Category: “The Process is the Product”

Quote from Eric Jannson at NITLE

Use of AI to transcribe 1906 I.W.W. sticker and early newspaper clippings

I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 4.7) over the weekend to transcribe text found in early 20th-century I.W.W.-related advertisements and newspaper clippings and to provide accompanying Library of Congress subject headings, in order to catalogue a digital image collection I’m curating in JSTOR called History of I.W.W. Silent Agitators” or “Stickerettes. In doing so and without me prompting it to, Claude offered additional commentary and analysis for each item being catalogued, identifying themes as it went, a chronology, historical references, patterns over time, etc. I then asked Claude to summarize the several items it had transcribed, and the results are…

Generative AI Cataloguing Instruction Template

For the past several months, I’ve been exploring the use of generative AI to catalogue political stickers from Ukraine and Germany. Over time, I’ve fine-tuned my prompts, and ChatGPT 4o is producing some impressive results. At one point, a student was going to help catalogue some of the German stickers, and I asked AI if it would remember the work we had done together for another user. “No—I won’t retain memory of this conversation across different accounts. If someone else logs into another ChatGPT account, they’ll be starting fresh, without access to your previous chats, preferences (like formatting styles), or…

ChatGPT4 to catalogue sociopolitical stickers?

I took a workshop yesterday at SLU where I work on generative AI and dove deep down the rabbit hole. I had gone into the workshop as a casual user of an early version of ChatGPT but came away really impressed with some possibilities for cataloguing sociopolitical stickers in the Street Art Graphics digital image collection. In the workshop, I used the library’s ChatGPT4 version to do a few test runs on stickers and other artworks in the SLU image collections, and here is what I learned. Prompt: I am a university professor. Describe the contents and meaning of this…

Featured collector: Chuck Keppler

A U.S. collector named Chuck Keppler contacted me recently in conjunction with the exhibition of screen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey at St. Lawrence University, Inspiring | Controversial | OBEY! Chuck has compiled an amazing collection of Obey stickers and an Obey sticker database that numbers over 1,400 and is grouped by themes: OGs, icons, star icons, Obey/Giant, propaganda, circles, banners, commercial identity, etc. I asked for an interview, and here are Chuck’s responses. Can you describe how and when you got started with the Shepard Fairey Obey sticker database project? What piqued your interest? Do you collect the…

Chapter proposal: Street Art Stickers as Subversive Visual Discourse

A chapter proposal that I submitted for a new anthology was recently accepted! Entitled Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces, the volume will be published as a companion piece to the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education (2016). The new collection features four sections: participating in a changing visual information landscape; perceiving visuals as communicating information; practicing visual discernment and criticality; and pursuing social justice through visual practice. My proposal was accepted for the section on pursuing social justice through visual practice. My chapter proposal Publicly-placed stickers…

Featured artist/collector: Morgan Jesse Lappin

I’m pretty sure that Marisa Zarczynski ’ 06 was the first student at St. Lawrence University to help me with my budding sticker research project back in the early 2000s. We reconnected again lately, and she introduced me to an artist friend of hers from Brooklyn who collects stickers, Morgan Jesse Lappin. Here is his sticker story. “My sticker collection started in the early 80s in Rockland County, NY. My mother would take me to the supermarket, and I’d get a bunch of random stickers and the newest MAD Magazine. One day my mother gave me an empty photo album…

Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: Post #3

I continue to work from home on digital image collection projects that I outlined in my first post from this COVID-19 series, focusing now on a series of confocal miscroscopy images generated by two faculty at St. Lawrence University: Jill Pflugheber, Microscopy Specialist, and Dr. Steven F. White, Lewis Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures. This digital project grew out of an exhibition this past spring at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at SLU called Microcosms: A Homage to the Sacred Plants of the Americas. Here is the exhibition text panel that the two faculty wrote to accompany the…

“Paper Bullets – the expanded version” at Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin, Germany

In the summer of 2019, I was given the opportunity to present an expanded version of my Paper Bullets exhibition at the acclaimed Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Oliver Baudach, the director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, was the driving force that made the project possible. It was an enormous undertaking, in that for the first time I drew from my entire collection of thousands of new, unused, historical and contemporary political stickers from around the world. Neurotitan is a non-commercial, alternative art gallery that features urban art. Housed in the Haus Schwarzenberg in Mitte, the gallery dates back to…

German 103 writing assignment at SLU – fall 2018 – three examples

In the fall of 2018, St. Lawrence University students in Dr. Brook Henkel’s German 103 class again incorporated contemporary street art stickers from Germany for a writing assignment called “Politische Plakate und Aufkleber in Deutschland” (similar to what his students did in the fall of 2017). As before, I introduced the assignment by giving a brief talk with slides describing the ubiquitous sticker culture in Berlin, focusing on topics such as urban development, gentrification, police authority, surveillance, and identity politics. Students then came to the gallery where I work to look at three sets of original, unused stickers from my…