"The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content."

Matthew Battles on use of images in Steve Martin's novel An Object of Beauty, prompted by Martin discussion with Charlie Rose. Might have brought emblem books into the discussion of ekphrasis.

I come to Galton in connection with "ekphrastic telegraphy," a concept that broadly covers coding and telegraphic communication of visual information. The Galton intersection includes his fingerprint identification (and potential for code), and his system to describe images by cipher. He captures the entire profile of a Greek girl in 343 small circles, described by a cipher of 271 letters, of which 79 letters suffice to describe the complex shape of her eye in profile : URkkk kklll mSVap ponmn mmlmm mlmlm llmZZ VnTnn mnmmm mmmlm mmnZZ Tjjjj jjkke chmmn mnun [sic] ononZ . ¶ find on this site his “The Just-Perceptible Difference” Proceedings of the Royal Institution 14 (January 27, 1893)

from "Pictures by Telegraph," on system of W. H. Lowd, in Scientific American Supplement, No. 1028 (September 14, 1895): pp 16432-43 . Lowd seems to have been interested in systems, as he was also associated with patent US1354437 (1920), Train Classification and Number Indicator

post on Ptak Science Books blog. the article on Lowd's "pictures by telegraph" appeared in Scientific American Supplement, September 14, 1895 pp 16432-33. Lowd's system had several predecessors and successors.

Data + Art : Science and Art in the Age of Information, PMCA Pasadena Museum of California Art, 25 January – 12 April 2009 ¶ gallery shot in dogboy's photostream on flickr ¶ this image (and the coding/drawing activity described in the related links) example a kind of ekphrasis, that is, verbal characterization of a visual scene.

"machine converted Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper. Too anxious to wait for the official processed image, employees from the Voyager Telecommunications Section attached these strips side by side to a display panel and hand colored the numbers like a paint-by-numbers picture." ¶ JPL, GPN-2003-00060 (JPEG 1219 x 933 pixels)

"40,000 pixels per 8 hours, 5,000 pixels per hour, 83 pixels per minute, 1.4 pixels per second... So we got a large sheet of graph paper and marked it out into 200 x 200 squares. Each square was divided up into 4 smaller squares. And we armed a team of 8 people each with a lead pencil. As the data came back, according to the video data value we would shade in a number of the squares. When viewed from a distance it gave quite a representable picture..." ¶ on first display of Mars imagery from Mariner IV, 1964 ¶ ex Memoirs of a Space Engineer, Australia Broadcasting Corporation