From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/06/03, 06:24 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.10) The next review, continuing the second pass through the Chess History 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