Structures of Image Collections

Citation

Enser, P. (2008), "Structures of Image Collections", New Library World, Vol. 109 No. 11/12, pp. 592-593. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800810921412

In the publisher's view “(t)his is an essential book for anyone who cognitively engages with collections of images either vocationally or avocationally”. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is a view unlikely to be shared by those two communities, either of which would search in vain for the disciplines upon which the book's claim to present “an interdisciplinary approach to the principles, practices and belief systems underlying categorization and image management” would need to rest. In place of a rigorous engagement with such disciplines the reader encounters a series of diminutive chapters which present a superficial introduction to some of the concepts and terminology associated with perception, cognition, knowledge organization and cultural informatics.

The work as a whole leaves this reviewer at a loss to know who would find its contents useful. Certainly not, I suggest, those with a commercial or curatorial imperative to provide access to collections of visual assets: there is little in this book beyond a lament about the well‐understood difficulty of characterising the semantic content of images through the medium of words. Likewise, the research communities in computer science and computer vision will search in vain for any significant insights or unifying principles, their recent engagement with automatic text labeling, as a means of mitigating the constraints of content‐based image retrieval, having been ignored by the authors.

Comprehension of the concept of “collection”, moreover, poses such a minor intellectual challenge that the general reader might be forgiven for treating with mildly amused skepticism the authors' grandiose aspiration to “push the boundaries of understanding the concept of ‘collection’” (p. 5), and their attempts to coat such elementary material with a veneer of scientific gravitas, as in “images act to induce humans to emit pheromones of meaning” (p. 79).

The opportunity has been missed for this book to be a useful vehicle by which the evolution in the principles and practice of image collection management could be explored through the medium of some leading physical and virtual collections. However, the authors do offer some interesting observations on the recent phenomenon of cooperative, or social indexing. Unfortunately, their final musings on “groupthink”, “deindividuation” and “desensitivity” appear to eschew the liberation of access points wrought by collaborative indexing in favour of some undefined paradigm by which “…the image itself is able to supply avenues of communication” (pp. 141‐2). Having previously observed that “meaning does not reside in the image. It resides in the beholder.” (p. 139), however, the authors appear to have fallen into a logic trap which detracts from their contribution to the social indexing phenomenon.

Sadly, the quality of exposition does not come to the rescue of this work, moreover. The style of writing is dominated by a contrived informality, and the failure to observe the usual rules of citation and bibliography removes the work from the scholarly domain. Not, I fear, a landmark contribution to the literature of the field.