GooglePicture

Last week, I went for an on-campus visit to a school that should remain nameless because I try to keep my anonymity. (If you want details, you can e-mail me at Leopoldtulip@yahoo.com, and I'll try to answer someday.) I ended up accepting the job, and now I'm trying to get the dissertation done (which is why I've been so bad about blogging).

Anyway, I was preparing to guest-teach a class on Gulliver's Travels, and I had a really great picture illustration from Gulliver's Travels that I wanted to use. The problem? I didn't know where the illustration came from. One of my professors had used it in a class, and even though I found the handout he had given, the picture gave no information on the illustrator.

Now, Google's really helpful if you want to track down a quote. The problem is, I didn't want to track down who said a quote; I wanted to track down who drew an unnamed picture. Google's pretty good on the word front, but not so helpful on the "worth a thousand words" front. Somehow, it didn't seem that simply listing things in the picture would really be helpful ("Gulliver," "great big eye," "the letter m inside the eye").

I then began to realize how nice it would be if google had a searchable engine where you didn't have to type in words at all. Maybe I could just hold up the picture to the computer, and google would scan all its digital images. Or, if I couldn't actually find a copy of the unnamed picture, perhaps they could invent a sort of "doodle recognizer" where google tries to match up your own chicken-scratchings with famous masterpieces.