SUMMARY OF QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSES IN VISUAL & MEDIA STUDIES

See new section of "Miscellaneous Responses"

Please also look at the complete set of questionnaire responses (viewable by field and by name) . You can also see the original questionnaire, "Working With Materials."

Sixty-three individuals responded to the NINCH questionnaire in the category of Visual & Media Studies. Many of the respondents selected multiple classifications for themselves from the following categories:

Architect (1)

Artist (5)

Computer Scientist/Information Technologist (7)

Curator (12)

Journal Editor/Publisher (1)

Librarian/Archivist (18)

Program Manager/Administrator (1)

Scholar (35)

Public Humanist (8)

Teacher (30)

Twenty-four of the sixty-three individuals identified themselves as both scholar and teacher. Fifteen individuals identified themselves with three or more of the specified categories.

Other: Doctoral student in education; visual resource librarian; digital collections developer; and multimedia producer.

Despite the diversity of positions held, the group needs were not divided clearly along these classifications. Identified needs can be grouped in the following headings: 1. Collections; 2. Tools; 3. Uses, Publication, & Delivery; 4. Support.

Collections

First and foremost, respondents articulated the need for more online images and texts. Although most clearly prefer access to original materials, all recognize the necessity of high-quality (in color and resolution) reproductions. Access to a wide range of visual material for scholarship and teaching, along with complete and in-depth data with clear documentation, is essential. Copyright issues are paramount; and there is agreement that collaboration to secure fair and legal use is desirable. Such collaboration can be facilitated by establishing authoritative standards for sharing images and catalogues. An alternative solution is to develop a meta-data common database (a common catalogue of art/visual objects) that will serve the needs of a diverse group of users, including flexible, “at will” accessibility in situations like the classroom. Online texts and images would ideally be available to individuals and groups beyond “subscriber” boundaries.

Tools

Hand in hand with making greater numbers of images and texts available online is the need for reliable interfaces and increased searching capabilities. Searching tools must work across all formats and all collections. Knowing what exists where, what it comprises, and how to locate the desired information—visual and textual—is an important part of searching. In addition, tools are needed for browsing and serendipitous discovery, not just searching for known objects. New search categories also need to be developed, including object appearance and sounds. Increased access to information increases expectations, and will increase the need for more flexible discipline vocabulary and language approaches. As the information age opens new vistas there is additional need for ways to identify authoritative materials with reliable documentation. Finally, the respondents expressed a need to work with a combination of originals and surrogates.

Uses, Publication, & Delivery

Copyright issues were an often-repeated concern, but the field committee felt that copyright was such a complex subject that entire conferences could organized (and have been organized) to address the myriad unresolved issues and problems. Almost all respondents expressed a desire for more clarity with regard to copyright (especially educational copyright), the need for some central clearinghouse or checkpoint, and more widely acknowledged standards of fair use.

Other diverse expressed needs include high-quality peer-review for online publications; increased bandwidth and more sophisticated hardware enabling better environments for multimedia consultation and presentations; and increased opportunities for educational uses of virtual experience (e.g., virtual travel through an architectural site).

Support

More time and money find their way to the top of everyone's list of needs. Increased funds for training non-tech scholars to master technology are widely desired. Time-savers listed by respondents include tools for collaborative research and scholarship, more interdisciplinary collaborative courses, and more collaboration across institutions and departments. Supportive institutional policies and procedures are also important and will probably require a change in institutional attitudes toward increasing technological training and purchases and toward valuing scholarly contributions in electronic formats and environments.

Collections

1. More texts and images online
2. Need authoritative standards for sharing images, catalogues
3. Collaboration among and within institutions, including copyright
4. Preservation of original materials becoming compromised by material disintegration
5. "Reachabilty" of materials and access to primary sources
6. Art historians need to compare images online
7. Allow access across distance
8. Need access to a wide range of visual material for scholarship and teaching
9. Complete and in-depth data, clear documentation
10. Suppliers and cataloguers need meta-data common database
11. Dichotomy of perspectives, scholars/librarians and cataloguers
12. Need faithful (true color, high-resolution) reproductions—with high-resolution zooming capability
13. Common catalogue of art objects based on standards

Tools

1. Reliable interfaces
2. Searching tools: across formats, across collections
3. Art history needs documentary evidence, "searchability"
4. Finding materials by range, images, sounds, library catalogues
5. Cracking the archives—knowing what exists where, what it comprises, how to get at what's essential
6. Tech programmers, visual analysis
7. Image content and appearance searching tools
8. Support for discipline vocabulary and language approaches
9. Tools for browsing and serendipitous discovery, not just searching for objects known
10. Ways to identify authoritative materials
11. Access to materials in a variety of formats
12. Need to work with a combination of originals and surrogates

Uses, Publication, Delivery

1. Better copyright resolution, central check, easier permission—fair use
2. Better peer-review for online publications
3. More memory, better environment for multimedia consultation
4. Bandwidth issues for multimedia and delivery of moving images
5. Better information access for independent scholars
6. Support dynamic teaching of process—real time access
7. Images “at will” in classroom activities, museums
8. Audiences: broader (expanded) access
9. Virtual experiences for students (e.g., travel architectural site)

Support

1. Help, training, and time for non-tech scholars to master technology
2. Change in institutional attitudes—legal values, recognition
3. Time—teaching prep and slides, publication and images
4. Supportive institutional policies and procedures
5. Resources (money) for museums to carry out projects
6. Funding resources
7. More collaboration across institutions and departments
8. Tools for collaborative research and scholarship
9. More interdisciplinary collaborative courses

Catherine Hays & Sally Promey

Miscellaneous QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSES IN VISUAL & MEDIA STUDIES

1. DEFINITION

• 35mm slides, film, photographs, movie posters
• primary sources from film & music to texts archival materials held by museums, research institutes, libraries, and other repositories, as well as private collections (often the families of artists, dealers, and collectors)
• secondary sources and reference volumes and scholarly journals.
• Historical archives, drawing collections, nineteenth-century newspapers on microfilm, insurance maps, paintings and sculpture, Library of Congress American Memory collections, slides, digital images, film, searchable humanities indexes.
• still images of museum objects, sites and engravings. We are beginning to use QTVR and are focused on exploring things like VRML.
• Architectural drawings (construction drawings, architects' sketches, surveys of existing conditions); construction records (estimates, specifications, logs, minutes, receipts); technical data contemporary to the period of study (scientific and engineering journals, patents, trade literature and advertisements, technical monographs); historic structures reports and HABS/HAER documentation; contemporary photographs and other images; corollary social commentary.
• Primarily materials in machine-readable form. Digital images, records in digital form, Finding Aids, etc.
• Accessioned photographic prints; 35mm and 16mm motion pictures; audio tapes; digital facsimiles of the above; digital full-text articles and bibliographic information; collections management data; video disc analog images accessed via collections database; conservation records and other items of museum management and practice too numerous to list here.
• period materials. These range from old professional journals to old architectural drawings, and include municipal records, published city directories, manuscript letters and organizational minutes, business records, old photos and other graphics.
• Internet, Photoshop, flatbed scanner, PowerPoint, DVD, videotape, laserdisc, SPSS statistical program -- I use these materials to create lectures for classroom presentation and for research purposes
• I mainly use digital resources, often those that have no direct corrollary in the physical world (such as net.art or online art resources which are themselves the focus of my teaching)
• Web sites; listservs and mailing lists; online environments such as MUDs, MOOs, chatrooms, and ActiveWorlds; and email.
• I'd suggest that it's not practical to separate scholarly tools from the materials under scholary scrutiny.

2. LOCATION

• As an architect, the place I work in makes a great deal of difference to me. The quality of these spaces varies a great deal from windowless tombs to wonderful light-filled volumes such as the reading room at the library of congress.
• I use reference librarians as much as possible
• The majority of my archival research collections I find in libraries
• I try to use materials that are available in electronic form and that are generally available. I avoid where possible using materials squirrelled away in very expensive databases.
• travel to libraries and archives. Welcome online catalogs of collections
• Visual Resources Collection- my own personal photographic archive
• Major obstacles are the physical locations of me, my notes, my computer, and the books. Often I am lacking one or two of these and the work is impeded.
• I find the materials through travel and visiting a wide range of collections as well as through catalogue and bibliography searches of various kinds (electronic and otherwise).
• Archivists, curators, librarians, and other scholars frequently facilitate access to and/or provide information about the specific subjects or items for which I am searching.
• ample opportunity to re-engage, re-examine, and/or re-read.
• catalogues raisonnes, databases, Web sites, andthrough museum and scholarly publications. The most comprehensive sources for my purposes to date remain the analog sources, i.e., publications.
• online communities
• As for discourses, I merely keep my eyes open.
• I prefer a dynamic environment where these resources keep shifting to a static one.
• The materials I use may come from libraries, museums, archives, commercial image vendors, personal collections, internet web sites, architectural firms, or art galleries.
• Ideal circumstances for me are a laptop and a T1 connection or better.
• institutional library resources: books, periodicals, institutional slide collection; my work space is within the institution's library facility
• The ideal work environment would allow flexibility to shift among the various information resources, of different physical and organizational types, that I use:...

3. ORIGINAL

• rely heavily on range of surrogate formats (to film)
• "Original" just means the first instance of a work or resource.
• I usually do not need originals.
• We use the term "original" to refer to accessioned collection objects.
• Much of the material I work with is generated electronically, so "copies" are identical to the "original".
• As long as there is a good reproduction at hand, "originality" does not play a role in my research.
• most of what I use are surrogates -- digital copies of something that exists in tangible form.
• you have to actually see, hold, touch the original art. But I also need some form of visual print (xerox, drawing, polaroid) so that I can remember it 6 months later.
• I would want to see the orginal in any kind of serious research that I accomplish, but the original surrogate is a close second and functional substitute for long term visual analysis.
• In most cases, legibility precludes the need to spend much if any time with an original, even with most graphic items. Architectural drawings from a developmental stage in a design, however, will often contain emendations, erasures, and other marks that help the researcher trace a designer's thought processes.
• At varying times, multiple sorts of objects constitute "originals."
• I find myself considering the great majority of cyberspace as original.
• We distinguish between archival originals that exist in one copy, and books and periodicals, which although published in numerous copies, are the originals from which we make slides.

4. INTERROGATION

• Situating my work in the context of earlier work is by identifying the limitations of my predecessors' work and defining how I would like to go further; vis-a-vis work from other fields, this I do currently by involving consultants from those fields to offer input on issues related to but different from those I define.
• Situational context: most of the sources I have consulted have been previously ploughed by researches in limited or specialized fields (architectural history, history of technology, sociology); what value I add must come from crossing the field boundaries.
• My work is often bouncing off other work (particularly misassumptions in Western art history), misinterpretations by other scholars. I read more from outside my field (anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism) than within it.
• The demand for searchable image archives delivered by increasingly accessible information networks will likely frustrate museums with significant photographic collections unless these institutions are able to support users beyond their traditional constituents.
• Who, what, where, when, why, and how? I like to ask what an image can tell a viewer about itself upon close inspection and how might more information be obtained.
• Assumptions and bias: I try to make them explicit, or at least subject to discussion.
• As a librarian I ask innumerable types of questions, most initiated by others.
• As a historian, I ask the widest range of questions that I can imagine in order to situate objects most convincingly in historical and cultural contexts.
• Since I'm sometimes not certain what I'm looking for until after I've looked for some time, serendipity plays a large role in my research—thus the ability to browse among resources is critical.
• My work (both art and teaching) is often about questioning the ways in which (technology) alters or reveals our perceptions or thinking about a non-technological resource (whether that be human experience or museum artifacts).
• explore how and to what degree on online environment promotes a diverse and creative set of ideas and participants.
• our interrogation is often about how our faculty plan to use materials in the future.
• I also try to make clear that although some of the methods applied in my research are considered to be `hard science' or `hight-tech', the results of these examinations still need to be interpreted by the researcher, and that several more or less subjective moments can be identified in this process.
• A basic goal of my public outreach material, or my teaching materials is to place the raw materials of intellectual properties in the hands of students so they can see how scholars go about interpreting documents and objects from the past
• "Who is the audience and what do I want them (or what does the instructor) want them to learn from these materials?" And then, "How can I best utilize these materials to achieve this goal?"
• Look beyond the discipline or art world discourses to discern its relationship to social and intellectual history.

5. EVALUATION

• In terms of my research, a vast majority of my work concerns originals; in terms of my teaching, only a very small percentage does.
• The primary source sets the tone and agenda of my investigation, but once that is done, secondary sources become extremely important.
• I am particularly focused on rights: I look for high quality of visual materials that can then be published broadly in electronic form.
• Secondary sources are a roadmap to the primary sources, which are what you have to rely upon. I value most highly the sources as lenses through which to see another world, another view, another era. To place one above another is like being asked to pick favorites among one's children. My work is driven by primary sources.
• It is very difficult to distinguish between "primary" and "secondary" sources in my work. Since a great deal of what I do is a kind of anthropology or sociology every source can be thought of as primary in one context or another.
• Most highly valued among primary sources is their unmediated quality.
• In research, I value archival or other primary documentation, though I supplement this with secondary sources. For teaching, I value high quality visual materials (still and moving images, graphics, tables, etc.) that clearly illustrate a concept or practice.
• With respect to databases for use in research and teaching, I strongly prefer those with the least "architecture" of their own; less "canned" is definitely better!
• Like Emerson, I am a walking eyeball, and I point-and-click my way through the electronic ether.
• In monographic and periodical publications, I value thorough documentation.
• Documentary resources are most valuable if they make descriptive (non-rhetorical) statements of the disposition of activities and objects of the past.
• Interpretive writing is valuable because it imaginatively brings the documentary and physical evidence of the past into a convincing social context.
• On the balance between primary and secondary sources: this is another distinction that seems increasingly shop-worn to me.

6. CONSTRUCTION & RE-CONSTRUCTION

• At present, the fruits of my research is being placed online, where it can be evaluated by others and whose feedback I invite.
• By building a visual resource collection, we are in effect constructing a secondary resource by gathering surrogates of the visual world and constructing a means of access to its content.
• I wouldn't say I reconstruct material very often, but depending on my research, I often recover primary sources that are not otherwise known to scholars
• I use links to connect materials. We are studying Web access logs to understand usage.
• I value the ability to triangulate with multiple sources that document different aspects of one subject. Interpolation is usually more credible than extrapolation..
• Because I work so strongly with primary materials - I am heavy on construction, but I believe that there are multiple ways to "correctly" construct/reconstruct a whole out of the the singular part. In other words, there is no one answer.
• With respect to my own practice, I believe that a strategy that incorporates constant questioning of assumptions and of varieties of evidence, as well as a strong sense of the and "messiness" of lived experience, is likely to get me closer to historically responsible interpretations.
• Digital imaging is a major resource in this process, since we can now digitize and superimpose in separate layers the different technical images with a quality image of the painting, allowing for much more precize comparison.
• presenting a variety of materials in a logical framework for research purposes.
• "Rigor" is established by the accuracy and completeness of the evidence provided for the argument put forward. Results are evaluated by so-called "peer review", which does not function very well; too often partisanship or self-censorship, because of the structure of the system, get in the way of regular, thorough and honest evaluations of publications and research.

7. COLLABORATION

• As a librarian, most of my work is collaborative, as a scholar, most is not
• I look forward to a different kind of collaborative research where the contingencies do not always flow to a single thesis, which seems a very artificial aspect of linear writing when compared to the multivalence of reality.
• I find collaboration in historical research difficult. Ironically, perhaps, I often try to get my students to collaborate
• Collaboration enables people to bring rich resources together for the benefit of a much larger group.
• I greatly value examining the material of my field through the lens of a different perspective; different research issues come into play; different methodological approaches are brought to the fore.
• In terms of obstacles, we have both had to learn the limitations of the other's discipline and finding a common understanding and goal.
• Most of the materials I share with my colleagues are available online, so it is quite easy to share them.
• Biggest obstacles to collaboration are copyright laws that inhibit sharing of materials across institutional boundaries.
• Collaboration works when it gives you ideas you didn't have before. It doesn't work when differing focus and intent collide or when time constraints for individuals don't match.
• the greatest obstacles to collaboration are people's reluctance to change the old ways of working
• I have co-authored books, and whatever their shortcomings I can honestly say that they are better books than they would have been if only one of the authors had written them.
• Do not collaborate.
• Working alone is advantageous for its economy and flexibility. Collaborating is benefical for the ideas that come out of conversations and shared writing.
• I do a great deal of team-teaching. I have found that team-teaching creates a larger context in which my own pedagogy can take on "added value."
• There are many technical barriers to collaboration -- the lack of a good XML authoring environment, for example, is a big problem.
• I would suggest the development of clearing houses or partnerships, wherein the independent scholars could supply topics of mutual interest to institutions with established internships, that could in turn provide the people.
• I am very much interested in the ways that one can integrate images into a variety of fields.
• I collaborate with people of the culture I interview, local scholars etc. I find it easier to write alone.
• I would like to see more collaboration between institutions for data collecting - images from early travelers accounts for example, shared across a range of institutions - along with occasional symposia bringing together teachers and students from the institutions working on similar topics.
• With respect to my teaching, and over the last several years, I have particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work in collaboration with educational technologists and librarians on subjects of mutual concern and commitment.

8. TEACHING, PUBLICATION, PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AND OTHER FORMS OF

DISSEMINATION

• My research process remains the same regardless; what differs is the manner in which information is presented.
• Audiences find my publications through database searches, I assume.
• My ideas and my expertise I disseminate primarily through the listservs of my professional organizations, which serve a global community.
• Our work has been disseminated as campus wide image databases.
• As a teacher my most immediate audience are the students who enroll in my classes. Beyond this however, I try to make the materials of my classroom instruction available broadly through web-based resources ...
• The improvement of scholarly publication models is one of our primary research agendas here. Basically, we need to design documents that have scholarly rigor but that are intellectually accessible. ... The way to make p rogress is by actually producing things.
• While I have been successful in getting general feedback on the materials published in the journal, I have not yet been able to establish the kind of ongoing discussions that I think would be useful to readers.
• university publications, journal, conferences
• The web may help academic publishing, but there is also alot of junk out there.
• Research and dissemination are intimately tied.
• I think that the entire world centered around research, publication, service and teaching is in the process of a vast restructuring due to the Internet.
• Books, articles, book reviews, exhibitions and exhibition catalogues, scholarly and public conferences and symposia, teaching, syllabi (almost always in conventional rather than electronic media of publication).
• Lately my work has been focussing more on Web dissemination. Better peer review, both in the print and electronic academic publishing worlds would help a great deal.
• One big gain for the museum and art professions would be the *real* recognition of online publishing as professional work.
• The older monograph form is passing away and the newer short essay is increasingly important.
• I do not regularly try to manipulate the public dissemination for age specific audiences.
• Teaching and research precedes dissemination at a popular level

9. OVERALL

• My greatest need is time. My days are often filled with paperwork, committeework
• my greatest frustration is the scarcity of well-documented digital resources
• weakest link is true collaborative work among "competing" institutions, and the need to forge ongoing ties between traditionally separate colleges - i.e. Arts and Sciences vs. Engineering/Computer Science
• I and my colleages at many other institutions are redundantly cataloging similar material and/or are simultaneously making digitized images of the same object seems like a tremendous waste of effort and resources.
• NEEDS: more time, technological support, consistent funding, staff.
• FRUSTRATIONS: uncooperative and paranoid academics, egocentrism, not enough time, and lack of acknowledgement, bad communication.
• more collections descriptions at an itemized level
• I would like to copy, cheaply, all primary material for my reference use.
• The greatest frustration in research is finding the data one needs.
• I think some of the biggest problems are in the area of copyright. It is difficult and expensive to get illustrations for my books and articles, and I have trouble putting together readins for my classes.
• the traditional boundaries between disciplines are stifling. I work squarely in between two fields, history of science and architectural history.
• A greater degree of useful access to the world's visual resources without the barriers of constraints such as licensing, etc. would be a utopian cornucopia.
• Funding from some sources, e.g., the national endowments and other major foundations, might be more forthcoming if the preservation value of digitization could be demonstrated. But professionals in the field of preservation–properly conservative, we believe–are not yet prepared to state that digital copies have the same status for preservation as, say, microfilms. This is a policy problem that requires a technological solution: how can archives guarantee the persistence or longevity of content in digital form?
• finding the best way to provide broad to content in the humanities without injuring the rights of creators and producers, i.e., those who hold the copyrights or other rights in the materials.
• there is the question of the "new literature," humanities-relevant content being created today in digital form
• more time and more money to do research, espeically in a non-science area.
• Finding material that self-identifies (so I know iteratively where it came from).
• Museum to museum, museum to university, and (appropriate) museum to corporation collaborations seem to me to be the kind of objectives that will be useful in the fluid universe of eternally modified standards and technologies.
• I wish that searching functionalities were ... and that there were more full-text resources available as well as more art images accompanied by high-quality, valid data.
• I am concerned about preservation (and "readability") over time with respect to new media and rapidly changing technologies.
• I would like to see image quality continue to improve for digital images.
• In the classroom, I would like to be able to quickly call up individual images from a wide range of possibilities and in an order determined by the needs of the particular teaching "moment" rather than on the basis of pre-loaded slide carousels.
• Copyright is also frustrating. The archival original and the monograph seem to rule the library budgets. Few institutions recognize the value of surrogate images, so grants are hard to come by.
• I would like to see more middleware technology available in an "off the shelf" version, requiring less complicated local programming. This would enable more standardization in the delivery of databases of material over the web. But the tools are probably not that universal yet.
• Copyright and the shrinking public domain obviously are huge obstacles to research and publication in the arts.
• many image-based electronic resources and data bases (e.g. the AMICO project) require a completely different approach to institutional thinking regarding both access and use.

Other Field Questionnaire Summaries:

History | Interdisciplinary Studies | Language and Literature | Performing Arts | Visual and Media Studies