Friday, November 3, 2023

Response to an e-mail regarding the changing of bird common names

 

Response to an e-mail regarding the changing of bird common names –

 

Flipping through an older edition of the AOU Checklist of North American Birds, it took me about three minutes to find a dozen scientific name honorifics. Based on that finding rate, I suspect there are at least a couple of hundred from North American birds alone. I have a sneaking suspicion that if one got into the avian taxonomy literature, some of it old and not very accessible, as well as written in German, Russian, etc., and found the original descriptions of those species, then dredged up any reasonable amount of information on the individuals so honored, you’d discover a range of personalities, including scoundrels.

 

Audubon will be an interesting case, given that he is now so famous and the National Audubon Society is so invested in that name. His role as a teacher through his art has been important in very many ways for a very long time. In my view, this struggle with an important figure’s past is always an opportunity to understand history instead of trying to erase it, so we’ll see how the NAS handles it.

 

There are a great many people who are also serious birders, with a significant economic impact involving travel, gear (including photography equipment, much of it high end), clothing, literature, seeds and suet, charitable contributions, etc. Among that crowd are some obsessive life-listers, who hopefully rely on scientific nomenclature instead of common names, even accepted ones. But there will be life list revisions and probably foul language in places, especially from those who are invested in common names, even official common names, e.g., those in the AOU checklist. From my career as an invertebrate zoologist, however, it never seemed anything more than an occasional literature inconvenience when scientific names were changed, synonymized, etc. After all, the tapeworm fans are not nearly as numerous as are serious birders.

 

I also belong to a couple of odonate (dragonflies and damselflies) groups on Facebook. At least some of the contributors to those social media groups are serious photographers, and the vast majority of them use common names that evidently are widely accepted. Some of them also take such striking photographs that I’ve sort of given up any hope of achieving similar results. However, as indicated in another e-mail a while back, one could join those groups then download their photos and end up with a truly nice digital field guide. The fact that odonates are beautiful, common, fly and mate (sometimes dramatically), and are relatively large, make them attractive targets for nature enthusiasts. So the odonate common name lexicon resembles that of the birds, and the odonaters seems to behave about like birders, but I’ve never seen a dragonfly common name based on a person’s name.

 

I’ve never gotten “into” butterflies and moths; I’m semi-sure that the lepidopterists are wondering when the culture police are coming after them and their common names. However, The Butterflies of North America (633 pages), equivalent to the AOU checklist, has no common names for any butterfly species.

 

Now, having said all that, the largest range of personalities is to be found not in the common names, or even in the scientific name honorifics, but in the describers. Sure, Linnaeus is credited with the descriptions of a lot of common North American birds, but once you get into the other groups’ taxonomic literature, you immediately discover a whole lot of names that you know are/were scientists, or at least acted enough like scientists to get an accurate original description published. On a statistical basis alone, I strongly suspect that among all of the humans who have described new species since 1758, regardless of the organisms involved, there are members of every group that for whatever reason might be demonized. Among the ones I know personally, there are a few ornery ones, but none are truly dangerous.

Monday, June 5, 2023

Art in a Time of Digital Wonder

I make no claim to be an expert on this subject, but I did start dating an art major when we were both in college, in 1958, and we eventually got married. A few years later we were both employed at a university, and she was Curator of Education (or an equivalent title, depending on the decade) at the Sheldon Museum of Art. As a result, I ended up in the company of artists and art historians, listening to them talk not only about their work but also about art in general. Throughout our careers, my wife’s in the arts and mine as a biological scientist, most of our social contacts were in the art community rather than the relatively boring and semi-toxic biologist community. So, my comments about the current issue of content aware fill and other digital photography wonders are derived mainly from those decades of listening to artists and art historians address the same questions that pre-Photoshop photographers were probably asking about darkroom jockeys and post-Photoshop photographers are now (or still) asking, the main one being “is it art?”

Humans make art, period. There was a time when the cultural world was asking whether photography was an art form, and that question got answered in the affirmative, mainly by market forces that eventually forced us to consider content and intellectual/emotional impact of photgraphs in addition to their value as investments. However, in my view, all humans are artists, writers, and musicians, period, and every time they press a shutter on a camera, draw a picture, write a letter, or play an instrument, they are indeed playing this role of artist, writer, or musician. Artists use all the materials and techniques available to them at the time they are working, so whenever new materials or techniques appear, and artists use them, that is typical human behavior. The real question, then, is whether these artists, writers, or musicians are amateurs or professionals, and if amateurs, whether they are functioning at the professional level. In my opinion, in the United States, the Treasury Department, i.e., the Internal Revenue Service, has provided a handy answer to this last question, and this answer is known as Schedule C.

Here are my Schedule C criteria: If you take photographs, even if you manipulate them mercilessly, draw pictures, write all kinds of stuff, and/or play an instrument, but do not earn any money from these practices, even if you’re doing them at a very high level, and don’t even try to earn any money from them, and consequently don’t fill out a Schedule C, then you are an amateur artist, writer, and/or musician no matter how good you are at whatever you’re doing artistically. If, however, you earn some income from your art, writing, and/or music, but not enough to buy food, shelter, and transportation, and choose to fill out a Schedule C, claiming expenses, etc., then you are still an amateur but one working at the professional level, i.e., earning some money with your art. But if you fill out a Schedule C, and the reported income is enough to provide you with housing, food, and transportation, and that has been the situation for several years in a row, then you are clearly a professional.

Now, however, in addition to the Schedule C criteria, there is the Self Employment Tax requirement for some professionals. If, because of your earnings from your art, you are required to pay self-employment tax, you are operating at the professional level and probably are a true professional. Finally, of course, if you are employed as a photographer, writer, or musician, and paid a salary for taking pictures, writing stories, and playing an instrument, you are clearly a professional regardless of how well you are doing these activities, what the general public thinks of them, and whether you fill out a Schedule C or pay Self Employment Tax.

Note that the Schedule C criterion does not include critical acclaim; obviously one can gain critical appreciation, or even critical acclaim, and not be a professional. Nowadays, however, there may be some semi-ethical issues involved in AI manipulations of all kinds of products, including photography, writing, and probably musical composition. It takes very little messing around with ChatGPT to figure out that the homework essay as a graded product in school is a thing of the past. Social media posts from the education community reveal not only a variety of concerns about this last problem, but also techniques for ensuring that creative work is original and reflective of a student’s knowledge, learning, etc. One of these English teacher techniques involves right up-front admission of AI participation in an assignment, and that seems like a pretty good approach to all kinds of creative work, including photography.

So, for example, instead of saying “here’s a photo of a squirrel in my back yard,” we end up saying “here’s a photo that just looks like a squirrel in my back yard, but the back yard is totally fake, made up of a thousand back yard images in the Adobe picture bank. Oh, and it’s not a real squirrel, either; it’s actually a squirrel made from a rat sitting on the spilled garbage in the alley behind my apartment building.” Someone might look at that picture and say: “That’s really a nice image of a fake back yard and a squirrel made from a rat, but we were just in Milwaukee where we stopped by a gallery and saw a nicer fake back yard and a squirrel made from a beaver. Seems to me when you make squirrels from beavers, they turn out better squirrels than when you make them from rats.” What we have here is a discussion of how well, in one person’s opinion, another person has used available techniques and starting materials to construct an image.

We also have, in this conversation, the typical talk about “better” but in this case involving fake squirrels and fake back yards. These fake talkers are using their subjective judgments to assess the visual and emotional impact of a picture and the ability of the picture-maker to produce such an impact. It’s also entirely possible that the person who made this fake picture spent quite a bit of time and effort taking real pictures of rats in the alley behind her apartment, and that some of these images produce a serious visual and emotional impact after only common manipulations such as sharpening, noise reduction, exposure, etc. If she exhibited those real pictures of real rats in real alleys, some folks might call her a purist, a word whose definition changes with the times, technological tools available, and use of such tools by serious artists, writers, and musicians. We can envision some Cro-Magnon cave artist with ground pigments, producing images of bison deep in a European cave, coming out into the sunlight, seeing another individual drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick, and calling that person a purist in whatever language the Cro-Magnons used 20,000 years ago to describe one another. So, our general definition of “purist” is one who uses a minimal repertoire of techniques available, regardless of the media, and still produces something interesting.

So, the question remains: What do we do and say about work that is heavily laden with AI content, as opposed to work that is heavily modified but still recognizable as a derivative of some relatively pure creative endeavor? That question is relatively easy to answer for photography: The artist admits their sources, intents, and tools, and we viewers view the work as a mixed-media product, judging it, in our minds, in terms of how well the intent was accomplished, or maybe even in terms of how skillful the artist was in use of the tools. We do that same kind of judgment with purist work, too, of course, but mentally put the purist work into a different mental category from the mixed-media work.

Here are a couple of examples, based on my encounter with photographers, to illustrate the paragraph above. In one case, the photographer takes a picture of some fairly common scene—buildings, vegetation, etc.—then converts that scene into a relatively striking image representative of a drawing, or an oil painting, to use a couple of options. We can still see the original scene or subject, and we can recognize the transformation done by the photographer. In this case the photographer is doing exactly what a painter might do with the same scene but using different tools. It’s the scene recognition, and the message of the image, that survives manipulation. In the second example, a photographer takes an image of a model in a studio then asks AI to put her in a Flamenco dance setting. Once he takes her out of the studio, she becomes a different cultural item, and it’s the choice of where to put her that is a creative act, the intent to produce a different response from a viewer than would have been produced by the studio image.

A byproduct of AI in the arts, of course, will end up producing the exact same reaction from consumers as so-called fake news has produced in the political realm, namely, a suspicion that whatever is put before us is a complete fabrication unless there is some compelling information that tells us it is not, and even then, we are likely to be suspicious that the so-called compelling information is itself fake, or manipulated beyond recognition.

 

 

 

Sunday, October 23, 2022

The Road to Roscoe photographs

 

Road to Roscoe comments:

 John Janovy, Jr.

In addition to my exposure to serious photographers via the Monday Morning Critique sessions of the Chagrin Valley Camera Club, I’ve had contacts with some professional photographers, a couple of such contacts involving two census-designated places: Roscoe, Nebraska (pop. 99), Keystone, Nebraska (pop. 31), and the road between them. The University of Nebraska’s Cedar Point Biological Station, where I taught and did research for 35 years in the summers, and spent 13 years as Director, is 8 miles north of Ogallala. When you go out the CPBS back gate, you end up on the road between Roscoe and Keystone. Because my major research site was in the South Platte River about a mile east of Roscoe, and I also used that river as a regular collection site for classes, my students and I were on that road a lot, especially driving south from the place where the canal road (named Cedar Point Road on Google Earth) meets the Roscoe-Keystone road. So, because the trip down that road seemed to acquire some emotional baggage as my research and teaching program developed over the years, I started taking a lot of pictures from one site on that road, and also of the buildings in Roscoe.

Eventually, the Road to Roscoe pictures turned into graduation presents for my grad students, a small watercolor painting in our downstairs living area, the covers of two books (Dinkle’s Life: A Spiritual Biography and A Century of Parasitology: Discoveries, Ideas and Lessons Learned by Scientists who Published in The Journal of Parasitology, 1914-2014), and at least one Facebook post. The thoughts and conversations while on that road turned into a chapter, entitled “The Road to Roscoe,” in another book: Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. The Road to Roscoe photographs were all taken from a safe turnout located 41o 10’ 26.27” N  101o 35’ 44.25” W, looking south.

I’m not sure why I posted one of those Road to Roscoe photos on Facebook a few years ago, but I did. I suspect it had to do with Throwback Thursday and something about the memories of being on that road going somewhere that was very important at the time, namely, the South Platte River. Eventually, as FB is inclined to do, I was reminded that I’d posted that photo on October 8, 2015, with the comment: “The Road to Roscoe. I've taken at least several hundred photos of this scene, with different lenses, different film, different cameras (including digital), and painted it in watercolor a time or two. ‘The Road to Roscoe’ is also the title of a chapter in DUNWOODY POND: REFLECTIONS ON THE HIGH PLAINS WETLANDS AND THE CULTIVATION OF NATURALISTS." So when FB reminded me that I’d posted that photo seven years ago, naturally, I re-posted, which caught the eye of one of my FB friends, Jim Doty, a professional photographer who lives in Iowa (https://jimdoty.com/). He happened to be traveling to Colorado was curious about that photo, so I sent him the coordinates and he stopped and took photos from the same place, both going to Colorado and coming back home. If you search for his posts on FB you can find his photo taken from the same spot in October of 2022.

The other photographer, John Spence (http://www.johnspencephoto.com/), has been a personal friend in Lincoln for many years, probably going back to 1978 when Keith County Journal was published, with considerable local publicity, and he was interested in doing some video work, using my material. We’ve since acquired some of his art, both photographs and sculptures. One day, maybe in the late 1970s or early 80s, he walked into my University of Nebraska-Lincoln office with a stack of 8 x 10 prints, laid them on my desk, and asked if I’d be interested in writing something to accompany them. He had in mind a coffee table volume with his photographs and my essays. Naturally I jumped on the chance, took the prints home, and showed them to Karen. She sat in her living room chair and started turning them over, one by one; pretty soon she said “these make me sad.” I knew exactly why they made her sad, and so that sentence became the first one in this set of essays, originally entitled The Land Where No One Falls. The chapter entitled “The Road to Roscoe” was written in response to John Spence’s photographs of the Platte River and its bridges; his pictures connected with my years of being in that river.

The coffee table book was rejected numerous times and never saw the light of day. However, a couple of my original essays have been published, one of them the opening essay in Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America, and the other, that Road to Roscoe chapter in Dunwoody Pond. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we experienced the equivalent of house arrest, I started on a project to clean out boxes of old manuscript, scanning several hundred pages of stuff generated on a real typewriter or via dot-matrix printer. Among those pages were the unpublished pieces from the Spence Project. I’m now going back through those essays and will eventually publish them in some form. I remember approaching this project by trying to put myself in John’s shoes while he was taking the photographs, and using the subject matter to construct some stories. One product of the pandemic is my recommendation that we go back and read things we wrote years and years ago; you might end up thinking that you’ve met a stranger!

Over the years I’ve thought about putting together a publication entitled “The Roscoe Album” with photos that I’ve taken of the place, its buildings, the railroad tracks, and the South Platte River as seen from the old bridge connecting Roscoe to I-80. The ones taken in black and white film have not scanned particularly well as negatives, so that will require some work if I use those. But I have lots of digital images, so may work on those. None of those pictures are great art, but they are of a place that I’ve stopped at many times over the years. We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, here’s a link to a freight train going west through Roscoe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_JQlNIOANE&t=98s 

John Janovy, Jr.

October 23, 2022