Is the idea of categorization the key to this project? Is how things are named, coded, and thereby located at the heart of this, and any archive? If something cannot be found or located in a meaningful way, is there any purpose to an archive? It might as well be a trash bin that one would have to dig through in the hope of finding something of interest.
On the other hand, this raises the question of who name and categorizes things, and the depth of tagging and description is what determines the usefulness of any archive or database.
Once someone has located something of interest though, all the rules, categories, intentions and uses are up in the air, wide open. There no longer needs to be anything to connect the image back to its source, or its intent, or its category. I like this idea, even though in some ways it contradicts the value and purpose of any archive, which seems to be to create a memorial of sorts, and the raw ingredients for writing histories.
If in fact naming is the key to the project, then doesn’t it seem logical that we will all come up with pretty much the same categories? People, Museums, Skaters, Aerials, Photographers, Passports, etc.? This seems just too obvious. Maybe finding a way to create less obvious tags and pursue deeper, more subtle links between the images would produce more unexpected results?
In this vein, every image would have multiple, even numerous, tags and references. The deeper and more subtley one delves into naming structures or conventions for tags, the more it seems that clarity could be lost, that tags could become nearly meaningless, even though they are at the heart of the archiving process.
For example, is “green” a sufficiently meaningful tag? Does the tag “museum” make these images within diverse museums somehow more useful to others? Will the new unification of diverse images through the use of subtle or nuanced tagging create something with greater, lesser or just different meanings than the use of only topic-related and content-specific tags, such as “highway aerial” or “politics”? Do more tags add more meaning or more confusion when no context or time-frame is available for the images?
