beyond google image search: image lexicon building strategies

What are “visual lexicons?”  In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions.  Therefore, a visual lexicon refers to a vocabulary of imagery.  Aiding students in developing an astute visual lexicon requires not only exposing, but immersing them in many images.  Part of that entails having students actively seek imagery beyond the art historical imagery and exemplars required as part of their curriculum.  “Image storming” – or brainstorming by gathering many examples of imagery related to a given topic or problem is an essential part of many artists’ practices.  Technology can make this process easier.

What resources can be used to “image storm?”: In a classroom setting posters, books, and physical exemplars are often used to spark student interest/build image lexicons.  However, each resource can be problematic. For example, posters can be both costly and space-encroaching.  Books may contain many lovely and interesting examples – but they can only be viewed by one or two students at a time.  Physical exemplars are important, but also take up space, and may not truly represent an adequate range of possibility with the media or technique.  With a limitless array of imagery at their fingertips, students often image storm online before consulting any of the other aforementioned resources.  Consider the following example:

Classroom snapshot: does this sound familiar?

Teacher: "Okay class, today I would like for you to search for images on the internet to use as references to your project.  Where should we go to get started?"

Students: "Google it!" (or bing, or yahoo, etc.)

So, what's the problem?
One of the most popular ways to find imagery online is through a google image search.  Its quick, its easy, and it is a good solution for very general images.  The problem enters when we consider page ranking – the method in which search engines spit out their query results.  

What is page rank?
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,^[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.  Here is google's explanation:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

I still don't get why this is a big deal - tell me more!
Consider this example: Little Suzie loves cats – anything to do with cats, and she would like to have some cat pictures for references for her next project.  So, she goes to google, types in “cute cats” and copies 3-5 of the first images she sees.  Again, this is fine if we just need something general, but what happens if Mary, who also is a kitten freak, enters the same search query?  That’s right, she gets the same results, and more than likely in the same order.  


This is problematic for a number of reasons:

1. due to page rank the most popular hits will be listed first, and generally students don’t like to dig through the page to find additional items
2. many of the items cross-listed may be commercial in nature – limiting the breadth of images seen,
3. google is only one of MANY search services students could use

The solution:

There are several alternatives to using google image search.  There are sites that host up and coming artist’s works (which are searchable by tags), there are social networks just for images (called image bookmarking sites – which we will explore more of below), and many alternative image search engines.  Check out some of the MANY alternatives by clicking any of the links below.  Please note - because of the ever-changing nature of the web-landscape, these links may have changed.  Sites should be previewed to insure appropriateness for the level of students your are teaching.

alamy

deviantart
enjoysthin.gs
etsy
every stock photo
FFFFOUND!
flickr
fotki
freefoto
image spark
image toss
imgfave
istockphoto
lookbook
myartspace.com
oobject
pinterest
photagr
photobucket
photoree
pichaus
picocool
picfog
picsearch

stock xchng
tastespotting
tineye
videque
vi.sualize.us
we heart it
we love typography
woophy
yay everyday
zoomr