Category: Technology/2.0

Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post).  From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays.  Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side.  The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr…

“Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive”

Stickerkitty is collaborating with The Weave: Mediocracy Unspun on a new project entitled Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA).  John Collins, professor of global studies at St. Lawrence University and co-founder of the Weave, and I put together a proposal to create “a new blog and digital archive that will document the creative ways in which ordinary people make use of public space to express themselves” (excerpted from our proposal abstract).  We learned on Monday that our proposal was accepted and will be funded for the first two years by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Crossing Boundaries: Re-Envisioning…

Kreuzberg stickers – tagging geo-tagged images with words

For my new geo-tagging project, I’m trying to come up with a manageable number of consistent subject terms to describe what a sticker is about, i.e., what people in library and information science call creating an authority control or set of keywords (index terms).  One can go a little crazy in this endeavor, because there are so many comprehensive guides to refer to, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Getty Research Institute Art & Architecture Thesaurus, various ARTstor Subject Guides, and plain old common sense.  My goal is to narrow it down to about 20 keywords, and…

Mapping right-wing stickers?

Yesterday while biking along the Rathausstraße, a popular restaurant and shopping area in Alexanderplatz, I came across several anti-Muslim stickers that are too offensive to post on Stickerkitty.  I’ve been debating what to do and how to write about them in a neutral and ethical way.  Posting offensive images can be a dangerous thing, I think, even if I were to simply describe what was going on in the stickers (i.e., what is being represented and/or communicated).  The stickers were out in public and in plain view, but posting them online seems different. I’ll share a little of what could…

Geo-tagging in Berlin #2

Geo-tagging digital photographs is getting easier and more complicated.  My new and evolving work flow goes like this.  Rather than photograph any or every sticker that comes my way (it’s laborious to turn on/off the GPS settings every time, and I come across 100s of stickers a day, anyway), I’m learning to photograph stickers at a particular location and let that group of stickers tell the story.  Yesterday, for example, I was walking along Torstraße in Prenzlauer Berg and came to a corner café with signs that read “BAIZ Bleibt!” (or “BAIZ remains”), a phrase I’d already seen on a…

Geo-tagging in Berlin #1

The geo-tagging on Stickerkitty’s map is coming along slowly.  It takes a little while to set the GPS on the camera, so I need to be careful out in public so as not to draw attention to what I’m doing.  Not that anyone really cares, but I like to keep a low profile.  It’s also taking a long time to load photos onto Flickr, though that might be a slow Internet connection.  The few I’ve loaded so far are showing locations perfectly!  The next thing to do will be to figure out how to tag with words and whether to…

Geo-tagging with Stickerkitty’s Map

I’m developing a geo-tagging component of my sticker project using the newly released Canon SX280 digital point-and-shoot camera with built in GPS.  It’s not a very fancy camera at all, but there was a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning figuring out the GPS settings.  Note: don’t bother with the wi-fi and/or smart phones.  Thanks to Carole at work for figuring out the details!  Today, I finally loaded my first image onto a Flickr map that reads right down to street level.  I.e., Flickr can read the EXIF data (including the GPS coordinates) in an image file and then…

Ho, ho, ho!

As far as I know, there are only two Christmas stickers in my collection, and as to be expected, both are stickin’ it to the Man – the coppers (Berlin 2010) and Wal-Mart et al (NYC 2006).  LOL. The Boycott Christmas sticker might still be available here, though the Web site dates to 2000. I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks creating a new Flickr database called stickerkitty’s collection.  It’s more for use as a back-up than anything else, though now I can show people stickers from anywhere.  All of my 5,000+ sticker image files are stored on one…

Summer 2011

Summer tasks (or accomplishments, depending on how you look at it) Configure new laptop (check) Install InDesign CS4 (check) Deinstall CS4 and install CS5 (ergh) Learn inDesign (in progress) Test Blurb print-on-demand (soon) Import 3,000+ image files into iPhoto on new laptop (in progress) Get admin rights for new laptop in order to download Dropbox (check) Organize image files into an official archive on SLU server (in progress) Scan earliest stickers in black notebook from NYC, 2005-2007 (need to find a student now that Joe Pomainville is gone= NTFAS) Scan stickers in red notebook, 2008-2009 (NTFAS) Put most recent 2010…