Site review - Chess Graphics
Mark Weeks
bookmarks, is for Chess Graphics by Alan Cowderoy. The site is at
address...
http://www.cowderoy.com/graphics/index.htm
...On his main page Cowderoy says that his site is, 'devoted to all
aspects of chess graphics. Photographs, cartoons, ray tracing,
paintings, drawings and much else.' The site must be the single largest
collection of chess imagery on the Web today.
What does this site have to do with chess history? Considering that the
Web is largely a visual medium, it has a lot to do with it. Knowing
Steinitz's career is one thing -- seeing a photo of him in a game
against Lasker is something else. Many of Cowderoy's more obscure images
are accompanied by explanatory stories, and there are a few topics where
you will not find a better article anywhere else on the Web.
The site has no controversies about past, present, or future world
champions; there is no critical analysis of FIDE leadership or of the
leadership of any other chess organization; there is none of the name
calling that seems endemic to chess politics. There are only well
organized images related to chess.
At the top of Cowderoy's main page is a set of external links to the
[Palamede] sites maintained by Cowderoy and his associates. The Palamede
site explains the objectives, saying, 'This site is the home of a group
of independant European chess sites [with the] aim of helping sites
providing high quality reference and educational material about chess'.
Some of the sites are exclusively in the French language; others are in
English. [Notzai], for example, has chess news in French, while [En
Passant] has 'software, fonts and graphics for chess publishing'. I
won't say more about the other sites than to mention that we'll be
taking a closer at [Variants] for the next review in this series.
After the external links is a set of internal links which provide
different paths to navigate Cowderoy's site. The site is not structured
in any obvious way, so there are many paths to reach the images. The
[Thumbnails] display all the pictures on the site in thumbnail format,
ordered alphabetically by the filename of the image. There are 46
thumbnail pages with 16 thumbnails per page. The thumbnails are about
130 x 100 pixels in size. One small problem here is placing the image in
context -- I wasn't able to determine a path from a thumbnail to the
referencing page.
[Catalogue] is described as the 'Catalogue of Catalogues'. Each
catalogue page shows four complete thumbnail pages, so the 46 thumbnail
pages are displayed on 12 pages, with each image of a complete thumbnail
page fitting in about 260 x 196 pixels. This sizes the original images
at about 52 x 40 pixels, which is just large enough to see that the C02
page has a picture of a young Bobby Fischer. The catalogue is a fast way
to get an overview of all material on the site.
[Search] is a standard text search over all pages on the site. A search
on 'chess' returned 294 pages, of which 157 were not index pages. The
function is useful for finding photos of specific players -- a search on
'Lasker' returned two pages.
[Random] displays a single random image. The last time I tried it, I
ended up looking at an unknown face in the image 'cits12.jpg'. A path to
the referencing page would again be useful.
Another sequence of high level links is repeated several times on
Cowderoy's main page. [Cartoons] links to a page which links in turn to
14 other pages -- cartoon page '6' is a caption contest. [Ray tracing]
links to a page which has links to 11 other pages. [Films], [pictures],
[players], & [pieces] jump to other sections on the main page. [Screen
savers] links to a page with three screen savers based on Cowderoy's own
work. [Font] is a link to a TrueType chess font.
'Recent additions to the site (18/5/2000)' currently has six links. I
used the search function to see whether the newest pages were indexed;
they weren't. Then I looked at the thumbnails to see whether the new
images were included; they weren't either. I would have been surprised
if the new material had been covered by these overviews.
The section 'pictures of chess pieces' has nine links to pictures of
real pieces. Since the demise of the Chess Collectors International
site, I know of no other site which offers as many images of pieces and
sets.
'Paintings, drawings, stories and other pictures' is the largest section
and has about 40 links. Some of the pages -- 'Paulo Boi and the Devil' &
'The Problem Cake' are two examples -- have stories which explain the
image. 'The Turk' has links to several internal pages, including an
article about the 18th century marvel. I was very surprised to find a
link to a ring four Wolfgang von Kempelen sites. The Turk is also a 21st
century marvel!
'SportsVerlag designs' has links to 5 pages of colorful designs. Page 4
has an image I reused almost three years ago as the icon for my own
site. I have seen other images from Chess Graphics scattered across the
Web. A footnote on the main page generously says, 'All the graphics
available at this site are known or believed to be in the public domain,
or may be used for non-profit applications, except where otherwise
indicated.' The note doesn't even ask for credit of any sort.
'Our portrait gallery' has 14 links to individual and group photos.
'Portraits of players' has links to more than 30 pages, many with
multiple photos. The separate section 'Other and historic' links to 6
pages of photos of people who became famous in areas outside of chess.
'Chess in films' has about 20+ links. Most of the linked pages provide a
further link to details about the film from the Internet Movie Database
at imdb.com. The link for 'Chess Fever' is a sequence of 6 pages which
storyboard the famous Russian movie.
'Various images intended as resources for desk top publishing and logos'
links to 11 pages. 'Odds and ends' links to 2 pages. Buried in some of
the pages is a 'Bibliography' with three references. I stumbled on one
page entirely by accident and couldn't work out any navigation path from
the main page...
http://www.cowderoy.com/graphics/duchamp.htm
...has an extensive biography of Marcel Duchamp.
---
There are not many Web sites which specialize in images related to
chess. None of the chess specific directories, like Chessopolis, has a
section dedicated to images. The UPITT archive has some images available
at...
ftp://ftp.pitt.edu/group/chess/GRAPH/
...where there has 77 files maintained sporadically. The last update was
July 1998, almost two years ago. The file '00index.gr' lists the content
of the other files. Riccardo Andreis has a philatelic site at...
http://users.iol.it/ricky.and/
...which includes a 'gallery of old prints, magazines' related to chess.
The Postaprint commercial site at...
http://www.postaprint.co.uk/index.htm
offers a search on its database of 19th century periodicals, which
include the Illustrated London News and which returns a fair number of
drawings related to chess. A few sites that we've already looked at in
past reviews contain many images:-
- Alphonso X Book of Games
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Gorge/3154/index.html
- Bibliotheca Van der Linde-Niemeijeriana
http://www.konbib.nl/kb/vak/schaak/afbeeldingen/schaakafb-en.html
- Chess Archaeology
http://www.chessarch.com/museum/museum.shtml
---
How useful are the general search engines in discovering chess images on
the Web? I know of three which offer searches on images. These are far
from perfect, because they use text clues on Web pages to determine if
an image is related to the object of the search. They all display
thumbnails of the images they return which makes it easy to determine
how relevant the suggestion really is. It is impossible to tell, of
course, how many images have been overlooked.
I decided to take a closer look at the three image search engines that
I've encountered:-
(A) AltaVista - Image Search [12 thumbnails per page]
http://jump.altavista.com/st_im
(B) Lycos MultiMedia [10 per page]
http://richmedia.lycos.com/ [search for ('All Pictures']
(C) Snap:Picture Finder [10 per page]
http://home.snap.com/search/picture/form/0,584,-0,00.html
First I did a search on 'chess' and got the following results:-
(A) About 4,589 images found.
(B) 1-10 of 1758
(C) Page 1 of 96 [meaning about 960 images]
Then I searched on 'kasparov', thinking that there must be more pictures
of him than any other active player:-
(A) About 130 images found.
(B) 1-10 of 84
(C) Page 1 of 2
A search on 'capablanca' came up with a few images:-
(A) 3 images found.
(B) 1-10 of 39
(C) [4 images]
I recently received an email message from someone looking for a picture
of Johannes Zukertort, so I tried a search on 'zukertort':-
(A) AltaVista found no image matching your query.
(B) No hits!
(C) Sorry, no results found for 'zukertort'.
These results tell me that AltaVista is the most promising search engine
for images, but that Lycos is better at finding the less popular topics.
This is probably because Lycos uses more of the text around the image,
whereas AltaVista uses only the filename of the image.
The major search engines automatically produce thumbnails and links for
the images that they discover, which many artists believe is a copyright
violation. There is a wealth of imagery on the Web related to chess
history, but it is not easy to find. I suspect that there would be more
if the copyright issues were clearer.
Bye for now,
Mark Weeks
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.