When you get your Blue Marble, you’ll know what to do!
This album is a work-in-progress* – a sampling of photographs and stories shared by people who have received blue marbles. It’s inspiring to see the many ways that people are caring for our one and only Blue Marble.
Enjoy the stories behind the photos. Click to flip each Blue Marbles Project pic below for metadata and then view the triples to explore linked data with ImageSnippets.
* We are so grateful to have met technologist Margaret Warren at DWeb Camp 2019. Margaret took the time to teach us how to use ImageSnippets, a Linked Data Annotation System to add metadata and create alt-text descriptions of photos. We’ve been slowly migrating Blue Marble images and information from our social media platforms, and taking the time to record the provenance information behind their creation.
When we began playing the “Blue Game” with Dr. Wallace J. Nichols in 2010, social media sites were a fun and playful way to share news and information. However, by 2016, concerns were growing about the negative impacts of social media on society. In 2020, Instagram’s complete lack of responsiveness to our report of a cloned account left us wondering if there might be a good way to preserve a record of our Blue Marble adventures, outside of social media. In 2022, the advent of text-to-image models using image generation systems like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, has created even more questions and concerns about creating safeguards in a world where realistic images and deep fakes can be swiftly fabricated with the rapidly developing technologies.
ImageSnippets goal is to build a persistent resource that establishes provenance and preserves the historical content and context of images in a way that cannot be easily manipulated and also in a way (through the RDF syntax) that can be read many, many, many years into the future (assuming an internet/web continues to persist). RDF has become a standard – like HTML and will likely be read by semantically aware devices for years.