They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you only have room for 650? Enter “Content Aware Image Resizing” or the retargeting of images:

This is truly amazing, another step in the ongoing campaign to make images as dynamic as text in the XML Internet.

It does raise some questions about the medium of photography, though. This isn’t the first time images have been digitally altered to be sure, but there does seem to be a difference here. To begin with, a photograph should not be mistaken for reality. Photographers make choices, and a photograph is a selective representation of the world. A resized photograph, I would argue, is basically the same photograph. A cropped photograph is not, but it can be considered another photograph, as it is a different selective representation of the real world. A digitally altered photograph can no longer be considered a photograph in the same way, but it remains a visual representation of an imagined world.

What, then, is a retargeted image? It is a new concept for a new world. Take the example of the image of the two figures on the beach (about 46 seconds into the video). Resizing the image would make it hard to see the figures. Cropping the image would lose one of the figures. Retargeting the image keeps both figures in their current size, and loses only the beach between them. This may seem like an ideal solution, but what is lost is the distance between the two figures. That is a major element of this photograph. It was deleted, not for artistic or functional purposes, but for practical purposes, to help it fit better on the page. The thousand words represented by a picture can now be cut down to just the verbs and nouns. And one imagines this being one day automated, even built into Web browsers of the future – a future where everything is as adjustable as Quick Text Shakespeare, and with similiar nuance.

Even the phrase “Content Aware Image Resizing” gives me the willies in the same way that the term “content provider” seems to imply that the content is just one of many elements that make up a deliverable product. Under this system, Shakespeare was a content provider. And the process described in the video is not aware of content. For that, you still need a human.

I know I’ve blogged favorably about the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and many of them are inevitable, but others are not, and we have a responsibility to keep up with the changing definition of information literacy. Now we have one more question to ask ourselves when we see a photograph online.

I was originally posting this because I thought it was way cool. But I don’t want us to be so dazzled by the new technologies that come out that we stop asking the critical questions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 6:17 am and is filed under Information Literacy, Science, Shakespeare, Studies, Technology, Video, Visual Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.