Don Norman wrote:

> The catch here is the word "visceral."  Chris was using it in a very loose sense. I am using it in a very precise, scientific sense.

Quite so, I'm using it in the way that, for example, my colleagues who make films, might use it as a general term for a response that is immediate and experienced rather than reasoned. We have many communities here with many usages. If I find that others are hearing my words differently from my intention (I kind of knew Don would but time is short and this is an informal arena) then of course I'll take a little more care and say "visceral, as my film-making friends use the term"

> Someday, research of this sort, will be very useful

Yes I think I had said that by the time I'd worked through my three 
posts with kind help from Bengy Turgan and Keith Russell. In fact today 
I've been talking to James Wang of the ACQUINE team (of course he's not 
as naive as a first reading of the work might imply) and I'm hoping he 
might help me with some questions I have about the implications of work 
on affect and personalisation that I am involved in. 

> But the work itself is solid.  

I feel uncomfortable with this. I agree that research of this sort
will be useful but the solidity of this particular project has to be
questioned. I am sure it has some real strength in the way it is
developing machine vision and artificial intelligence techniques but
there are some flaws in the basic assumptions about aesthetics,
revealed in the ACQUINE publications. 

First, as can be seen in their publication by Datta et al (2008), they 
adopt a key concept, that it is possible to isolate some kind of 
universal aesthetic value that is not dependent on 'semantics'. Don 
points out that humans do have some universal responses like /"fear of 
heights, darkness, crowds" /but I expect he would also agree that these 
influences can be moderated by context, in some contexts we value images 
that, for example, convey fear. Maybe the visceral response is the same 
but the value to us is completely different. This is quite evident in 
many of the images on the project website. I can't help feeling that the 
ACQUINE approach has been to just ignore the non-universal factors.

There is internal evidence to support this in one of their papers (Datta 
et al 2006). The website, photo.net, used by professional and amateur 
photographers, includes aesthetic ratings provided by its members 
reviewing each other's work and these ratings were used to develop the 
ACQUINE engine. The first problem is in the assertion that, while the 
professional photographers might focus on technical detail, the amateurs 
represent /"the general population". /No arguments or evidence are 
presented for this and I feel that it is equally valid to suggest that, 
while the mass-market membership of Flickr.com might represent a general 
population, the participants in photo.net are a specialist group. There 
is a long history of serious amateur photography based on the kind of 
"professional" values and institutions characterised by Richard Sennett 
(2008, 24-27) in his discussion of craftsmanship among the open-source 
software development community and I would expect the judgements of the 
photo.net community to be moderated by their professional concerns.

In fact that can be seen in the data. The assessments on photo.net 
actually use two factors, /"Aesthetics"/ and /"Originality"/. The 
ACQUINE team report that there is a strong correlation between the two. 
Given that we would expect an artistic community to put a high value on 
originality it seems that the photographers may not be able to separate 
aesthetics from originality, possibly because they have no strong 
separate concept of aesthetics. This correlation implies that the 
photo.net amateurs, as members of a specialist artistic community, may 
not be a good guide to the general population.  Also Datta et al note 
that this correlation implies a strong semantic/ /factor in the 
aesthetic judgements which makes it extremely difficult to isolate their 
'universal' aesthetics from the other kind. Having noted that problem, 
they appear to have moved on regardless.

So we have two problems in the most basic raw material of the research: 
The population chosen appear to have a specialised concept of 
aesthetics, highly influenced by their artistic context; and the 
researchers have no way of isolating their looked-for universal / 
"consensus measure"/ (Datta 2008) from the messy background of 
semantics. They are optimistically pursuing a convenient, narrow and 
possible spurious factor that they cannot isolate, apparently because it 
is too difficult to address the very complex reality they have in front 
of them. If there were no other way to deal with this scientific problem 
I might have some sympathy for them but I believe there are many 
possible avenues to advance knowledge and technique in this area, maybe 
they are not as appealing to the public or rich in immediate snake oil 
potential.

Best wishes from Sheffield
Chris


Ritendra Datta, Dhiraj Joshi, Jia Li and James Z. Wang (2006) Studying 
Aesthetics in Photographic Images Using a Computational Approach,/ 
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3953, Proceedings of the 
European Conference on Computer Vision, Part III/, pp. 288-301, Graz, 
Austria, May 2006 available online at 
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~wangz/project/imsearch/Aesthetics/ECCV06/

Ritendra Datta, Jia Li and James Z. Wang (2008) Algorithmic Inferencing 
of Aesthetics and Emotion in Natural Images: An Exposition, /Proceedings 
of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Special 
Session on Image Aesthetics, Mood and Emotion/, pp. 105-108, San Diego, 
California, IEEE, October 2008

Richard Sennett (2008) /The Craftsman /London, Allen Lane