Digital Image Interview Series
Henry Art, Biology/Environmental Science, Williams College

Henry Art, the Samuel Fessenden Clarke Professor of Biology at Williams College, has been a member of the faculty since 1970. He has taught courses in environmental studies, field botany, ecology and land use planning, through the biology department and the environmental studies program. His research includes long-term ecological studies of the Hopkins Memorial Forest. Innovative use of images has been key to both his teaching and research. In this interview, he is joined by Jonathan Leamon, a member of Williams's Office for Instructional Technology.


Academic Commons: How have you used images in your teaching and how has digital technology come into play?
Art: Images are key to the way I teach. For example, I've been teaching a new course on the natural history of the Berkshires. We've set up a website on the Williams CONTENTdm server with maps, video and images of various physical sites that are used in the course, and we've now made this available to the public: http://drm.williams.edu/nhb. All the material now is digital from the get-go: stills, video and GIS maps. Of course, we used to do it all the old way with slides and carrousels--the pre-PowerPoint days.

How did you work images into your classes?
Generally the slide projector would be on for most of the time and I'd use slides and overheads and move between the two. Frankly, I preferred the slides, in terms of their quality, their luminosity and the overall visual experience. Digital images seem more flat. I did a lot in the past with slide-tape presentations--especially on agricultural eco-systems--and taught a couple of courses that resulted in an analysis of various farms, which we presented on slide-tape.

What's slide-tape?
Two carousel projectors fed into a dissolve control unit. A specialized tape recorder sent both the audio part of the presentation plus a signal to the dissolve unit to shift between the two projectors. So you'd get dissolving of slide to slide to slide and you could time it--so it was kind of an analog equivalent of PowerPoint. One of the big differences though was that the quality of the image that students would be looking at from a projected Kodachrome slide was much better than what you get out of a digital projector where you've scanned the slide, no matter how high the resolution. Today's digital projectors give you something that's much more granular.
 
The quality of digital projectors has been a big issue in this project. Some faculty have been using some very expensive ($50,000-$60,000) units and seem more satisfied.
Well I haven't used one of those yet! The ones we have, the data projectors in most of our classrooms, are quite adequate for showing information. But a great slide that's projected through a slide projector looks so wonderfully alive compared to the flat quality you get with digital, no matter how much you've massaged it in PhotoShop. It's not as rewarding a visual experience. But, let's face it, my teaching is not so much designed to give a great visual experience as it is to impart information. But there's nothing that money can't solve, right?

Do you do both now: slides and digital?
No, I've moved over to digital. In fact, I just spent 3 hours in the studio putting together material for class tomorrow. I find I'm constantly biting the bullet saying, "OK, I'll scan this stuff through and use it in lecture tomorrow." So there are these pulses of activity in which I'll be working a week ahead if I'm lucky. For instance, these are slides taken in the Hopkins Memorial Forest in 1972. We marked a tree with a flag as a camera point and lined it up with a stump to get it centered then I went out on Thursdays--every 3 weeks at 4pm in the afternoon. Then just recently I spent a couple of hours scanning them in, getting them approximately the same size and then 20 minutes or so using iPhoto, Photoshop, iMovie, and Quicktime to set the timing on the slides and to align them. So now we have a year that takes 90 seconds. The point of this set is to show how rapidly spring comes in this part of the forest that the students visited and how the quality of the light changes. (This will soon be available on the Natural History of the Berkshires site).

Here's another collection on the Williams server. The Rosenburg Archives is a collection of around a thousand images of a farm family, caretakers of what is now the Hopkins Memorial Forest. The images date back to the turn of the 20th century. We scanned the photos into an archive and are making some medium resolution copies available to the public on the site. So, you see, I'm now into digital images--just constantly.

You're scanning your own slides as the need comes up?
Yes. I wish I could work way in advance. The College does invite faculty to bring in 20-50 slides at a time for scanning. This helps but I usually don't know what I'll use that far in advance. I've thought about retiring into a cubicle for a few years just to scan them all in. I have thousands of slides and don't know how they will get done. Now I take a digital camera on all the field trips. It's both a blessing and a curse. I just went out yesterday to a site we look at in our natural history course and now I have 50 more images that need numbers and metadata--some of which the camera supplies, some of which I have to supply.

Are you good at cataloging--putting in the metadata?
Well yes and no. I realize the need for providing it. As far as dates and exposures go, the digital camera takes care of those--and that's wonderful. All I have to do is put in location and keywords and all those other things I don't seem to have time to do while I'm doing everything else.

Can iPhoto help with batch cataloging?
Yes, it does. But I've also found iPhoto to be both a blessing and a curse in that I'm now getting messages that I'm running out of space on my computer. So here's one solution: external hard drives. I'm trying to archive in batches on external drives. Now all the images I collected before midsummer are on those drives.

Does the college help here? How much could live on a central server? One of the recurring issues in these interviews is the relation between personal and centralized institutional collections.
The implementation of CONTENTdm was designed to do that. If you look at that collection you can see that there are colleagues in biology and other departments who have simply transferred their whole slide collection there. I've looked at them and the quality is very uneven.

This is something that faculty are doing?
Yes, and it's not clear on the outside why these images are there, though I'm sure they're using them in their teaching. At the moment we don't have any other central repository, so the CONTENTdm server, the "collection of collections," is also serving as an informal repository.

Is there any filter? Can anyone essentially put anything up on the central collection?
[Jonathan Leamon:] Yes. The way we've organized it is as a collection of collections. Each individual faculty member owns their collection and is responsible for it. If they deem it useful, then the Office of Instructional Technology will support it, we'll design metadata schema so information can be retrieved afterwards and we'll help digitize and design an interface--but the faculty member provides images, copyright clearance if necessary, and metadata. We aren't the Library in the sense that we aren't building a collection for the college, we're assisting the faculty in developing their collections.

So it's not an institutional collection but a way for individual faculty to have their collections on a central server. Is there any kind of an institutional collection?
[Jonathan Leamon:] No. The closest we have is the art department slide collection, but that is a departmental collection, not an institutional one. The Archives also has a couple of collections up here. But while the material belongs to Williams, the project is still an Archives project--it's very decentralized.

Is there an awareness of copyright issues?
[Art:] Ownership is a big issue. Who owns the digital images on the Williams Collections Online server--is it the faculty or the College? Do Joan Edwards and David Smith own the Edwards/Smith Image Collection or does the Biology Department? It has not been fully discussed. Who owns the material that I've had put up? 95% of the images I have need to be worked on or processed to some extent and they are on film purchased by Williams (often taken on cameras owned by Williams). The other 5% were purchased by me for commercial work I've done. But who owns the intellectual property rights? Can I copyright them? I know I own the ones I've taken. I wouldn't even think of putting copy slides on the server, because of the copyright issues--and I don't even want to get into that.

If it's only for occasional course use, you would be covered.
Yes. That sort of stuff I put through Blackboard and it's intranet and it's fair use for teaching. But even that bothers me at times: the interpretation of what is fair use and what is not. Somebody else spent some time doing these things and I just flop them onto PowerPoint and put them into the Blackboard site and it's not with complete peace of mind that I do that. Having written a number of books myself, I think, well, if someone did that with my work...I don't know whether I'd feel honored to think they thought my creative works rose to that level or whether I'd feel I was being ripped off. So I'm somewhat ambivalent.

Are you using digital images because they are more efficient?
Well, to a certain extent; it allows you to do things more last-minute, but I'm not sure whether that's good or not. It used to be when you wanted to make a slide you'd have to plan it a week or ten days in advance and things were shipped off to Kodak; then a local shop came in and could do E6 processing overnight; now of course you can scan material minutes before. But there also projects I've been involved in that couldn't have been done without digital technologies.

For example, this summer I worked on a project, "Half a century of land use change in Williamstown" (now 90% complete). We worked with aerial photographs taken from 1935 to 2000 of various neighborhoods around Williamstown and registered them pixel-to-pixel (orthorectified them) and put them through a morphing program so that, when assembled in Quicktime, you can see farm fields turning into trailer parks, or field patterns changing from year to year, or farm fields abandoned and turning back to forest in a way that you couldn't possibly tell by just looking at photographs from 2000. The quality is remarkably good.

Is this available online for the public?
Not yet, but we're working on it. I'd love to stream this on the web with commentary. We produced it with a student working in close collaboration with Instructional Technology and the Faculty Center for Media Technologies (see their other projects at http://www.williams.edu/resources/fcmt/browse_our_projects.html). The motivation is to give people a sense of how much the landscape changes through time: people often assume the landscape has always looked like this. And this is a tool that can dramatize those changes.

What do you see for the future?
Over the past 35 years we have accumulated large amounts of various data on the Hopkins Memorial Forest, ranging from deed history to images, from data on the biological, geological, and meteorological components of the environment to oral histories of people associated with the landscape over the past century. In the next decade I would like to see this vast collection of data transformed into an integrated digital format and made available on the Internet.