Mozilla's Image Seeking for Fantastic Visual Metaphors

Although I didn’t have any prior experience with the Mozilla website, I found that it was easy to use. I chose to explore the activity, “Image Seeking for Fantastic Visual Metaphors”, by Alan Levine which tasked the user with finding images to conceptualize complex ideas. Image searches are usually pretty simple, but I soon found that they are also very literal.

I used Mozilla’s example of fear. A preliminary image search for “fear” on Bing proved the point that complex ideas are more difficult to find through an image search than say, “cute dog “or “funny baby”. Out of the first 12 choices for “Fear” images, 5 pictures were of the word itself and one was a poster for the 1996 movie, Fear. Not what I was hoping for...

The next step was to use the Mozilla Thimble to create an Image Seek. You have to edit HTML—my first instinct was to leave immediately and find a new activity. Run, My Brain shouted, Don’t look back! But I persevered.

As it turned out, it was actually simple to use. (There are step-by-step instructions on the left hand side). I began to place keywords in the Image Seek, which is shown as a preview on the right side of the screen. You can see it changing as you edit the code which I thought was neat. Mozilla notes that in order to conceptualize a complex idea, you can search for actions, objects, and locations that visually represent that concept.

Unfortunately, I didn’t read this before I started playing around with the Image Seek Remixer, and I ended up using synonyms instead of actions for the first category—which probably explains why I got such terrible results. (More on that later). For the first category, I chose “dread, alarm, disquiet, and foreboding”. The people/animals/objects section was filled in with, “owls, crows, murder, and stalker”. Finally, the places section got “Night, parking garage, tight spaces, and abandoned places”. I was starting to feel like I was psychoanalyzing myself. There was also a section at the bottom for combination words, so I chose “shivering, alone, panic, and dark”.

Next, you get to test out the Image Seek. Honestly, many of my Flickr and Google Image search results were still abysmal. “Dread” gave me tons of images of dreadlocks; “Alarm” produced image after image of alarm clocks. But, as I said, I didn’t read over all of the instructions before jumping head first into the exercise, so Oops.

It got better. “Foreboding” brought up black and white images of stormy landscapes, “Stalker” gave me one image of a shadowy figure in an ally, “Panic” produced hundreds of pictures of the band “Panic! At the Disco”…

Going into the exercise, I had wanted to find “something more than the word itself, eyes in the dark, or a woman cowering”. These results were definitely more interesting, if not more effective. The best result was for a combination of “dark” and “fear” which produced black and white, stormy, foggy forest images. Yet I felt this still missed the mark. It didn’t portray fear as much as it did a dark and stormy night.

Overall, the exercise was still effective and made me think more about searching for images online. A lot of thought needs to go into finding a great image to act as a metaphor.