Visual Lexicon- My Favorite Resources

Google has, in recent times, become a verb instead of a noun; “To Google”.  When faced with any question, what do we as Americans raised in the digital age turn to? Google. If someone asked you to look up a list of the American presidents, where would you turn? Google. If you need directions from California to Maine, where would you go? Google. If you want pictures of a poodle wearing a hat, where would you go? Google. This epidemic has affected education far more than any other sector of our society, and I myself am just as guilty as every one of my peers. I am guilty of Google abuse.  Anytime I need to acquire new information of any type, I immediately turn to Google, simply because it is fast and easy to use. The problem is, it is not necessarily reliable, efficient, or meaningful. Learn things, and I find out what I need to know, but the answers and pictures I come across are, in general, very generic. They are in essence what every person finds when they “Google” the same word or phrase. I wasn’t aware until it was explained to me, how Google actually works when you search an image in particular. Say for instance, you search the word “Baby” as an image search in Google, and your friend who lives 300 miles away does the same search. Google immediately pulls up the pictures in the same order for every person based on which photos are the most “relevant” or “popular”. So therefore, you are not finding out anything unique. This comes into play in the art classroom more specifically when you tell students to go find inspiration through pictures. They all go and look up the same theme, and they all come in with the same photographic “inspiration”. Many projects begin to look like one another, and new ideas are rarely formed.

Now this of a world where Google didn’t exist. At first thought, this may be terrifying, however, there ARE alternatives. I did not come to understand this until a couple of years ago myself. There are other search engines and programs, which allow you to tailor your search and find unique ideas, information, and photos. THESE are the kind of websites we need to be teaching our students about, and these are the kids of websites that we as educators need to start utilizing. Google is good for many things, however, when it comes to image searches, there are so many higher quality alternatives. Here are a few:

http://myartspace.com/

Now this may look like the somewhat familiar website “myspace.com”, and in essence, it is the same in many ways, therefore, the general public will probably be able to use it with ease. It works in the same way as MySpace in that people create profiles, upload pictures, network, blog, share information, and so on. The difference is that this is an entire community of artists, and the site is maintained by professionals. All the members are artists, and the photos that are uploaded are all the artists’ works. You can search through an unlimited amount of current works, and at the same time can network and talk with the artists themselves (if they’re willing of course). This website is so much more than simply a social networking site however, it allows you to search in the “Google” fashion by typing in word and choosing whether you want to search it by artist, gallery, or image as well.  I’ve found it very interesting to play around and do searches through this website in particular because of the fact that it’s almost exclusively contemporary art as opposed to the famous “art historical” art that you get when you search for art on Google.

http://www.photoree.com/

This is a website that I would recommend as a first stepping-stone out of the world of “Google”. It is run in exactly the same way; you go to the site, type a word or phrase in the box, and it pulls up images. I have found the art based searches to be much more tamed down and focused on the specific word I typed however, and therefore, when doing image searches, I almost always get better results.  This would be a simple way to introduce art students to the concept that you CAN in fact search the internet for images with an engine other than Google, however, it since the set up is virtually identical, they won’t be intimidated by how to navigate it.

http://vi.sualize.us/

This is the last of my favorite “real” websites that I could see utilized in an art education environment. This website is simple enough as well. It is an image book –marking website that allows you to click on an image and save it in your library online as opposed to having to copy and save every image you run across online, onto your desktop, and then organizing it into folders. It’s basically a one-click way to save images you come across online. I haven’t played with this all too much, but have started using it recently, and it’s been very useful and time saving.

http://www.oobject.com/

This is the last one that I have to share simply because it is fun. I don’t really see much academic use for this website, but if you’re bored and want to waste time, and like to categorize EVERYTHING into lists like myself, this is the most amazing website EVER! It is an entire website comprised of lists (done through photography I might add, not just like lists of words) or the most random things ever. Like for instance “14 Examples of Book Burning”, “ Absurd Armored Trains”, or “Snowmobiles through History”. They are random, and fun, but they are great as a time waster on a Sunday afternoon while sitting on the couch. You should check it out.