A Subject Index : The Canadian Architect Image Archive At Ryerson University Library's Special Collections

The Canadian Architect Image Archive (1955-1990) was donated to Ryerson University Library's Special Collections in March 2009. Over the course of a year, the archive was catalogued and properly housed. This applied thesis project describes the process of subject indexing a photograph collection in order to provide easy user access and preservation of the archive. The two groups of photographs chosen as case studies are 'Toronto' and 'Quebec', and are the most commonly requested to use for research. This thesis provides a discussion of the context and methodology of subject indexing a unique photographic archive. The thesis contains an appendix with the two subject indexes, proposed subject index testing questionnaire, and an accompanying CD with the indexes in their full format.

A Subject Index : The Canadian Architect Image Archive At Ryerson University Library's Special Collections

The Canadian Architect Image Archive (1955-1990) was donated to Ryerson University Library's Special Collections in March 2009. Over the course of a year, the archive was catalogued and properly housed. This applied thesis project describes the process of subject indexing a photograph collection in order to provide easy user access and preservation of the archive. The two groups of photographs chosen as case studies are 'Toronto' and 'Quebec', and are the most commonly requested to use for research. This thesis provides a discussion of the context and methodology of subject indexing a unique photographic archive. The thesis contains an appendix with the two subject indexes, proposed subject index testing questionnaire, and an accompanying CD with the indexes in their full format.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias OSIRIS broad-band first data release

ABSTRACT We present the first release of GTC OSIRIS broad-band data archive. This is an effort conducted in the framework of the Spanish Virtual Observatory to help optimize science from the Gran Telescopio Canarias Archive. Data Release 1 includes 6788 broad-band images in the Sloan griz filters obtained between 2009 April and 2014 January and the associated catalogue with roughly 6.23 million detections of more than 630 000 unique sources. The catalogue contains standard PSF and Kron aperture photometry with a mean accuracy better than 0.09 and 0.15 mag, respectively. The relative astrometric residuals are always better than 30 mas and better than 15 mas in most cases. The absolute astrometric uncertainty of the catalogue is of 0.12 arcsec. In this paper we describe the procedure followed to build the image archive and the associated catalogue, as well as the quality tests carried out for validation. To illustrate some of the scientific potential of the catalogue, we also provide two examples of its scientific exploitation: discovery and identification of asteroids and cool dwarfs.

“Inter Alia: Aliens and AI”

Contemporary anxiety concerning our efforts to communicate with aliens might be understood in terms of the exponential advances in neural network research (so-termed “Artificial Intelligence”) and the probability that the aliens we encounter are more likely to be alien AIs than organic beings. The premise of our paper is that the disquieting sense that AI possesses, or is possessed of, an external intelligence, one that operates autonomously, unpredictably, and, in our deepest fears, mutinously, is projectively displaced onto extra-planetary aliens. Our paper offers an analysis of Trevor Paglen’s satellite work, The Last Pictures, as well as Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope and Lagoogleglyph series. We conclude with a speculative imagining of an AI-archaeologist encountering in the distant future the orbital ring of dead satellites, one of which contains Paglen’s curated image archive.