewitt.org
109. publicdomain.nypl.org/pd-visualization - Brian Foo
111. “I propose enhancing the Manuscripts, Oral History and Pictures Catalogue with computer-generated metadata to create new pathways for patron exploration. By focusing on the 300,000+ digitised image set that is currently available…”
112. “I propose enhancing the Manuscripts, Oral History and Pictures Catalogue with computer-generated metadata to create new pathways for patron exploration. By focusing on the 300,000+ digitised image set that is currently available…”
113. but seemed technically achievable in a modern web browser larger than other sets that i had seen
114. little did i know…
115. the scale of the dataset was a big challenge in this project 2 million images…
117. emphasis in visual materials 1,199,477 things., photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
118. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
119. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
120. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
121. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
122. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
123. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
124. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
125. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
126. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
127. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
128. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
129. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
130. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
131. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
132. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
133. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
134. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
135. 1,199,477 manuscripts, photographs, negatives, published maps, drawings, objects, pictures, ephemera, journals, prints, medals, unpublished maps, paintings, coins, architectural drawings, newspapers, posters, and stamps.
136. “unsorted”, year, colour, similarity
137. “unsorted”, year, colour, similarity
138. “unsorted”, year, colour, similarity
139. four different ways of looking at the forest “unsorted”, year, colour, similarity
143. page 1 5 pages
144. 8 pages page 1
145. 27 pages page 1
146. 688 pages page 1
147. 27,749 pages
149. demo
171. serendipitous exploration
175. unbounded by physical space
176. try this at home… memory limitations apply pushes the limits of web browsers
177. more sorting criteria, custom groupings, filtering from library metadata future work?
178. the process
180. The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com
181. ended up using 1.2 million… still a lot for any web browser, let alone a smartphone 2 million images! ⏳
189. single pixels can convey a lot of information… but i wanted everything these are all “just” pixels
190. - Frustrated Fellow “but how am i going to show two million images‽”
196. technical details
197. …with lots of data cleanup and cloud computing time Python + Node.js for image similarity and color palettes
198. cloud-hosted static assets using Library’s API for image details Three.js + Vue.js for Aereo interface
199. github.com/slnsw/dxlab-fellowship-2019
200. dxlab.sl.nsw.gov.au/blog/building-aereo
201. Special thanks to •DX Lab team: Paula Bray, Kaho Cheung, and Luke Dearnley •Web team: Jenna Bain and Robertus Johansyah •Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville •State Librarian Dr John Vallance •Staff from the State Library of New South Wales •The State Library of NSW Foundation
202. Acknowledgments •Cyril Diagne •Douglas Duhaime - Yale DH Lab •Gene Kogan •Mario Klingemann •Ricardo Cabello - Three.js
203. Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga @mgiraldo