Digital Image Interview Series
Hank Glassman, Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies, Haverford College

Hank Glassman teaches Buddhism, Religion and Gender, East Asian Religions, Japanese Literature, Language, and History. Images have become increasingly important in his teaching on Japanese language, history, and culture and in his research on Japanese religions in the medieval period. He constantly struggles with how best to display images in his classes and how to help students engage them as texts.
 

Academic Commons: Tell me a little about your ambitions for using digital images and what the transition has been like.
Glassman: First, I've been at Haverford for six years and I have to say that for three of those years it was very much a struggle to bring digital images into the classroom. I was very dissatisfied with the options--software, hardware and support; it was very difficult to get material scanned at the resolutions I requested and there was a real absence of a support system or of specialists able to manage digital images. But then everything changed and now I cannot complain. First we had MDID and now we're moving to ARTstor and we have a terrific level of support. I'm very pleased by the direction everything is going.

Also, two years ago I got a grant to launch an image database on Japanese culture. However, getting images into the database, worrying about what the resolution should be, figuring out what it should look like--it was a lot of work, it was slow and I sometimes got conflicting advice. But again, things have now fallen into place. I don't need to worry about what the resolution of an image should be, or what the database will look like. Now I can just hand the library a book and a sheet with the metadata and it's ready for me to use. So it has been quite a transition.

What happened to make things go smoothly?
I think a number of things came together. One was that more faculty were using digital images and some were persistent about the need for better support. Second, there was some staff turnover in IT. And then the library created a new position and hired Norm Medeiros as Coordinator for Bibliographic & Digital Services. He and James Gulick, a reference librarian, both became very involved in working with digital images. They worked with photographer Willie Williams in the Fine Arts department digitizing images for a course as a pilot, using MDID. So if I had any questions or needed a few images digitized, I had people I could trust who would help me. After a while we then moved to ARTstor. I think the new Offline Image Viewer (OIV) really helped bring a lot of people into ARTstor as it seems much more flexible than the earlier system. I'm very happy with it.

How is ARTstor helping?
In many ways it was the organizational database and the OIV that helped me. In the past, I had my images, with pretty good metadata for most of them, but no organizational system. The ability to add your own images and images scanned from books into your own collection that you can then combine with ARTstor was just what I needed. It will still take a while to get most of my images (mostly in iPhoto) into my ARTstor library, but I now have a reliable system.

Do you feel as if you were ahead of the curve?
Yes. I know that many art historians are quite conservative about going digital. Because they have their slides, they're using their slides, and they knew better than I did that trying to go digital would be a huge time-sink. In retrospect, if I'd been patient and waited a few years it would have been much easier to just jump in now instead of trying to kickstart it. I'm glad I did it, but I think it's going to get easier from here on.

How are the images working in the classroom?
What I'm realizing, after using digital images for a fairly short time, is that I have very mixed feelings about using them just to give texture to what we're talking about--and that's largely what I have been doing. Now I want students to take images seriously, the way they take texts seriously; I don't want them to be wallpaper, decoration or just a supplement.

Last year I assigned them as "texts" and let the students take their own course about how they would write about them. I was very happy with the results. They reacted to them in different ways: they wrote poems, one created a game--but I was still unhappy with my own training in the pedagogy of teaching images. I come from a religious studies background, not one in art history, so I don't have much experience in teaching images. What I realized when I was showing them the images and asking them to write about them was that, now that I feel satisfied about how we're projecting images in the classroom, the next step for me is to devise ways to get students to look at the images well and take them seriously. But as far as the display of images, it went very well.

How did you show images in the past?
I've used slides (though never at Haverford), perhaps between 5 and 15 per class. But I've only shown digital images at Haverford, either scanned from my slides or downloaded from the Web--although the quality has been very varied.

Why did you shift from slides?
The main impetus was to be able show images where there were no slide projectors, for example to show images at academic conferences. These days it seems more people are able to display images from computers than have access to slide projectors.

So there was a compellingly practical reason?
Yes. But then after using digital for a while, I realized some of the other benefits, especially being able to zoom in, which proved very rewarding with some of the complex images I work with. You can either simply zoom in, using MDID or ARTstor, or take sections from a large TIFF file and make separate images from each of them--something you can't do with a slide projector.

Could you talk a little about the kinds of images you show? What are some of the complex ones where zooming really gets a chance to shine?
Certainly the Japanese shrine mandalas and pilgrimage maps, especially the Kumano mandalas, maybe see http://www.city.sado.niigata.jp/sadobunka/denbun/bunkazai/sado_city/yuukei/arts_craft1/city_no020_p.htm or http://www.univie.ac.at/rel_jap/bilder3/kumano_sankei_mandara.jpg or http://www.lit.sugiyama-u.ac.jp/miyakawa/kumano/tenwould.JPG which often include simultaneous representations of many scenes. There are a lot of details and you need a very high resolution image with zooming capability to show exactly what is depicted.

But now you are able to show that detail?
Yes, the technology is there for me now and it's time to find a way to express to students what I want them to do with images; how to write about them; what I want them to see in images; how I want them to use images vis-à-vis other materials we're using in class. In my own research, I tend to go rather deeply into images, but in class I've not had so much success yet. And until now they've tended to be: "Here are some pictures of the Korean Mission to Japan." It's not useless, but it reinforces students' bias against images - that they not be taken as seriously as texts; that images are not able to convey as much as text.

What's the next step?
I think one of the next steps is in getting them to be able to construct an argument out of images, using images as evidence. Some students are beginning to do this, but it's something in the future that I'd like to demand of them. I'm not trained to teach this at all. It's going to be a process of what works and what doesn't.

We don't have an art history department here (although students can take art history at Bryn Mawr). But that is not necessarily a disadvantage. In a way with an art history department on campus you might have an "I didn't know this was an art history course" attitude from students. This situation in fact gives us a greater freedom to be using images in different ways without students having expectations about how the images would be used. I like the idea of history and literature professors proceeding with images without the "sanction" of an art history department.

Have you made any strides in this direction over the past year?
Slowly. In my Introduction to Japan course I'm showing students some of the work I do in a conference presentation: modeling the way I work on images. I do have to remember that students are confronting these images and the culture mostly for the very first time, so it will take time.

Tell me a little more about the image database you mentioned earlier that you're building with colleagues. Many of the images will be from books, so will it be essentially a teaching database for the three colleges?
It may be a little different from what we had initially imagined. Once I looked at the cost of student time for scanning and the complexity of it, especially as far as permissions go, I realized this would primarily be a teaching database--mostly drawn from the Bryn Mawr slide library, a Bryn Mawr colleague's photographs of Japanese buildings and cities, a Swarthmore colleague teaching Japanese Literature who has a lot of images from late-19th-century Japan and a Japanese art historian coming to Swarthmore who would also both use and contribute to it.

Part of the idea was that students would go in and use the images, but now it's hard to see how it would work, I've had students write about images but it's clear that the fewer the better--unless you have different versions of an image. They get saturated very quickly and won't be very analytical. Last fall I had a slide show of 15 images on the Lotus Sutra and asked students to write about one image, although they could also choose different vignettes. I can't imagine giving them free rein. But the point is that now they have a collection of images in ARTstor: that was the piece that was missing: a core collection to which I can add.

Have the four of you, who will be the principal users of the image database, had time to get together to talk about teaching methods? It might be quite fruitful given that you're teaching from the same body of material.
No, we haven't yet. It does keep coming up, but it's often on the back-burner. We have an upcoming Faculty Seminar on the illustrated book in medieval Europe, with faculty from English, Music, History and Language. This is both a pedagogical and scholarly opportunity to share with colleagues. But people are of two minds and are eager for time to spend on their scholarly work. There is clearly some institutional pressure to develop pedagogically, but if there is any time left over people are reluctant to use it for something other than their scholarly work. They want to get to their research. However, as I start to think about summer funds for course development I'm thinking of doing something along the lines of word and image.