Category: Technology/2.0

ChatGPT4 to catalogue sociopolitical stickers?

I took a workshop yesterday at SLU where I work on generative AI and dove deep down the rabbit hole. I had gone into the workshop as a casual user of an early version of ChatGPT but came away really impressed with some possibilities for cataloguing sociopolitical stickers in the Street Art Graphics digital image collection. In the workshop, I used the library’s ChatGPT4 version to do a few test runs on stickers and other artworks in the SLU image collections, and here is what I learned. Prompt: I am a university professor. Describe the contents and meaning of this…

Summer 2015 Sticker Quadrathlon!

It’s been an incredibly busy summer creating traveling exhibitions and building a new digital archive, a new Web site, and a new Street Art course. Here is the syllabus for the course. St. Lawrence University Street Art Graphics! AAH 3014 SYLLABUS – Fall 2015 Course Overview In this 200-level studio course, students will work individually and in groups to create street art in the form of wheatpastes, stickers, stencils, silkscreens, and a final project that will be placed in a public venue in Potsdam or Canton. A social media component is also included to meet other street artists, see their…

New course proposal for “Street Art Graphics” digital archive project

The pegatinas writing assignment with Marina Llorente and the Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive project with John Collins have both gone so well that I’ve decided to develop a new course proposal that would offer students the opportunity to conduct research and write about street art stickers and ephemera related to street culture for the Street Art Graphics digital archive. One of the biggest game changers for the archive is that I’m trying to convince SLU to convert from ContentDM to Artstor Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloguing and image management software system that would provide several improvements. In addition…

Pegatinas writing assignment – featured SLU student research – Jamie Abraham ‘15

The fall 2013 pegatinas final writing writing assignment for Dr. Marina Llorente’s ESP 439 seminar Literatura, cine y cultura en la España contemporànea went really well. Having the students first annotate the images made a big difference. Students were also given the chance to submit preliminary drafts of their work to get feedback on their writing. The students who annotated images, conducted additional research, and revised their writing subsequently aced the assignment. During the upcoming week, I am going to post examples from several students to be able to show others this process of writing about stickers. Today’s featured student…

Pegatinas Writing Assignment Part One: Annotating Images for Digital Archive

For the upcoming assignment at St. Lawrence University to have Marina Llorente’s students analyze political stickers from Spain, I decided to split the project into two parts. Part One will ask students to annotate the images, and Part Two will ask students to use the annotations to write about what the stickers mean (i.e., what are the larger issues that the stickers point to?). I’m doing it this way now because the last time we offered the assignment, students did well contextualizing the stickers but sometimes forgot to describe all of the textual and visual elements of the stickers. Those…

Marina Llorente – Fall 2014 Spanish writing assignment

SLU professor Marina Llorente will be having her students analyze stickers from Spain again this semester for her course Español 439: Literatura, cine y cultura de masas en la España contemporánea. She gave this assignment in the fall of 2012 (see previous posts on Catalonia stickers from 1970s-80s and stickers from Madrid, summer 2012, Solicitud de pegatinas españolas / Request for Spanish stickers, and New stickers from Spain for digital archive and writing assignment), and the students enjoyed it quite a bit. I’ve spent the last couple of months making a concerted effort to expand my Spanish sticker collection for this…

New stickers from Spain for digital archive and writing assignment

I haven’t had much time to post on Stickerkitty lately, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping busy with other things. I heard recently from SLU professor of modern languages, Marina Llorenta, that she’d like to repeat the assignment we created in 2012 to have her students conduct research on political stickers from Spain for her course on “Literature, Film, and Popular Culture in Contemporary Spain,” a project that later turned into an SLU art gallery exhibition called Pegatinas Políticas, which you can read about here. To prepare for the upcoming assignment this fall 2014 semester, I have been…

Arab Spring stickers

This semester, I asked one of my students, Rebecca Clayman ’17, to do research and write descriptions for a series of four Egyptian stickers from the Arab Spring protests for the Street Art Graphics digital archive (scroll down and click on “Egypt”). Since neither of us reads or speaks Arabic, Rebecca interviewed Gisele El Khoury, the director of St. Lawrence University’s Language Resource Center and Arabic professor. Dating from the beginning of the uprisings in 2011, the stickers are in bright bold colors: blue (“electoral process”), purple (“freedom”), green (“democracy”), and red (“social justice”). Gisele provided the Arabic script and…

Stickerkitty Can Haz Metadata

I am learning how to use ContentDM (CDM), the digital image management software that the SLU gallery uses to catalogue its internal permanent collection database and other published collections.  It’s a program that’s geared more toward library special collections and historical societies, and so it’s not that great in terms of presenting large works of art on a monitor or wall screen.  (By contrast, the gallery’s Canadian Inuit art collection is presented in Drupal; the images appear almost full screen and are much clearer.)  What’s cool about learning CDM, however, is that I can now add misc. stickers here and…