Picturable Storytelling

IMAGE SEARCH with Google and Bing have helped illustrate my storytelling. The wealth of labelled images available online has helped creative writers and has turned computer programs into automatic illustrators. I've kept a running count of what Ireland is visually (i.e., according to Google Images) and I'm trying to continue to lay claim to having visited more than 70% of the images revealed in the first two pages of Google image results for the island. I teach a group of ex-Dell employees in Limerick and hope that searches for egfdell continue revealing results that reflect on the programme we're running for the crew. News editors must be getting some business intelligence from image results when looking up "imf ireland". Seeing the images flow by is like having a front row seat in the meltdown economy. But beyond manually looking up illustrations, it's also interesting to see how researchers are creating programs that can read children's books and then illustrate them with relevant images found online. If my three year old's books are any indication, it appear that a sentence typically gets represented by a group of images. Getting results that are picturable, you have to look at the first 20 results thrown up by Google, then perhaps cluster them by colour scheme. You need to have things look good when placed together, so a similar colour shading and compatible pixel pattern are essential. I'm off to make a few hundred more of my Flickr images available under Creative Commons Copyright because I like helping others illustrate their stories.

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