Research on the Internet

In this age of ever expanding information one would think that it would be getting easier to find the answers to simple questions. You just Google it? But most of the time one has to navigate a minefield of dead ends and results from third party search sites. Bing or yahoo gives much the same sets of unrelated results. Overlay other services such as pinterest along with the supposed assistance of google's offering similar results and one gets even more unrelated dross surrounding the real information. So it makes much more sense to target websites that provide a a much cleaner starting point.

Looking for information on people such as artists and their subjects then a site like wikipedia may be a first port of call, but once on gets below the well known names then it is more likely than not that there will not be an entry and for many of the artists I have been reviewing recently this is the case. In a few cases Wikimedia Commons may have images for a target, but there tends to be a gap between the two and no direct link between the two matching sets of data. Wikipedia itself may have different content to that stored in the Commons pages for the same subject so both sides need to be searched independently. In addition many of the artists are not English and so are listed in different language sections of wikipedia which adds to the complexity of researching them. Often an English page has not been created even if only as a stub to identify the other language entries, but the Commons pages often highlight that there is other material if only those pages also had a link to them.

For a more complete catalogue of artists the Athenaeum provides an alternate starting point. This is another crowd sourced information database which provides a growing directory of artists and the works they have produced. In addition it often provides the location of a particular work, with directories of a number of galleries and even private houses form part of the growing database. As an example of the sort of information available, there is a list of the paintings currently on the walls of 10 Downing Street, and included in that collection is a picture by Henry Lamb of his daughter knitting. A little random one might think, but Henry Lamb is not listed on either  the pigtails in paint or I am a child websites, and so prompted my interest to check what other children's portraits he had undertaken. Wikipedia has a page which is probably to be expected, but there is no indication on that as to the type of images he undertook other than a few pictures on that page, but in addition to the Athanaeum listing, there is also a directory of United Kingdom artists which has a listing for him. While there are a number of pictures in Wikicommons these are not properly indexed and do not show any of his child portraits but now that we have an answer to work with, the search engines should be able to provide a more targeted result, one would hope? Bing does not do too bad a job searching for "Girl Knitting, Portrait of Felicia", but has very poor taste in the alternative results, while google just seems to loose the plot and not find any of the extra links provided by bing. Removing the ' -pinterest' from either search will demonstrate just what an unusable mess this cataloging system makes to the results so my current process uses Bing with pinterest disabled in order to scout around for other higher resolution versions of a particular image. In this case the UK Art image is the best one available since the picture is still under copyright, something that the Athenaeum identifies nicely.

As a side issue, once pictures do move to the public domain, the quality of the resulting explosion of copies can be somewhat poor. I will expand on this later with a couple of examples, but the basic guide is that while Wikimedia Commons is often the source of the highest resolution versions of a particular picture, the colours can be far from what the artist intended. It is not uncommon to find several versions with a range of different colours which can detract from appreciating the real quality of an artist. The next step in the cataloging of Henry Lamb's childrens portraits is to find as many as I can from the current catalogs.

Update re. current search result performance.
It should be noted that google no longer returns the 'X' rated images it used to include even with 'SafeSearch' switched off. Bing's three stage filter does remove the 'X' rated material but seems a little too heavy handed in 'Strict' mode, but neither setting changes the main results of the "Girl Knitting" search. It is interesting just how SafeSearch handles the works of an artist like Sally Mann. While Bing's Strict mode filters a few of the images which are visible with both Moderate mode and off, Goggle's filter makes no obviouse difference to the images returned.

Image quality
Safe access to video clips and films
Backing up a Wordpress site