John Resig Talk

I recently attended a presentation by John Resig, the guy that made JQuery(https://github.com/jquery/jquery).  The presentation was called "Hacking Art History for Fun and Profit" and it was held in the Golisano Auditorium at 3 on April 17.

The whole presentation was about John's side project of http://ukiyo-e.org/ which is a database for Japanese woodblock print art.  John showed the main backbone of the site and how he uses different libraries like Node js(https://github.com/joyent/node), mongodb, Digital Ocean, Amazon S3, and Amazon Cloudfront to make the site function.  John also gave some history about Japanese woodblock art, and the problems that arise when trying to catalog the works.

Basically, the problem was that there was not a reliable way to tell if woodblock prints had already been cataloged, or even if the correct artist was credited with each print.  The solution was John's brilliant Ukiyo-e website.  The site is populated with the different images of the prints and translates the authors' names to store them in a database.  The program then visually compares the pixels of the photos to pair duplicate uploads together and get a probability of who the artist was.

John also talked about how he is trying to implement this kind of technology into other forms of art and in different museums.  The idea all came from John Resig's appreciation of Japanese Wood prints and yet it evolved into a side project that is now looking to be a very helpful tool.

Personally, I found this talk to be extremely interesting for a number of reasons.  First, he was John Resig, a graduate of RIT, and he literally made JQuery.  Second, I am in a Japanese History course so the whole topic of Japanese Woodblock Prints actually resonated very well with me and the background information I had from that course.  Furthermore, I have also taken classes where javascript and utilization of different web technologies and API's are huge topics, so that aspect of the talk was really important to me.

Overall, it was really cool to see someone passionate talking about their interest and how it evolved into a great project that is quite profitable.