A snapshot from Krakow:

Time has come for preparing my dissertation for official printing. Luckily, I had done most of the formatting when creating the manuscript for the committee, so I expected an easy process. It hasn’t been too bad, but some challenges have appeared: CMYK: There are several years since I last had to deal with professional printing, so I had totally forgotten about the need for preparing all colour images in CMYK. Similarly, the people at the printing office asked me to convert all images that are supposed to appear in b/w to grayscale.

After being convinced by Tim, I have started using TextMate for text editing things. Right now I am mostly interested in its many nice LaTeX features, and the best so far is that it will create the necessary code when dropping and image into the text. You can’t believe how much time and effort this saves me. Very, very handy!

Came across a great website with lots of references to the work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830 - 1904), a pioneer in early photography. I particularly like his chronophotographies. {#image442 width=“500”}

I am very visually oriented and often prefer some graphic representation over text. Now, as I am starting to get into the writing face of my dissertation, I am looking for how to better incorporate visuals (and other media) as part of my dissertation. I will probably end up with some more or less traditionally formatted document, although I have been thinking about writing a hypertext document. However, I will probably make it as an electronic document (PDF) with included audio and video, and of course plenty of graphics and images.

{#image248}Researchers at Microsoft Live Labs are working on Photosynth based on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington. By structuring the photos based on their relative position to each other, it is possible to navigate in a large photo collection in a 3D style way. The system looks very responsive from the video, but I would be curious to see how it works in a real-world context. It would be very interesting to create similar navigation tools for audio.

Nils showed me this nice picture site called DesignKlicks from Spiegel Online. It is this 3d-picture space where you can move around and look at similar pictures. Unfortunately it is based on keyword descriptions and not on picture content. I really look forward to the day we get picture (and also music and video) browsers like this working on media content itself.