So, for a while I have been considering why it is so difficult for me to apply adjectives to imagery. I went to the public DARCI more than a week ago (I haven't since--and I only contributed to one image with only one adjective). I was surprised because I found it very difficult for me to think of adjectives. Maybe that sounds a bit crazy, but it did. It took ten minutes to for me to come up with one adjective.
I went to DARCI today, and am still there currently, and had a sort of epiphany.
I was thinking of adjectives in a specific way. There is a difference between describing and interpreting an image. There are descriptive adjectives and interpretive adjectives. The adjectives we use in describing what is visually happening in images is simple, direct, and fairly easy. But to put interpretive adjectives to an image (happy as opposed to bright, or creepy as opposed to dark, etc) takes a lot more. It also seems to me that interpretive labels and adjectives or ideas are based on descriptions of characteristics of what visually happens in an image. To interpret, we process the various descriptive qualities through our own context of experience to find correlations that we can then use to contextualize and interpret the image that has more meaning, more significance, or transcends simply being a re-description of something.
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I had a similar experience teaching DARCI. I sat and sat and thought and thought and when I had finally finished one image nearly 30 minutes had passed. (I feel a lot of pressure to teach her "correctly" as I see it and I think this slows me down. I also get slowed down because it's difficult for me to pinpoint what I interpret the image to mean or feel in words). What I found most interesting about this experience was that when I would finally come up with an adjective, it would mean several things to me. Often these multiple meanings could be expressed through the options provided, but sometimes the nuance wasn't there. Often the associations I had with the adjective were missing.
ReplyDeleteIt made me think: does DARCI have these nuances?
I don't think she's there yet and I think much of it is due to what Joe and Jared were expressing in class about the word "wet." I was teaching DARCI what warm meant, but I couldn't convey all of the feeling and nuance in this word because the options were there and this because the experience wasn't there.
How do you create experience to provide associations artificially? I feel like so much of what we feel is because of context and history. DARCI simply doesn't have this to draw from.
First of all thanks for taking the training of DARCI seriously. Bryan, I think you are right. I like the two adjective types you came up with. I think we want people to teach DARCI both kinds of adjectives; but, the descriptive ones are easier to come up with and DARCI will probably be able to learn them much quicker since they are based on more objective measures. So don’t stress too much about nailing interpretive adjectives.
ReplyDeletePaige, keep in mind that those multiple meanings that we provide are not perfect. They do not contain a lot of the nuances that people associate with the given words. The words come from a database created by academics trying to be as objective as possible. I think DARCI will be able to learn nuances by the discovering how images are associated with various words. To humanize her, DARCI’s experiences, which color the meaning of individual words, are images themselves. With that in mind, don’t worry too much about whether or not a particular word has the exact meaning you are looking for in the provided description. Ideally, DARCI will gradually pick up on visual cues that reflect the meaning you intend.
I want to use verbs. As an artist I use verbs. As a story teller I use verbs. etc.
ReplyDelete