On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Arnaud HERVE <arnaudherve(a)x-mail.net>wrote;wrote:
The last few days we talked about appropriate nudity
in medical images.
I have an example of appropriate clothing now.
I think applying such rules as decency, respect, etc. are not totally
sufficient.
I think that the main principle should to avoid erotic content in order
to focus on the cognitive effort to understand the physiology. And in
such a context an erotic content would not only be offensive, it would
be a pollution for the cognitive intention.
I just worked on this document ( ~ 7 Mo download) :
http://arnaudherve.free.fr/Sugery_table_with_female_patient.pdf
It comes from a vendor of surgery tables. The document was originally in
German and has been translated to French. Anyway you don't have to
understand the language, because the medical words are almost the same,
and the images are obvious anyway.
What I wanted to show is that the patient is clothed, although in a real
life surgery situation, she would be naked.
The answer for that is not really in respect for the person, although it
is present here. The main intention is semantic. It mean the sellers
work seriously at making tables, they talk to buyers who work seriously
using those tables, and the focus is on the tables and not the patient.
By the way you will notice here and there the arm of a nurse, without
her face. The arm is naked and the shoulder clothed, which doesn't mean
the nurse is decent, it means she is working. So her face would not only
be a violation of anonymity, it would be a pollution to showing her arm
manipulating the tools.
I think that is the spirit. For images of organs of course it will be
more difficult, but still the focus must be on understanding the
anatomy, or physiology, or pathology. Or in other words, discourage
those who want to drool over female bodies, BUT encourage those who want
to acquire knowledge.
I think the principle applies to women in sports too. Have a look at this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Com%C4%83neci
Here you can see, or at least I can see immediately, that the focus in
on the sports feat and not on decency or desirability.
Don't know if that makes sense to you. So to sum it up it would not be
sufficient to merely REMOVE the erotic content, it is necessary to
IMPOSE the cognitive content. Then if you want to positively impose the
cognitive content, the negative removal of erotic content comes very
naturally.
Arnaud
Arnaud, I agree with the point that you are making.
It is the same as when we expect article content to have a encyclopedic
tone. We often need to rewrite text to make it less like an investigative
report, a salacious tabloid story, or a company press release.
Images need to be used in a way that that best illustrates the overall
content of the topic being discussed.
This can be a matter of presenting a neutral point of view, or maybe just
good recognition of the way that that an image can be introduced into the
article to supplement the text.
It is true when introducing all images into an article. But it seems
particularly necessary to think of it when writing articles that feature
images of women because of the way that women are sexualized in many of the
images uploaded to Commons. Forcing them into articles that are not erotic
adds a weird connotation to the article.
(The first example image would not load for me but your excellent
description helped me understand the point you were making.)
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight