Though online since March, 2008, the public launch of the accessCeramics project will occur in late winter and early spring of 2009. Scheduled for presentation at three national/international conferences and one regional northwest conference, members of the accessCeramics team will present papers, host a booth, and generally spread the word about the contemporary ceramics database. Check below for the names of the various conferences, their locations, dates and websites. Session dates and times will be posted later. Thanks to all of you who have submitted images to raise the numbers of the continually growing collection. For those invited artists who still have this on your "to-do" list, we encourage you to submit your images (or more images) for maximum exposure during the public launch of the website.
CAA (College Art Association)
Los Angeles, CA., February 25 – 28th, 2009
VRA (Visual Resources Association)
Toronto, Canada, March 18th – 22nd 2009
NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts)
Phoenix, AZ., April 8 – 11th, 2009
Northwest History and Heritage Extravaganza: Oregon Heritage Commission, The Washington State Historical Society, The Oregon Historical Society, Northwest Archivists.
Portland, Oregon, April 15-18, 2009.
-Margo
Friday, December 19, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Winner of Survey Drawing
The accessCeramics team recently surveyed a group of accessCeramics users to help improve the accessCeramics collection and web site. Those taking the survey were eligible to win a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate.
I'm pleased to announce that Steve Hilton is the winner of the gift certificate.
We'll have more about our survey results on this blog in the near future.
-Mark
I'm pleased to announce that Steve Hilton is the winner of the gift certificate.
We'll have more about our survey results on this blog in the near future.
-Mark
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
geographic diversity
Part of the beauty of using Flickr as our submission system for accessCeramics is its global reach. This allows us to seek contributions from artists who live just about anywhere. To reflect this, we just added a Google Map of our artist locations to accessCeramics.
As we're still building the collection, the geographic diversity of our artists is currently limited to the United States (Michael Moore is our lone international artists). As the collection grows, hopefully our national and international representation will grow as well.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
accessCeramics supported by NITLE Grant
Earlier this summer, accessCeramics was fortunate enough to be awarded a $19,000 grant from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)'s Instructional Innovation Fund--Western Region. The grant will facilitate the growth of accessCeramics and its use in liberal arts colleges in the 2008-09 academic year.
Funds will support our new part-time Submission's Coordinator, Miranda Costa, who is now helping to recruit artists for the collection. She is also providing technical support and assistance to artists as they add their images.
Funds will also go to support redesign of the accessCeramics website and improvements to the interface to make it more useful for teaching. Furthermore, grant monies will support travel to the NCECA 2009 conference, where we will be promoting accessCeramics to arts educators and artists.
As part of the NITLE grant, several ceramic arts instructors at liberal arts colleges around the country will be using accessCeramics in instruction this coming academic year. These colleges include:
Juniata College
Carleton College
Macalester College
Denison University
Kalamazoo College
University of Puget Sound
Hope College
Willamette University
Lawrence University
Instructors will provide feedback to us about the accessCeramics user interface and collection.
The accessCeramics team is grateful for NITLE's support.
Funds will support our new part-time Submission's Coordinator, Miranda Costa, who is now helping to recruit artists for the collection. She is also providing technical support and assistance to artists as they add their images.
Funds will also go to support redesign of the accessCeramics website and improvements to the interface to make it more useful for teaching. Furthermore, grant monies will support travel to the NCECA 2009 conference, where we will be promoting accessCeramics to arts educators and artists.
As part of the NITLE grant, several ceramic arts instructors at liberal arts colleges around the country will be using accessCeramics in instruction this coming academic year. These colleges include:
Juniata College
Carleton College
Macalester College
Denison University
Kalamazoo College
University of Puget Sound
Hope College
Willamette University
Lawrence University
Instructors will provide feedback to us about the accessCeramics user interface and collection.
The accessCeramics team is grateful for NITLE's support.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
code4lib journal article
Issue 3 of the code4lib online journal was published today, and it contains an article I wrote on the technology surrounding accessCeramics. Some of the main points have already been discussed in this blog, though the article goes into somewhat more depth. If you're interested in some of the design philosophy behind accessCeramics, and perhaps some of the nerdier aspects of the project, it might be worth a look.
Friday, June 6, 2008
accessCeramics now PicLens compatible
accessCeramics is now compatible with the browser plugin PicLens. What does this mean? It will completely change way the images on the site are viewed.PicLens creates a 'virtual gallery' view, which is a wall of images one can easily navigate. It also lets users view full screen slide shows of images. accessCeramics has browse-specific PicLens slide shows for any case. For example, to view all 'Coil-built' images, go to the browse screen, and click 'Start Slideshow'.
accessCeramics also supports PicLens Lite, so those without the Piclens plugin will get a similar Flash-based view.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Flickr Machine Tags Revisited
Over the weekend we added the ability to browse by different fields in accessCeramics. While this isn't really that hard of a problem, technologically speaking, it became clear that flickr machine tags couldn't handle this very well.
It came down to this. To get a list of the different values the images had for glaze, for example, we would have to do the following:
Or, if the metadata was in a local database like MySQL, we would have to:
In addition, the API doesn't support partial or truncated machine tag searches. For example, if I wanted to search for 'sculpture', I wouldn't get 'figurative sculpture' as part of my results set. This would require our users to be overly precise with their searches, which just isn't ideal design.
Because of situations like this, we decided to migrate the metadata to a MySQL database. We'll still include machine tag generation in Flickr as part of the process, in the event that API methods are added in the future. But storing all metadata in a local DB will greatly enhance the site's functionality and speed, especially as it grows to the volume we hope it will.
When this project began, we were hoping Flickr would be the database layer. To a certain extent it still is, but it just doesn't offer the same flexibility as a fairly simple MySQL database. It's still a cool idea, and hopefully Flickr will make some enhancements in the way machine tags are used and queried. With some of the recent chatter about an academic Flickr, hopefully the conversation that will move Flickr in that direction has begun.
It came down to this. To get a list of the different values the images had for glaze, for example, we would have to do the following:
- Make an API call to get a list of images in the collection
- For each image, make an API call to get the list of tags & machine tags
- Cycle through each set of tags and perform a regular expression match to find the 'glaze' machine tag, and store that value in a PHP array
- Put the array in order, and print the results.
Or, if the metadata was in a local database like MySQL, we would have to:
- Make an SQL query to the database, and process & print the results
In addition, the API doesn't support partial or truncated machine tag searches. For example, if I wanted to search for 'sculpture', I wouldn't get 'figurative sculpture' as part of my results set. This would require our users to be overly precise with their searches, which just isn't ideal design.
Because of situations like this, we decided to migrate the metadata to a MySQL database. We'll still include machine tag generation in Flickr as part of the process, in the event that API methods are added in the future. But storing all metadata in a local DB will greatly enhance the site's functionality and speed, especially as it grows to the volume we hope it will.
When this project began, we were hoping Flickr would be the database layer. To a certain extent it still is, but it just doesn't offer the same flexibility as a fairly simple MySQL database. It's still a cool idea, and hopefully Flickr will make some enhancements in the way machine tags are used and queried. With some of the recent chatter about an academic Flickr, hopefully the conversation that will move Flickr in that direction has begun.
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