Re: Some questions about the battle at the Denmark Strait
Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2019 9:17 pm
I will make only a few brief observations and comments.
1) The format of requiring a "yes or no" response can be productive if properly done, but is very difficult to control. In the courtroom, a series of questions along these lines is often disallowed by a judge as 'leading the witness', i.e. represents an attempt to, in small slices, lead a witness to admit to an overall incorrect whole by inappropriately admitting to the truth or ambiguity of small individual parts.
2) Some questions simply cannot be properly answered in a "yes or no" format, e.g. "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no."
3) Photographic evidence, particularly photo-journalistic evidence and especially that sort of material published in wartime, is often the victim of deliberate or accidental manipulation. The image itself may be retouched so as to obscure certain details and/or overemphasize others. The image itself may be reasonably accurate, but may be mis-captioned in order to make it more commercially valuable, e.g. a shot that is really of Bismarck firing at some time during the action, otherwise innocuous, would sell better if if were captioned as "Bismarck fires the salvo that destroyed the HOOD" The photo-journalist usually sees himself as a visual story-teller rather than one there to accurately record the event. In that regard, it is often considered acceptable (or even commendable) to somewhat 'bend' and image to suit a given narrative. This sort of thing goes back to people like Matthew Brady, who during the American Civil War sometimes re-arranged bodies and equipment on the battlefield in order to get a 'better' picture. So photo-journalistic evidence, especially in wartime, must always be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism.
4) The quality of the imagery is, at best, highly suspect for analytical purposes. Initial exposure may have been -- and almost certainly was -- sub-optimal for the films then in use. Manipulation in the darkroom when prints were made is certain. This -- as mentioned earlier -- will certainly result in distortions in image integrity. Cropping the image -- i.e. changing size and aspect ratio -- often destroys any ability to make meaningful or accurate photogrammetric measurements. Further, the images we are seeing are usually taken from the internet, and often extracted from printed publications where the screening process that was used to print full-greyscale images in black and white, i.e. in ink-dots, adds additional artifacts and removes others. The process of digitization -- especially if the copies are made in .jpeg type formats -- also results in computer generated artifacts that further degrade the utility of the image in question. The net result is that a lot of detail is lost, and a fair amount of incorrect apparent detail added, every time the image is reproduced.
5) Those involved in formal photogrammetry and photo-interpretation, at least as practiced in mapping and physical geographic analysis, tend as a whole to be more cautious in their interpretations, mostly because they have all, over the years, made one or two bad judgments where real consequences were involved, e.g. the expenditure of thousands of dollars to purchase what appears to be a grassy meadow that is really a swamp covered in bullrushes and water a half-meter deep. Just as in real life, one passes through a series of phases; the first where one (as a young child) knows nothing and admits to it, the second (as a teen-ager) where everything is relatively clear-cut and black-and-white, and the third (as a mature individual) where one realizes that a lot of things that seem perfectly clear to those less-experienced, are really somewhat grey and indeterminate. In that regard, the photos we are looking at are of such poor overall quality that they overall represent more of a Rorschach (ink-blot) test than a depiction of anything in reality, i.e. the interpretation of the image tells more about the interpretER, than about the image itself.
With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel: "A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest..."
Bill Jurens
1) The format of requiring a "yes or no" response can be productive if properly done, but is very difficult to control. In the courtroom, a series of questions along these lines is often disallowed by a judge as 'leading the witness', i.e. represents an attempt to, in small slices, lead a witness to admit to an overall incorrect whole by inappropriately admitting to the truth or ambiguity of small individual parts.
2) Some questions simply cannot be properly answered in a "yes or no" format, e.g. "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no."
3) Photographic evidence, particularly photo-journalistic evidence and especially that sort of material published in wartime, is often the victim of deliberate or accidental manipulation. The image itself may be retouched so as to obscure certain details and/or overemphasize others. The image itself may be reasonably accurate, but may be mis-captioned in order to make it more commercially valuable, e.g. a shot that is really of Bismarck firing at some time during the action, otherwise innocuous, would sell better if if were captioned as "Bismarck fires the salvo that destroyed the HOOD" The photo-journalist usually sees himself as a visual story-teller rather than one there to accurately record the event. In that regard, it is often considered acceptable (or even commendable) to somewhat 'bend' and image to suit a given narrative. This sort of thing goes back to people like Matthew Brady, who during the American Civil War sometimes re-arranged bodies and equipment on the battlefield in order to get a 'better' picture. So photo-journalistic evidence, especially in wartime, must always be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism.
4) The quality of the imagery is, at best, highly suspect for analytical purposes. Initial exposure may have been -- and almost certainly was -- sub-optimal for the films then in use. Manipulation in the darkroom when prints were made is certain. This -- as mentioned earlier -- will certainly result in distortions in image integrity. Cropping the image -- i.e. changing size and aspect ratio -- often destroys any ability to make meaningful or accurate photogrammetric measurements. Further, the images we are seeing are usually taken from the internet, and often extracted from printed publications where the screening process that was used to print full-greyscale images in black and white, i.e. in ink-dots, adds additional artifacts and removes others. The process of digitization -- especially if the copies are made in .jpeg type formats -- also results in computer generated artifacts that further degrade the utility of the image in question. The net result is that a lot of detail is lost, and a fair amount of incorrect apparent detail added, every time the image is reproduced.
5) Those involved in formal photogrammetry and photo-interpretation, at least as practiced in mapping and physical geographic analysis, tend as a whole to be more cautious in their interpretations, mostly because they have all, over the years, made one or two bad judgments where real consequences were involved, e.g. the expenditure of thousands of dollars to purchase what appears to be a grassy meadow that is really a swamp covered in bullrushes and water a half-meter deep. Just as in real life, one passes through a series of phases; the first where one (as a young child) knows nothing and admits to it, the second (as a teen-ager) where everything is relatively clear-cut and black-and-white, and the third (as a mature individual) where one realizes that a lot of things that seem perfectly clear to those less-experienced, are really somewhat grey and indeterminate. In that regard, the photos we are looking at are of such poor overall quality that they overall represent more of a Rorschach (ink-blot) test than a depiction of anything in reality, i.e. the interpretation of the image tells more about the interpretER, than about the image itself.
With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel: "A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest..."
Bill Jurens