Hello everyone, my name is Michael Stahl and I work for Allotropia and want to tell you a bit about work I've been doing during the past year related to PDF and universal accessibility. So first definition of accessibility which as it happens you already saw a couple of hours ago in a talk by another Michael who also happened to talk about accessibility. So yeah but for the purpose of this talk we want to talk about document accessibility. So here the problem is that LibreOffice produces PDF documents and we want these documents to contain the necessary data so that a PDF reader and a screen reader that talks to the PDF reader can make the document accessible to visually impaired users. So first but relevant documents and standards are there that can help us in this task. So of course we start with the standard for PDF itself which was initially developed by Adobe but these days it is actually an international standard. The most recent version came out a couple of years ago and I recently found out that there is an organization called the PDF Association and they make this ISO standard available as a so-called sponsored standard from their website. So you can give up a couple of your personal data and download the standard document free of charge from their website basically. Yeah and the second relevant standard is ISO 14289 which is the PDFUA standard. That one unfortunately you have to buy it from ISO for a lot of money. Yeah but this is really important because it contains many requirements what a PDF document that is accessible should look like, should contain. Yeah and then other interesting documents are from the PDF Association the so-called Matterhorn protocol which is essentially a checklist containing many criteria where you can evaluate whether your PDF document is accessible if it meets them all and then there is the tagged PDF best practice guide which also contains many hints about how exactly the tag structure in the PDF should look like. It fills in a bit of gaps that the ISO standard leaves open and so on and then from another corner from the W3C there is the web content accessibility guidelines document which is mostly about HTML and such things but there are also some hints regarding PDF. So another thing that is very useful is that there are validators where you can check your PDF document if it is if it implements the recommendations and requirements successfully. So firstly there is Vera PDF which is actually open source and it's conveniently available as a flatback from FlatHub and its user interface is a bit clunky a java swing kind of thing which you can see here on the slide and essentially you choose the PDF file and then in the flavor box you select PDF UA and you click the execute button and it produces an HTML file with some warnings or errors. Yeah but what's important to notice is that a validator is not panacea so because the validator as a matter of principle can only can only detect if your PDF document is inconsistent but the actual problem of document accessibility is that the source document has some sort of semantically meaningful structure and you have to map that semantic structure into the PDF document and the validator of course doesn't know what the structure of the source document is so yeah there are many problems that can still be there even if the validator says you have no issues but it's useful and then the other validator that I've used actually there are more validators than these but and I've been told that some of them are even better but I have used only these two this one is called PDF accessibility checker and it's only available for Windows the main user interface looks like here on the left you have a basic overview of the of any warnings that have been found and then there are some additional features so with this results in detail button you'll see a window pops up and you can see every individual warning then you have a screen reader preview which essentially shows you the document structure without any graphical fluff around it and the most useful feature is here this logical structure button which opens the dialogue here on the right hand side and yeah this essentially has shows you the structure tree so 95% of PDF accessibility is that there is a tree of structural elements in the PDF document and yeah that has to map to to the structure of the source document and the elements in the tree should be in the logical reading order of of of the document and what you can see in this example is that there is one element selected here this span element and then you can see in the top right corner the text that corresponds to this span element on the page is is highlighted so you can very easily see what your tree elements refer to and then you can see from from the tree the parent node of the span element is something called standard and this is a paragraph element we name the paragraph elements in PDF after the paragraph standard after the paragraph style which in this case is standard and if you look a bit further up there are a couple of footnotes so for footnotes there is a special structure where we first have the label of the footnote in a label element label element contains a link element and the link element contains a link annotation and that means you can click on the footnote number in your PDF reader and it will jump to the anchor of the footnote and then what follows is a paragraph with the paragraph style footnote so yeah that's what the structure tree looks like then yeah most of the of the work was actually that while PDF while LibreOffice already produced the PDF structure tree there were many details that were wrong or things that were missing incomplete and we already had this PDF accessibility middle bug where many volunteers and also Gabor did a lot of work to find these issues over the years so thank you all for that and yeah this is just a list of the commits which I did which I don't know 60 or something like that to fix all of them won't of course go into detail here and we have also added a new feature namely Microsoft Office 2019 already had this and you can now also in LibreOffice mark your floating objects as decorative that essentially means that these floating objects will not appear in the PDF structure tree they will instead be tagged as artifacts and you can set this with the dialogue on the right in writer on writer frames images embedded objects and also on the frame styles and if you enable this decorative box then you can see here the description and text alternatives are disabled because if the element is not it's just decorative then those do not make sense and then we have also added this feature for the drawing objects and shapes and with this dialogue here you can set it in also in calc and in impressive and draw um okay so some of these structure tree additions were rather complicated so one example is the the writer lists and the label element that should contain the number of the of a list item turns out that the text formatting code is very complicated and the data structures it uses are rather non-obvious in some places with lots of subclasses and so on and the way the PDF is actually produced is by painting the text so the PDF is produced from the document view and not directly from the document model whereas the structure tree has to correspond more to the document model um so it was quite clear when I when I added this label element export that I'm probably going to do it wrong there are a lot of special cases that I don't know about um and so what I did is I added some simple asserts um about rather obvious things like if there is a numbering portion inside of the text formatting data structure then we have to open the label element once and if you have opened it once then we have to close it once and so on simple things like that and then we have this crash testing server where every couple of days some tens of thousands of documents are automatically loaded and exported and well this hit a lot of these special cases and eventually over the course of a few months I was supplied with all of these documents that actually contain contain the special cases and then I could fix them so this worked out rather nicely and I would have maybe thought of a third of these special cases ahead of time with with a lot of effort but never all of them and it's just really non-obvious things like you would think that the first line of a paragraph would contain the the numbering but actually the first line can contain only some special portion where the paragraph is blocked by a float by by some other floating object and non-obvious things like that yeah then another very difficult problem was the media shapes so we can have embedded videos essentially in in the document and there are some requirements for what this should look like essentially if you do it well in PDF so I made this diagram where every one of these boxes is a PDF object so at the top at at the in the left we have the there's an object for the page in the PDF file and this points to another object which is the page content stream and this is essentially the drawing commands that put everything that you see when you look at it in a PDF reader on the page so this is PDF drawing commands then in the middle there is an annotation object so to make this into actually a video you have to use an annotation object this is a screen annotation it contains some metadata like what MIME type this thing is and what its dimensions are and and appointed to some other object which contains the actual binary data of the video yeah so this enables the PDF reader to actually play the video and then on the right hand side you can see there is a structure element for the paragraph where the shape is anchored so for floating objects the way it works is that the floating object is a child in the structure tree of its anchor paragraph and in the lower right there is a structure element for the annotation itself and the problem here was that this this structure element for the annotation was missing and yeah in order to add that we have to have pointers to both the page and the page content where of course not to the whole of the page content but somewhere inside of this list of drawing commands there is there is this thing here anode with a property mcid this is a marked content and so somehow this structure element must reference to this marked content id 0 and then here between bdc amc this is what is actually drawing the thing on the on the screen and in addition to that we need a pointer from the structure element to the annotation element and also a pointer back from the annotation to the structure element and the structure element also needs to point it to its parent in the structure tree and of course in the other way so okay now why is this difficult so the problem i think is meta files how does writer actually generate a pdf file so firstly writer creates all of the annotation objects that are in the document with the help of a special vcl class called pdfxed outdev data this is the first step so and the second step is that writer paints its own paragraphs and so on with the vcl api and it records this to a vcl meta file together with this additional pdf data class then the third step is writer paints the floating objects and the floating objects are handled via the draw page and this creates a lot of drawing layer primitives and then the drawing layer paints these primitives via the vcl meta file processor to be and this is all recorded into the same vcl meta file there and then the last step is that vcl replace the recorded meta file which is now finished together with the with the additional pdf data to a pdf writer class and now i looked at this and was wondering what value is actually the meta file adding to any of this and i just asked armin like an hour ago and he said nothing it's complete nonsense the reason by the meta file exists here is that the pdf export is older than drawing layer that's the whole reason so if we go back here this thing in the middle is created in step one this part here is created in step three and somehow you need to find this part is created also in step three and this one is created in step two and so somehow you need to to to find these other objects that that were created at a completely different time so yeah this took me some time to get working yeah okay so what other changes were there in liver office 76 so everything related to the pdf export improvements should be in the 76 version not necessarily in 760 but yeah we needed to change the default version of pdf that is that is exported to version 1.7 because it turns out that some of the attributes that were needed in the structure tree are actually new in that version and yeah pdf 1.7 is like 15 years old today so we didn't see any problem with that then we changed the tag pdf option so that is enabled by default so a tag pdf enables the creation of the structure tree if you if you turn that off you don't get the structure tree in the pdf file and as I said 95% of this is just to get the right structure tree there which of course adds a bit to the file size yeah but we think the cost is worth it to enable it by default and then there is an additional option where you can turn on pf udimersal accessibility and this changes actually very little in the pdf file what it does is that it adds a pdf ua tag to the pdf metadata and then in the dialogue it disables various other options that are incompatible with accessibility like at the bottom there is something about reference x objects I don't know what that actually does but it's not allowed so we turn it off and then it runs when you click the export button it runs the accessibility check which is another dialogue that shows you warning about the document content because it turns out the pdf export is not solely responsible for the accessibility of your pdf file and if the user just puts something in that that is poor then the pdf export cannot magically fix it like for example as a requirement that the first heading has to be at level one and if you start your document with a heading level five then well it's going to be bad so the dialogue will warn about it yeah and if you want to know more about the accessibility check dialogue then you can go to this talk by my colleague Ballard which is in 90 minutes or so today about accessibility improvements in writer and another one of my colleagues somewhere is also talking about the accessibility check and namely how he made it possible to have it not only as a dialogue but also in the sidebar which may be more convenient uh yeah which is also today so I was not the only one who was working on this um right and of course none of this would have been possible without funding by our customer data port so thank you for that and that was all um are there do we have time for questions oh we must have time for questions using the the tag or the tag tree to then reconstitute document structure when a pdf is imported so the first question is is if you if you personally or you know other people who have had experience with the tagging and have started to are planning to work on improving the import filter to use this information and the second question is that if we can use such information even if LibreOff has been generated so if we can use like a tag structure that may be Microsoft Word or other common pdf generators okay so um yeah the structure tree just contains a lot of the structure but uh it does not contain um everything so um in particular with regard to formatting information most of that is is missing so for example for uh spans inside of a paragraph we currently export language and uh if it's superscript or subscript and if it's underline strikeout or overline i think that is all and yeah if you look at format character there are a lot of a lot more things you can you can do there so um i do without tagging doesn't even have the information of what's within the same paragraph yes yes that guess or or partition into lines or yes of course so so you would get a much better result than if you had no structure tree in the in the pdf file but you should not expect this to to be a perfect result another question where can we maybe experience how this tagging information is is used in in other than programmatically i mean how it would appear or be communicated to to people with disabilities seeing that how most of us don't have those you know more serious disabilities um yeah you can you can just use the pack which can show you the structure tree um i guess that is the most obvious way i know i think the adobe acrobat also has similar features i have never used it but it won't so it's suppose i'm blind obviously this won't won't help me i want i wanted as a non-blind person i want to experience how blind person would would experience the tagging in a reader or i don't know whatever is used to make pdf successful well you you could just set up a pf reader and a screen reader and then i think that is just the you have to just try it out i think that's the the how do you say that the proof of the putting is in the eating or something like that recommend is checking out the youtube channel and there's plenty of videos on the easy so the da is why all the caps and we'll get up there youtube channel has a lot of videos on it thanks uh yes there's also some kind of virtual team while we are editing the um at the moment no you just have to look at every single one um i believe they do but to be sure ask in the dark why ballash later


Today we're going to be looking at a program called Axel to speed up your downloads. Now when you're downloading from a server such as this one here to your computer down here, now even though you have a certain amount of bandwidth allowed by your internet service provider and the server has probably more bandwidth than you do, the server may say oh for each person downloading we're only going to give them so much bandwidth to download this file. So when you connect to it it's sending it at a certain speed but with Axel does you have two options you can connect multiple connections to the same server allowing you to split and get more bandwidth from the server. Now although you can do this it could be frowned upon because now you're eating up the bandwidth of that server by making multiple connections and there's still of course a limit of your bandwidth that you're allowed to your internet service provider that's limiting and you can't get past that without paying for more bandwidth but if your bandwidth is this big and the server's only giving you this much on downloading a file you could do four connections and speed up your download. Another option would be is sometimes servers have mirrored servers so even though you have that original server you may have another server here and here that you can download from and Axel allows you to do that too. You have the same file on multiple servers and you're able to split up and download portions of that file from each server using Axel. So let's go ahead and get working and see how this works. Okay so Axel should be in your repositories by default it's built A, X, E, L and so for example on a Debian based system you can use aptitude or aptget and just aptitude install Axel of course either as root or sudo. I already have it installed once it's installed the basic command is similar to that of wget or curl. In fact we're going to use wget as an example here first so I'm going to say wget I'm going to paste in a URL for an ISO of tiny core their larger size one their core plus which is I think 75 megabytes enter here and this is definitely a site they must really throttle back users because even though the distro is real small it tends to take a long time for it to download and as you can see right here we're getting four to five hundred kilobytes it's slowing down now so around four hundred kilobytes or kilobits a second and it's going to take approximately two minutes and 15 more seconds to download. I'm going to hit control c to cancel that I'm going to remove the file that we just started to download excuse me now I'm going to use Axel and I'm going to say dash and 10 this says take make 10 connections to the server that might be overkill um depends on the server but 10 is the number I tend to throw out there I'm going to paste in the same exact URL so Axel is going to download just like wget did only it's going to make 10 connections basically pretending to be 10 different computers downloading so I'm going to do that and as you can see already we went from 400 kilobits a second we're up at 1600 1700 kilobits a second definitely just right off the bat we're getting five six times the speed by doing that now that you do want to be careful though as I said I tend to use the number 10 I've tried 20 before uh with different servers and some servers will see one ip making that many connections and block you for a while um plus it's just kind of rude to do too many connections to a server at once especially something like tiny core I'm assuming since they throttle back so much it's probably uh budget restraints they probably can afford so much bandwidth it's an open source project not the biggest project probably doesn't have a lot of backing so you know you might want to think about who you're downloading from is it worth you know uh eating up their bandwidth you know if you're downloading something from google um that's large it just is an example they can afford the bandwidth they're just limiting everybody you know for efficiency use but making extra connections is an option um another option would be you could put multiple URLs to different mirrors so a lot of Linux distributions you go to their website and they have all these different mirrors well if it's the same file you just do you know I'll make something up here just as an example something a little shorter here I'll just call it linux.com forward slash core.iso and maybe they have another mirror that is like linux net.core.iso and another one that maybe it's it's like um .uk or something like that so it's the same file on different servers in different places you could enter this is I just made this up so it's going to give me an error not found but it will actually make three different connections one to each of those servers download so you're getting the benefit of multiple connections but you're not hogging down on each server so that is another option kind of like you know maybe yeah look at like torrenting but from actual servers rather than other people downloading the file to where you're getting bits of the file from each now also another thing axle automatically will start download uh uh continuing where you left off so if you were to control c like we did up here and you were to run the same command download the same file it would um continue right where it left off you can do the same thing with wget if you do the dash c option so it's just axle does that by default so that's a quick look at axle I don't use it all the time but when I'm downloading larger files like maybe like a 4 gig iso I might hit a few different mirrors using axle and might make more than one connection to each of those mirrors depending on again I'm limited on my internet speed um but definitely can increase also if you do make a lot of connections you might hog down your own network so if there's other people on a network you might bog down their connection so we can search other people on your network but if you're home alone downloading a large file there you go axle will help it's a great little program and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you continue watching them consider going to my patreon page there should be a link in the description if you want to support and also be a little more interactive with me I thank you for watching and as always I hope that you have a great day


Anyway, looking, starting to look at those two games, a big game this weekend, a very big game, Manchester City versus Newcastle, FA Cup quarter-final, how are we feeling? I'm in a weird position because obviously the last game we played against Liverpool, but when I think around that was big and stepping up and we had to... I feel like we said that a lot this season. I felt like we had to win that game and we didn't see City anywhere near our best or anywhere near a version of our best. So now we're going to this game, I don't want to just recycle that same speech of we need to be at our best. I know Newcastle aren't really doing well at the moment, they're having a bit of a wobble, they got beat off Chelsea the other day. I think that being knocked out, I think it's going to be a really difficult game, really difficult. Yeah, I also don't want to re-up that speech because it feels like we've won, it feels like one that was said repetitively. Singing the same tune all the time. Having said that, this is a big game. Huge game and we need to get up for it. Yeah, it's true though, it's just true, we do need to get up for this game. It goes without saying at this point. I feel like we don't need to say it because it goes without saying it. It's an FA Cup quarter-final, it's a chance to win a major trophy. At this point in the season, I kind of feel like it might have a positive effect on other parts of our season, i.e. the Premier League and the Champions League. If we can push on and get to a semi-final, everything adds together. Psychologically, you get through another round of a Cup, it puts you in a positive mindset. Newcastle not in the best of form, that's one I guess positive for us.  I don't know. I think Dab is like I always say yeah on that, so and that feels like a one-off game always, like could you isolate it? I think this is a one-off game that'll be isolated. I think I've said Eddie Hall want to do bits in this. I mean, fortunately we've been on the right side of Eddie Hall's career, like obviously when he was at Bournemouth and then but with Newcastle, I feel like there's a lot of draws creeping in there recently. A few draws, yeah. And we can't draw this game. Not physically possible. Is it from the quarters onwards then it goes to extra time panels? Couldn't tell you, couldn't tell you with all the new formats now. I can't basically, I can't remember if they scrapped the replays from quarter finals onwards or not. I'm pretty sure they've scrapped replays. It's not like the Carabao Cup where it just goes straight to pens. It's extra time on pens. Extra times on pens, yeah. So there's a percentage of that happening, but someone's got to win. And I think it'll go all out for it. Like I say, just got beat off Chelsea not having a good time. Yeah. Needs to just go for it. They need to, do you know how we were saying like the wounded animal kind of thing? The wrong times we're playing Manchester cities when we've just been beat or just dropped points because we'll want to bounce back. Like I think they'll be in that kind of frame of mind as well. Well, the one thing that I would say is kind of feel like for Newcastle, their season rests on this in a weird way. They're not finishing top four. It doesn't like finishing in the European places at all with the way things are going. They've got a long, long injury list. So it is proper not their year. I saw a quote the other day. I can't remember who it was. It might have been Jamie Carger who said it looks like Newcastle are ready for their season to end. Like they're begging for it now. They're like, oh, we just want this to be over. Well, the injury list just keeps getting bigger. Obviously they're not getting the results for them. It's just stopped the count. Yeah. So their only hope now of counting this season as a success is like, I'd say get into an FA Cup final in an FA Cup. Not that I'm going to say it's a complete failure. Three years ago, obviously Newcastle were in a much worse situation, but with their expectations of the fans and sort of what Eddie Howe's built now, they want to be competing for European places. That doesn't seem to be sort of the outcome that we're going to get this season. Yeah. They want to have a really strong squad. I've got a lot of injuries going on. Obviously the Carabao Cup's been and gone. Like it will mean a lot to them this weekend. And I'm not saying it won't towards, but I'm just putting it in the perspective of for Newcastle, if I'm trying to think of, well, where's the bite for the enemy? Like what did they, what's the jeopardy for them in this game? Cup games are always important, but maybe sometimes when you season completely rest on it, it's a bit more important. Mean more, again. It means more. It means more, I see it. You know, but who knows? I mean, what are your, I won't go as far as say predictions at this point, like in terms of score. But from what you saw at the weekend, are you feeling like City will bounce straight back? I mean, I'd like to hope so. I'd like to hope that we can put in a more controlling performance, a performance that is more like City. That's the other word that we've thrown about. Or control, control.  But just a more City-like performance is what I'd expect from City after that. Because the Liverpool game was not like City at all. The only thing that you could say it's like City is that we, yeah, again, have not won at Anfield. The rest of it was very consistent. Yeah, that's very consistent. The rest of it just was not City-like. You know what I mean? We didn't dominate the ball. In nothing that we're used to seeing. I think against Newcastle, I think City will really want to retain that, bring that back, start to play our own pace. Last time we played Newcastle, we've seen, I think they'll try to settle very similar.  Which worked, it worked. Yeah, it worked. Obviously, I know, we was away with three points, so Oscar Bob last-minute winner. Just about.  So, I just think they'll set up the same, they can't attack us, and I think we'll get a lot of the ball. But I just hope we kind of showed up a little bit more for another Liverpool game, because Liverpool just, it wasn't it. And I think City had a shot for ages. Yeah, it was bad. I want to say that's it. You're going to win. So you're going to win. I back us. I'm manifesting it. It's, after a performance like Liverpool, kind of feels like you're reaching to them, knowing as to like, it kind of feels like you're reaching into a magician's hat and you don't know what you're going to pull out with City. Yeah. It's sometimes, we've seen it in the past, where we've had results like that Liverpool game, and not even necessarily the results, just like the actual game itself, where we weren't in control, where we have a real off day, where we have a bit of a stinker. And then the next game, we come back and we fire on all cylinders. And we've also had games where that then carries on. So it's like, I really don't know what we're going to get. I genuinely feel like it could go one of two ways. Yeah. I agree with you. I agree with that. It's, we are reaching to the unknown in this. Previous season, you look at it and go, yeah, we'll bounce back. Oh, yeah, yeah. This season is just so, you sit in last podcast. Inconsistent. Yeah. We're just going from loads of different games, all the time. You don't know where we're at. You don't know where we stand. Even when we're going to a good run of form, we're going like on a winning run or anything. We didn't get a weird result. You still don't really know where we're at yet. You don't know if we're at our best. I thought for us a couple of weeks ago, the Luton game was the turning point. I was free flowing football. That's some of the best football. That's the best football. That is the best football I've seen from us. It was sort of the movement. Everything, everything just clicked into place. Yeah. And we spoke about the time. Yes, you can say it's Luton, but like the movement off the ball was just incredible. It was the best I've seen this play this season. And when I saw that game, I thought, this is it. This is where we click into gear. And then we had that first half against United. It wasn't terrible per se, but it was just a bit less fluid. And I was like, okay, well, we still came away with a win. The second half performance was decent, but it wasn't as good as the Luton game, but it is United. It's diabetes. So it's a one off. So who knows? And we have the Liverpool game. And I go, oh, no, we're back to being rubbish again. But like, Liverpool was like rock bottom rubbish. Just like inconsistently terrible and not have any idea what's happening and a man city looking like they're Bolton Wanderers in 2013 and just knocking the ball up the pitch constantly. Yeah. Bolton there for some reason. Just the first team I came into my head. Full shade after half a minute. Yeah. Nearly went to a game the other day. I know we did. We did. We did win when we were gonna have to go to one. Also, the home form is impeccable at the moment. Is it? Yeah, yeah. You did win last night? Yeah, yeah. For you, man. Could have been there. I literally see it before I was like, for you, man. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we'll get the win. I don't want to be the guy to say it again, but I just hope that it is the start of us knocking some form, but actually it won't be because we'll have the international break then anyway. So let's just end on a positive note before the international break is my opinion. Get the win. Yeah. Get through to the semi-finals and then we can worry about all the final third of the season. Yeah. You can worry about the running then. We can worry about that after the international break. Yeah, exactly. See what plays come back. Hopefully they all come back injury-free, but see how we turn up after the international break. See who's fit. Then we can look ahead as to Arsenal and then just like really focus on that and the rest of the season and then just try and figure out where we go from there.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to our next to last lecture. I can't believe it. How the fall is racing by. Wanted to ask for your help for a moment, if I might. We are looking for someone to help us with database management. If you or someone you know, a neighbor, a friend, a family member, could help us with database management. And basically what that is is keeping records of all the members in the association, sending out emails. We would help and train whoever that is. So if you have ideas or someone might have questions about it, call me. Thank you so much. So now I'd like to ask Michael or landscape of our program committee to please introduce today's speaker, Michael. Thank you Carol and hello everyone. Today we welcome Kelly Helm Stuttler DDO, Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont. Professor Helm Stuttler DDO earned her master's and PhD degrees in art history at Rutgers State University of New Jersey. The main academic focus is on Italian and Spanish sculpture of the 16th and 17th centuries. Earlier this week, in fact, she hosted and co-organized a major international conference on Italian Renaissance sculpture here at UVM. Her scholarly interests include Michelangelo, portrait medals and female power, artists, friendships in Renaissance Europe, museum studies and art and its destruction. She has involved many UVM students in community-based arts projects, research and exhibits on themes such as street art, activism and art, gender and sexuality in art, and the history of Confederate monuments. She's published many well-received articles, essays and books, and guest lectured at museums and universities in Europe, Canada and the US. Professor Helm, the Prado in Madrid, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and recently at her own alma mater, Rutgers. Professor Helm Stuttler DDO's research has earned fellowships from various sources, including the Ministry of Arts and Culture of Spain, the Medici Archive Project, and the ITATI, Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies near Florence. She's been honored with the Krebsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at UVM. Kelly and her family moved to Vermont 19 years ago after living in Italy. We currently have six animals, all of whom are named for Italian artists. Today, Kelly Helm Stuttler DDO will speak on monuments, memory and loss in the American cityscape. Thank you and welcome. Thank you so much for that wonderful and generous and kind introduction. That was lovely. I feel quite humbled by it. And I'm grateful to be invited here to be a part of this group and share some of my research and thoughts about what is going on with monuments in the United States, which has been so much in the news. And so I'm grateful for this opportunity and want to thank Michael in particular for reaching out to me and just being such a lovely host, even in this virtual world. So thank you for that. I will jump right in to my talk and then have time at the end for questions, which I think are through the chat box. You probably all know the drill better than I do. As Michael mentioned, I have been working on Italian Renaissance sculpture in particular, which is what I got my specialization in at Rutgers and that is what my primary scholarly focus is but I have sort of naturally gravitated to thinking about the role of sculpture in the United States. And I think I, I come at that natural so naturally because of two perspectives. One is my training in Italian Renaissance sculpture where public sculpture was of enormous importance as a means of communication. And then from my being born and raised in the state that has the most Confederate monuments in the United States, the state of Virginia. So I come at it, as I say from from these two perspectives and want to share with you some of my thoughts as public sculpture in the US has become so widely discussed. And so widely targeted by protesters and by people on the other side of the protests that are concerned about the preservation of what they see that monument standing for. And so, again, I appreciate your time today and and bear with me as I very passionately talk about these sculptures that I find so fascinating. So I'm going to start with Italy, which is where, for me, public sculpture really gets exciting but it's also true that there are important examples of public sculpture from the very beginnings of the history of art. I certainly think about ancient Mesopotamian culture, but, you know, other examples and they're very well may have been public monuments even in the prehistoric era that were really meant to do the same things we see monuments doing today, which is to communicate with a set of ideals that a certain group of people holds and wants to sort of make public be shared in a public space to be engaged with or seen as a model of behavior, which is often how we see monuments performing in public spaces. The instances where and many instances, frankly, where we see that, you know, their situation in a public space becomes problematic over time or becomes, you know, no longer represents the value sets of the people that are engaging in it in their daily lives. And I certainly think this example is a great example of that. This is a monument to Ferdinando I di Medici, the Medici family, you know, the sort of source of money and patronage and all that makes the Italian Renaissance so exciting in Florence. And Ferdinando I di Medici was engaged in these new means of trade and transportation and exchange in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and that included the slave trade. And he had Giovanni Bandini and Pietro Tacca create this monument to honor his role in this, which he saw as being, you know, an important role in maintaining or even elevating the status of the port of Livorno in particular which was the major port for Tuscany, where the Medici's rain from. And so this monument shows us Ferdinando standing very proudly in white marble, and then around the base of this pedestal are these images of slaves and we know their slaves. And in fact have even been identified as individuals in some cases, at least hypothesized, but we know their slaves because of the way that they're positioned in these crouching poses, the fact that they are almost completely nude, and that they are chained to the pedestal. And it's quite clear that we are meant to understand them as slaves and subservient to Ferdinando who stand so proudly above them. And they are done not in the white marble that Ferdinando's monument statue is done in but in bronze, which adds to this coloristic effect of the monument and certainly is also meant to help us identify that these are men that are coming from Africa. Sorry, hit the wrong button. And even in the 17th hundreds and certainly as we get into the 1800s. I think that people saw this monument and found it to be perfectly acceptable. It was seen in ways that I think are not dissimilar from how some people see this monument today. It's a record of one of Napoleon's generals as they, you know are going through Italy, and engaging with in somewhat in sometimes very problematic ways like looting with the art in Italy and Napoleon's general comes across this monument in in Levorno that we just looked at, and really it's iconography, how it's composed what kind of meanings are meant to be taken from looking at it. And it says that it's a very distressing spectacle to see this statue as you come on to the port, and it invokes feelings of pain scoring contempt and hatred, which as he says should should disturb every sensible soul that approaches it. And he suggest that instead of this statue, there should be a statue of Liberty that is that substitutes this and that we should break the chains of the four slaves and smashes with a pick the head of Ferdinando and spread it out on the ground. So really vitriolic reaction to the iconography of this statue, even in this period when certainly the slave trade certainly existed. So that that's sort of one perspective that I come with is looking at you know renaissance statues and the way that we see them today and you know the talk as monument of Ferdinando the first is unusual and how starkly that iconography of slavery, and white dominance is is communicated but it's not an anomaly we see a similar sorts of images and paintings and other sorts of sculptures but it's placement in the public square and leave or no is pretty exceptional. And important to point out that today leave or no is quite a diverse city, and there are, there's quite a population there of Italian Africans or a newly migrated Africans that live in that city and interact with that sculpture and have, you know, understandably ask that something be done with it and have it removed from the public square. And because it's an important renaissance statue, there's been a lot of mixed reactions to that suggestion. So that's one aspect that informs how I look at the American cityscape the other is my being born and raised in Martinsville, Virginia. Martinsville is a very small town in the southwest corner of the state. Our house was five miles from the Virginia, North Carolina line, and we were about three hours east of the Tennessee border so that kind of orient to you geographically. It was, and still is a town that has a lot of wealthy people in it, white wealthy people who benefited from the furniture industry and textile industry. But it also has a very large population of poor black people, and there, the town remains quite segregated in terms of the city and where people reside in what the populations of the school look like, and so forth. And in that city with walking distance of my house it was a very small town but walking distance of my house in the downtown area was the courthouse and it was the courthouse until, I think maybe a decade ago so until very recent history. And this was the courthouse where, you know, the only courthouse in our city and where all kinds of trials as you might imagine, took place. The front of this courthouse in 1901 was added a Confederate monument and that was added by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Mildred Lee branch of the Daughters of the Confederacy, which was, and still is an active group, a social and politically active, active group, who really wanted to sort of frame the history of what happened during the Civil War in terms that defended the south and the south stance as, you know, a place where these genteel generals and brave soldiers fought against the tyranny of the Union. In that framing of that discourse and tying into that other untruths about how the Civil War was actually not about slavery, about how the slaves were actually happy and creating this sort of myth that is called the lost cause, was propagated through their work and still is both through public monuments like this one in Martinsville, but also through textbooks and, you know, it's quite a marketing campaign. And they edited the history and social studies textbooks that were used in my state, including the ones I learned from until quite recently, and made sure that this myth of the lost cause is, is what we were taught. And frankly, I never had a teacher that went against that way of describing what happened during the Civil War and very much grew up. And because of that with the mindset that Robert E. Lee and others like him were the kind of ideal southern gentlemen, never sort of questioning what actually happened what it was really about and what these men actually stood for. These monuments that were placed around by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in conjunction with the Ku Klux Klan which they very much supported financially, were really meant to endorse and reinforce these ideals of the lost cause. In Martinsville, you know, we're looking at another image here of that St. Courthouse with the monument placed in front of it. And in this image you can see that to the right of the courthouse as we're facing it. There are but a lot of business fronts will store fronts and it that is still the case that is sort of the marker of the beginning of the business part of downtown. And we have lots of nice stores and department stores and other things that were during the period of segregation only intended for white folks to shop in and, you know, even when I was growing up you would not see black people in these stores for the most part so that kind of segregation, certainly held on long past the end of segregation. On the left side of the image and left side of the courthouse was the area that began the black part of town. And this was a very vibrant cultural center for black culture in our town and had really been settled by black people right at the end of the Civil War, once they were freed. But it was an area that as is true in many places across the south or elsewhere that were affected by segregation the black schools and you know any sort of black community support was really very paltry compared to what the white part of town enjoyed. But I bring all of this up because I see the placement of that Confederate monument right at the crossroads of the white and the black parts of my hometown as being really significant it maps exactly where those delineations are but it also is meant to reinforce that our side of town very much supported the efforts of the Confederate soldiers and we still very much hold them up as a model of the way we should behave and that we laud their efforts in protecting southern heritage. I think it's you know particularly significant that it's in front of a courthouse and you can, I think easily imagine and extrapolate how a black person would feel as they were going to face trial in this space where outside there is a monument that is proclaiming that slavery was not an issue, not a problem and that you know the power of the white people in town and those belief systems are what should be remembered. But Virginia, as I said earlier, is filled with Confederate monuments but they are also found all over the place, which I think is telling in terms of what their meaning is. There are 1,568 Confederate monuments in 12 southern states. They are also in town squares courthouse lawns and in every state capital building in the south. A thousand of them were placed between 1890 and 1950 so well after the end of the Civil War. They are not monuments that would be more the norm which are erected right at the end of a war in celebration of victory. These are monuments that are actually sort of raising up the defeated and the people that were found to be treasonous in this conflict with the Union. So that those years of course are important 1890 to 1950 and are aligned with efforts for greater freedoms for black people in our country, greater integration, for example, with Brown versus Board of Education. You know, as that becomes law, we see schools being named after Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee, we see monuments going up to Lee and other Confederate monuments on school grounds, clearly as a means to send a message of defiance against this integration of the schools and to serve as a reminder both to the white people and the black people that were attending those schools about who's in charge. There are 27 Confederate monuments in Texas, there are 16 more added across the south after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act so we can really align these with these changes in protections and rights for black people in our country. But what I think is so extraordinary and so telling is that we see Confederate monuments being placed in areas that have the opposite to do with the Confederacy places like Maine, Oregon, New York, Montana places that that you know clearly had had no importance or any role in terms of the Confederacy so quite extraordinary, and I think says a lot about what the true meaning of these sorts of sculptures are. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked this overlap of important law cases or other moments in American history with the erection of monuments or naming of schools, courthouses and so forth, after the Confederate soldiers generals in particular. And you can see that here that the key years really are, you know, especially around 1890, 1896 you have Plessy versus Ferguson and you know you've got the clan that reemerges you've got the Tulsa race rights it's like every time, you know there is some sort of movement. Towards greater civil rights there's an uptick in both monuments and naming but also in things like the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan the Tulsa race rights and so forth so you see this sort of ebb and flow another moment is in 1954 with Brown versus Board of Education. And this uptick after that, you know, as the civil rights movement is really starting to get some traction. We see a lot of monuments being placed yet again in these very important sites of city squares in front of town halls in front of courtyards and for schools. So it is the United Daughters of the Confederacy that are kind of at the heart of this monument mania that happens starting in the 1890s. They are still very much identify as a group that is meant to protect and honor the memory of, as they say honoring the memory of their Confederate ancestors protecting preserving and marking the places made historic by Confederate Valor. Collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the war between the states. This is, you know, their, their version of truth, of course this is the truth of, as they see it of, you know, what, what is actually the myth of the lost cause but you know they made this statement in 2018 it's not like this is what they said in 1890. So that it's very much still a part of their mission. And even as we start to see monuments that they raised fall down, they are reiterating the values that they've always held as central. One key place where the United Daughters of the Confederacy made their mark was on Monument Avenue and Richmond, Virginia, which I am sure you all have seen in the news and Richmond was three hours north of me growing up and was one of our big cities we would go to visit and I very much remember driving down Monument Avenue and just how impressive this series of sculptures was. Again, certainly not questioning who they were why they were there or any of that but being certainly impressed by the beauty of the landscape design and the placement of these statues it's quite an impressive place to see Monument Avenue as a place where exclusively white people could own property this was written into the contracts when people would buy houses in this area that only be to white people. And then the landscape design is meant to reinforce that with the statues of the Confederate generals that marked, you know, down the median as you were going through this beautiful tree lined avenue and Monument Avenue is, you know, in the most beautiful houses in Richmond align each side of it so it is a place that very much centers the the important presence of white people and and the benefits they enjoy in the city of Richmond Richmond is a very diverse city. Certainly the representation of all these white people concentrated in Monument Avenue does not reflect the city population of Richmond. And that was true even when Monument Avenue was made but it was part of that effort to maintain, you know, these boundaries in the cityscape between where the white areas were and where the black areas were. One of the monuments on Monument Avenue is what was the monument of Robert E. Lee, which was done by Anthony Mercier, and this was a sculpture that was really meant to be the center point of the Monument Avenue sculpture series. Robert E. Lee certainly the most revered of those Confederate generals and and held up as a real model of of Southern manhood in important ways. And believe me that there are still many many people in the south that feel exactly that way about Robert E. Lee and there's been a great deal of pushback. Against the calls for having the monument removed. And these calls for having, you know, questioning the presence of the monument actually began as soon as the monument arrived in Richmond and was erected on Monument Avenue. On May 31 1890 in the Richmond planet, which was a black run newspaper. One writer really questioned what it means to have this monument be placed in the center of Richmond. And reminds the reader that Richmond the capital of the late Confederacy has been decorated with emblems of the lost cause when the boxes containing the bronze monument of General Robert E. Lee were removed from the cars. No flags of the Union ornamented the procession only the stars and bars the Confederate flag could be seen the rebel yell under the folds of the flag of succession which way proudly after 25 years rent the air. But what does this display of Confederate emblems mean what does it serve to teach the rising generations of the south. Why this placing of Lee on equality with Washington Jackson with Marion and Stuart with light horse Harry of other days. There's lacking and all this display the proper appreciation of the Union. There's evidence that the loyalty oft expressed penetrates no deeper than the service. So questioning, you know, how can we say that we are now part of the Union, while also raising up the symbols that are obviously in contrast to that. On the other hand, a white man archer Anderson a Richmond industrialist and former member of the Confederate Army, said of the Robert E. Lee right as it was being raised, it will teach generations yet unborn and stand as the embodiment of a brave and virtuous people's ideal leader. So he was very clear about what the meaning of this monument was meant to be for those in Richmond. After much pushback and discussion about what should be done with this highly problematic monument and the other monuments on Monument Avenue. Robert E. Lee monument was removed on September 8. So just a little bit over a month ago. In these two images document that but it was a very long and difficult path to get to this point. The other monuments of Confederate generals had been removed, but not this one and and again since Robert E. Lee. So I mean to really embody the values of the South the Southern heritage and those ideals of manhood. There was a lot of concern pushback and people crying out that we were erasing history with the removal of this monument. And it's just me to ask you know who's history. Are we erasing when monuments like this are removed. It is not the history of the realities of what happened in Virginia and elsewhere during these Jim Crow years, it's not the reality of the very separation of black people into accepted white culture in the south. And, you know what it erases is in my opinion but I'm certainly not alone in this is this anomaly of having monuments of the defeated. And so centered as important public monuments in the city of especially such a diverse place where, you know, instead, we should be valuing and setting up to afford values and models of morality if that's what monuments should serve. And surely we need to move on from these monuments that raise up people who absolutely fought for maintaining southern traditions, including the institution of slavery. Ralph North on the governor of Virginia and said, on the occasion of the removal of the monument the public monuments reflect the story we choose to tell about who we are as a people. We need to display history is history and use the public memorials to honor the full and inclusive truth of who we are today, and in the future. And I think that's really what's. It's an important statement. As we think about other monuments that are around the country and what we should do with them and the answer is not always to remove them and certainly it's not always to destroy them. We do need to have some dialogues around what should happen with the monuments that we decorate our city escapes with the monument lab, a nonprofit public art and history lab in Philadelphia has been tracking and doing some data analysis around public monuments in the United States, and they have raised visibility about what who it is that we have monuments of, and this is their top 50 people we have monuments to and the United States. And, you know, some of them are problematic people I think by, by most measures, including at number six Robert E. Lee, and but there's also Stonewall Jackson, and at number 12 number 13 Jefferson Davis. There are other people that are not Confederate soldiers but people that certainly did damage to many of the native peoples in the United States and to other people of color, including who need to say that who was a missionary in California I'll talk about briefly in just a moment Christopher Columbus is another Andrew Jackson, and you know I think Nathan Bedford forest at number 44 that really gave a restart to the Ku Klux Klan.  We need to consider what implications there are of that. Wikipedia, not always the source I rely on but has put a list together of the monuments that have been removed and I just wanted to share very quickly I don't know if you're able to see this though, you may not be able to so I will share this as a link. I don't want to look at it when you would like. And, but it is a list of all of the monuments that have been removed since 2020 and there are hundreds of monuments. In some ways that that causes some panic of, of folks who worry that we are causing that erasure of history or we're, you know, acting to quickly in thinking about who's in our public spaces. Some examples of monuments that have been removed include these by me, but oh Sarah or I mentioned just a moment ago. Sarah was a man from Spain who came to the United States to California specifically and created missions and enslaved the indigenous people of the area to work in the mission to build them and and service them and has been the target of a lot of protest and pushback among indigenous people in California and their allies. And so these statues have been removed prior to that they had certainly been vandalized, and these were not statues that were just in front of the missions which maybe one could argue is while public it's still, you know, a church and so part of private property on that regard, but some of them were in front of municipal buildings in front of tribunals where especially placed when indigenous rights were being ratified by the courts and so very much like the case of the Confederate monuments. We see the same kind of trajectory, looking at monuments of Sarah and my point is that it's not just the Confederate monuments that are problematic we have monuments across the country that are still very much lauding men who have very troubled histories and did damage to the people that they subjugated and in various ways. Christopher Columbus has also certainly been targeted recently. And, you know, there is the, the pushback that he caused, you know, a great deal of harm to Native Americans. And there's also a question of, you know, why he's lauded in the United States to begin with. And most of the monuments to Christopher Columbus were put up by the Italian American community, who was fighting against prejudice that they were experiencing. They kind of tried to tie their presence in America back to Christopher Columbus, obviously an Italian himself, and sort of create this ideal of, you know, Italians being at the very heart of the United States and its history and thereby, they should not be treated. You know, in some incredibly discriminatory ways about what places they could enter into what jobs they could get and so forth. So again, these are, you know, a question of who's in charge and who's making the monuments and what might they mean but this is sort of coming at it from another single of those who are feeling discriminated against erecting monuments to serve a different sort of purpose. So public monuments are of course complicated. While some monuments are fairly easy to remove others definitely are not. And these are two such examples from Mount Rushmore, which was a sacred land of the Lakota Sioux, or Stone Mountain in Georgia, which is inscribed with the Confederate generals. There had been Cherokee and Creek Federation land. And what what to do about monuments that that, you know, especially in the case I think of stone mountain that are of people I think we would more or less universally say need not be lauded anymore. And so with this monument when it is now part of the natural landscape in a really seemingly permanent way. Other monuments are problematic in other ways. This is a monument of Lincoln. This is called the Emancipation Monument in Washington DC. It is a monument where we see Lincoln standing with a slave at his feet crouching he's very much like the slave we saw in the Ferdinand of the first monument he is mostly nude, and is clearly meant to be as having been subjugated. Yes, in this case he's breaking these chains. Thanks to Lincoln which is clearly what the meaning is supposed to be. But it is a clearly, I can have graphically meant to suggest his lower status as compared to the stately manner that we we read Lincoln in the thing about this monument is that it was paid for by newly emancipated slaves. We read men and women and in fact it was a woman who was who donated part of her first paycheck as a free woman to start the fund that would then pay for this sculpture to be made. To see this monument today.  Even at the time, it's iconography was questioned Frederick Douglass who had been present at the inauguration of the monument later wrote what I want to see before I dies a monument representing the Negro not count on the knees like a four footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man. And, you know, that sort of idea of this iconography and how contemporary black person reacted to it, certainly represents the pushback that this monument has gotten today. A recent public scholar contemporary of ours wrote it's not enough to argue that free blacks and formerly enslaved paid for the monuments not enough to argue that archer Alexander's image is the model for the kneeling figure he's the one who cast. I mean is the model for the black pan here. It's not enough to argue that Frederick Douglass delivered the dedicated to dedicatory speech and recognize the role of Lincoln and black freedom. It's not enough to argue that racist imagery has a lesson to teach us now it's not enough to simply reinterpret for a 21st century public we understand that the Freedman's Memorial should not remain in this space so still cause to have it removed. But even what last week, we had instances here in Vermont that should make us stop and question some of the monuments that we have around our state. And at the Bennington Museum on Indigenous Peoples Day, formerly Columbus Day. These, their protesters put up a sign in front of the museum that just says land back. And then we see the statue of Lincoln, a very odd statue. It's very odd if you don't mind me saying of a woman crashing at his feet under his cloak and then a new young boy, an odd odd in terms of its iconography to be sure, but it had been vandalized with red spray paint with the number 38. And this was a statement to remind people that Lincoln's past is not immaculate and that he had been responsible for 38 Dakota men being slaughtered. You know, in while he was, you know, doing the emancipation proclamation and other good things he was also not protecting indigenous peoples rights. So, for example, around Vermont, like this one, the some well the Champlain Monument made by Ferdinand Weber in 1967 on Alamot is troubling from my perspective, with the same kind of iconography used as we've seen elsewhere. The proud Samuel de Champlain. Sort of hanging over this, presumably abinac, he indigenous person that is in a canoe at his feet. But it follows the same iconographical tradition and certainly I don't think really shows the kind of on par collaborative relationship that Samuel de Champlain supposedly enjoyed with the abinac people if that history is a true one. So again, just to say this falls into the same sort of pattern of iconography that should make us stop and think about whether this is appropriate if it honors the abinac people in ways that they should be honored. And if these are values about who is in charge that we want to share with young people of today who are looking at and engaging with these sculptures so what are our options moving forward and I will wrap it up with this. I think super important I and I say this with some obvious bias is to bring art historians and historians in to think about and help work through what the history of monuments are to think about what could be lost or what could be gained adversely with their removal from public sites. We need to engage the public and the diverse voices of our cities to see how these sculptures may impact them how they read them what messages they think that they send and really think about you know what histories we're trying to preserve whose history that is who's who's in charge of telling that history. And then there are options of moving the monuments, adding other monuments to give them context, adding plaques to give them background and background and take them to museums or battleground cemeteries memorial parks or other sorts of other kinds of public sites that are not in the city square, reappropriate their imagery reuse them in some way and I can show you a quick example of that reactivate to street art and other contemporary artistic and then interventions, and sometimes just recycle them this is often maybe the best thing to do with some of those Confederate monuments that have actually no artistic value but we're mass produced. A couple of examples to show you what that could look like moment a park in Budapest, Hungary which is sort of a graveyard for communist monuments it didn't mean their destruction but you know certainly it takes them out of the cityscape it shows this change in government and values but it still preserves them and preserves that history in ways that I think are really compelling and interesting. There are ways within the museum, like Fred Wilson's mining the museum installation from 1992, where by showing empty spaces like these empty pedestals on the left hand of the image, we can try to give balance and at least recognize the absence in the histories that we're telling, even of great Marylanders like Harriet Tubman Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Banneker who were not recorded in the Maryland Historical Society, otherwise. Here's an example of a projection of on the Robert E. Lee monument before it was taken down. And then the decline and digital artist used the monument and it's pedestal as a sort of canvas for his projections and they would rotate different kinds of images that he would project their candy Wiley, a fabulous painter and in this case sculptor has done this monument for this monument is not far from Monument Avenue, and is meant to counteract some of the equestrian type of imagery that we see here with that we saw in the Confederate generals and instead show us a native, you know, we see a Native American or African man as he can be read in this setting instead. I mean, a new monument was put in place on September 22. So not even a month ago, no exactly month ago of Thomas J. Warren with this emancipation and freedom monument monuments like this that can give context can tell more of the historical truth. than what we saw in Virginia prior to this that was such a celebration of the lost cause. And I will end it with that I think we should allow some time for questions or comments if you have them and I will stop sharing my screen. Okay, thank you Kelly. We, we do have a few questions. Some people who are widely admired today might become controversial or polarizing in the future. Yes, new information about the person becomes available or if attitudes of the public just change. Should we just stop building statues of people all together. Well, I have to say I'm a big fan of abstract sculpture precisely for that reason, I think, you know, there are ways that abstract monuments can or might maybe better to say monuments that are more about a value than they are about an individual person maybe one way to get around that but I also think we just need to be willing to let go of monuments when they become passé for whatever reason we need to be willing to take them out of our public spaces and say you know it served its purpose. We now see that as a problem or this person is problematic. And that's okay and move on I don't think monuments are actually meant to be permanent. Okay, we have a question that asks, what are your thoughts regarding current comments and efforts about removing artworks that depict nudity in 3000 year old sculptures. I can't even say that I have heard that I can't even imagine a where that might be happening. You know, I think America is a very puritan place but I don't think that's the norm elsewhere in terms of of nudity. I certainly don't see any issue with showing the nude body in sculpture it has, it is part of a very, very, very long history of not only of art but of the human race and, in fact I see nudes as a way of making art more sort of accessible and reliable as they don't have on clothing that sort of puts them in a particular place and time, and they're more universal than that, and, you know, certainly I think the beauty of the, the human body is something to be celebrated I say that in part as a Renaissance sculpture scholar so full transparency on that front. Okay, another questioner asks, what is your opinion about tearing down monuments, if they offend certain segments of our society. I think that the diff the important point for me is where are those monuments when monuments are on public land, then they should reflect universally held values are any values held universally that may be a question for a philosopher to answer. I, you know, I think that if there are people that race significant questions with the presence of, you know, a sculpture that lots of particular person or value, we should take that to heart we should listen to that we should again be willing to take those sculptures of our public spaces, it doesn't mean they can't go in private spaces it doesn't mean they can't go in museums but the public landscape should be a place where we find a place to build community not to segment it through problematic monuments. Many Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War did not have slaves, they may not have been voluntarily enlisted into the into the war effort. Today, is it possible at all for their descendants and others to honor these people for their service and sacrifice. Oh boy. Well, I think, you know, again, I have to point out that the Confederacy lost the Confederacy was very short lived, and that the Confederacy was about pretty specific things that I think we should find abhorrent. So, I think, you know, I certainly have ancestors that fought in on the Confederate side. I certainly do not raise statues to them around my house or anywhere else I accept that that is a part of my family's history, it is a part of my family's history that you know I think if we dig into anybody's family's history we're going to find people that did things in that history that we're not proud of. We can honor military service but I think it's questionable to do so, depending on what people fought for. I mean I think families in Germany might be able to have some thoughts about that as well right would you similarly want to, you know, laud those people that fought in world war two that maybe didn't have an option or didn't see a way out of it. So I think we have to be very care I certainly honor our service men writ large but I think we also have to be willing to accept and when poor decisions were made that we no longer can celebrate. Thank you. I think that's all the questions we have for now but there certainly is a lot of food for thought for us to think about so I'll say thanks Kelly and pass it over to Carol. Oh yes thank you Kelly this was really interesting very very lot for us to think about and ponder. Thank you so much and see you all next week. Thank you Michael to buy everyone. All right thanks again.


Okay, I'm going to be talking about the future of SVG and web standards. I work on Inkscape. Inkscape uses SVG as its native storage format. And from that, I got interested in working. I got invited to work with the SVG working group on improving SVG in the future. So this talk is going to be about what's coming up in the next version of SVG. And then I'm going to also comment a little bit about web standards. I think it's important to understand how the web standards get created and what you can do to help that process. So I've got quick introduction, what SVG is, short history of SVG. And then I'm going to talk about the SVG2. And then, as I mentioned, I'll talk about a little bit about web standards. In case you don't know, SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. There are basically two kinds of graphics. There's the bitmap graphics, which is basically just pixels being turned on and off. And they're vector graphics, where you define a line by defining two points. And I want to have a line from this point to that point. And that's scalable. You can change the size, make it bigger, make it smaller. And it's always going to have the same accuracy. So it's quite advantageous.  So the real difference between a bitmap graphic and a vector graphic is at the point when the rasterization takes place. With SVG, it takes place at the last, or vector graphics in general, it takes place at the last moment when you're about to display it. When you know what your resolution of the screen is going to be. So you can see, I'm missing a figure there. When your screen resolution is the same as the resolution of your bitmap, there's no real difference in the two methods. But as soon as you enlarge something, then you can start seeing a bitmap, you can start seeing the pixelization take place. Okay, where can you find SVG used? Well, right now, all the major browsers support it, natively. It's been used in mobile phones for quite a while. Even before smartphones came along, it was being used. Actually, a special version of SVG was being used called SVG Tiny, which had less demands on the processor in the phone. Drawing programs, as I mentioned, Inkscape uses it as its native format. One thing that surprised me to learn is that most TV set-top boxes use SVG. eBooks, EPUB 3, specifies that SVG is one of the formats that you can use for images. It's used in some other strange places. Plotplotters and cutters can be driven using SVG. And there's an interface from Inkscape that drives this thing called an egg bot, which allows you to draw patterns on eggs. It's used in mapping. Of course, it's very useful in mapping because you want to be able to change scales. They're interested in using it for document storage because it's an open standard. That's very easy. It's XML, and I'll talk about that in a second, which makes it easy. Even if SVG is no longer being used in the future, you can easily translate the XML into whatever the next new best thing is. And one interesting talk in a conference I went to a couple years ago was someone interested in using it for graphics, for braille, for blind people, it can be able to feel things. You would have a device that raises up parts that you can feel with your fingers. Okay. A little short history, SVG is based on PGML, which is derived from PostScript and VML from Microsoft. It was basically taking the features of those two things and merging them together. And it uses XML. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, which is interesting because you can then mix, if you have different XML specifications, you can mix them together because they have namespaces. It's very easy to do that, put MathML and SVG inside an XHTML document. It's easy to parse. It allows round tripping between formats, something that you can't do with HTML. And it can be styled with CSS. And so here's an example of a very simple SVG file. I guess, basically, you list the namespace, the size of the document, the width and the height. And then you have a circle. You define the center of the circle, the radius. And you say, you want the field to be red. See, the alignment isn't quite the same as on my screen. You have attributes. And you also, those things like fill, you can also determine, they're specified the field using style, which you can then change using CSS. SVG is a W3C standard. It was, SVG1 was published in 2001. SVG1.1 in 2003. SVG1.2, there's a draft in 2005, but it was never published. So what happened? Well, politics got in the way. Adobe bought Flash. Adobe was the primary mover behind SVG. And when they bought Flash, they no longer had any interest in supporting SVG at all. Also, Microsoft ignored SVG completely. All the other browsers started to support SVG, but Internet Explorer didn't until version nine. And a W3C was going through a rough period of time. They stumbled with the conversion of HTML, was supposed to be changed into XHTML, which is a better format for parsing and for being able to mix standards together. And well, Microsoft's IE6 wasn't interested in something new. Well, more recently, the other browsers got together and said, well, this move to XHTML isn't working. Well, nothing's happening, but we have new and new demands on what we want to do. And so there was a group formed, what WG? Which basically abandoned the move to XHTML. But they did include SVG and MathML in the HTML5 specification. Even though SVG and MathML are XML, they have special ways of fitting it in even without having the namespaces. And more recently, Adobe has given up on Flash. Adobe has come out strongly behind HTML5. And Microsoft finally supports SVG. So the interest in SVG has really grown recently. And in 2011, SVG 1.1, second edition came out. It was basically a maintenance version, lots of bugs fixes. And now we're ready to move on to SVG2. SVG2 is rapidly being developed. There's a lot of activity. The working group has expanded. They're more on the phone calls, we have weekly phone meetings. There are a lot more people on those phone calls than there were just two or three years ago. There are 45 members in the group with an active core of about 10. There's active participation by Adobe, Canon, Google, IBM, Inkscape, Institute Telecom, a French university. Or Institute, Mozilla, Opera, and the W3C itself. And there is some participation, although not quite as active by Apple, KDDI is a Japanese phone company and Microsoft. That's the thing that's a comment about this group now. It's dominated by browser vendors and it's HTML, CSS biased. Many members also belong to the CSS working group, which is much, much larger and much, much more active. And the comment I want to make is that most, if not all, members would not, I don't think would consider themselves to be designers. And I think this has an effect on what gets put in to the specification. So what's happening with SVG2? Well, SVG2 is basically SVG 1.1 being ripped apart. It's ripped apart into an SVG2 core and lots of modules that are being shared with CSS. And there are possibly a few modules that will be orphaned like SVG fonts. I'll talk about that a little more in a minute. This is a good thing in that the modules that are shared with CSS are more likely to be quickly incorporated into browsers, such as CSS3 colors, which allows you to specify colors using an HSL value. That's all right, you can already do that. Even in SVG, you can do that in the browsers, at least the ones I tested. Although being incorporated into the CSS and being used in HTML, it doesn't always necessarily mean that you can use it in SVG yet. SVG is a low priority for most of these browser, probably all of browser vendors. Their main focus is HTML. So just because something from CSS is available in HTML, it doesn't mean it's available in SVG yet. But hopefully it will be soon. In one case of that is 3D transforms. You can do 3D transforms in HTML. You can make your boxes rotate and do all kinds of fancy things. But you can't do that natively in SVG yet. This is also a bad thing because CSS HTML interests dominate. The SVG group can't just make changes by itself. Last week, due to some problems with Inkscape, I brought up the problem of image rendering.  Suppose you have some bitmap art, you end up with it all blurred when a lot of times you want to maintain its blocky nature. And you can control that kind of with image rendering by misusing it. Well, I brought up the group and found out when I was doing that that actually image rendering has been taken over by a CSS image specification. So we can't just go in and change it and add this blocky thing. Now, they're doing that, but it's going to be a year or two years before it's going to be released. We can't just put it in the spec now and be done with it. So there's also some problems with breaking things apart. So what is SVG2 going to look like? Well, there's the core, as I mentioned. There's CSS animations, which are not smile-based. Smile is a way of animating things that the SVG animation isn't exactly, native animation isn't exactly smile, but it's based on smile. So the way you're going to animate SVG is up in the air in the future. You can always use JavaScript, et cetera, but then you get problems with security issues, et cetera. It's not always useful. CSS backgrounds isn't really part of SVG, but uses SVG. You can specify backgrounds in CSS using SVG now. CSS color I already mentioned. CSS compositing and blending. They've taken the modes for blending and compositing out of SVG and putting them in a separate specification. Exclusions and shapes. These are used for flowing text into regions or excluding text from a region. And hopefully that will replace flow text, which is something that was in the SVG 1.2 specification which never got adopted. Inkscape actually does support flow text, but if you don't export it as regular text and you try to view your Inkscape SVG on a web browser, you're not gonna see the text. CSS filter effects, for example, blurring things, making a drop shadow that's been removed from SVG is now in its own specification. CSS fonts, the way of specifying a font. It's not the same thing as SVG fonts. So let's talk about SVG fonts as the actual design and being able to animate the fonts and do all kinds of crazy things with them. This CSS fonts is more about specifying, I wanna use this font and if this font isn't available, fall back to this font, this character's not available, or maybe I wanna use all caps or something. That's in the CSS font specification. Image values and replacement content. Masking, I'm getting short on time so I'll have to go a little quicker. Text decoration that is underlining, overlining, things like that. Transforms, those 3D transforms, like perspective transform that you can now do in HTML, that's all defined in CSS transforms. And web fonts, web fonts, fonts that are being downloaded. There's an effort to put SVG inside of the true type fonts. And the reason for doing that is internationalization. It's a bit complicated, you can ask me later, I guess I don't have time to go into that. So let's go to the SVG two editions. The first one is solid color element. This allows you to have custom palettes that you can then change in the future time. Inkscape simulates this by using one-stop gradients, but you can't then use that color everywhere. You can't use it, for example, on gradient stops. In CSS, you can style things with color, but you need to have a different, if suppose you wanna style the border, the stroke of an object with the same color that you use for a fill of a different object. You can't do that easily in CSS right now. So having a solid color element in SVG allows you to do that. Flexible paint border. In SVG 1.1, the stroke is always on top, which in the case of, if you wanna have a stroke around a letter, it doesn't work so well. It's better to have the fill on top and the stroke underneath. So that's a change. SVG 1.1, the stroke is always evenly placed around the edge of an object, half in, half outside. It'd be nice to be able to specify, I want it all on the outside, all on the inside. Well, it turns out that this is actually being deferred because there's nobody working on it. But so if you want this, you should holler at the SVG working group. Holler. Okay. Not just at me, though. Arc line join. There are three traditional ways in PostScript, PDF, whatever, for joining lines together. But if you have curves coming together, none of those three are really, and you want something sharp, none of those three really work well. So there is this new arcs line join. It came out of actually, some work in some of it, but I didn't escape. Oh, that one was black, that one was black. Common ways, hatches, common ways to shade shapes, technical drawings is to use hatching. You can simulate this by using patterns in SVG. You have a pattern and you repeat it over and over. The patterns are subject to anomalies at the boundaries and also the problematic for those people using SVG for plotting or engraving because you don't want the pen to be going up and down, up and down all the time or the engraver to go up and down all the time because that'll leave little defects. One big one. Finally, we'll be able to have automatically a marker, in this case the arrowhead, inherit the color of the stroke that's attached to. Another problem with markers is suppose you've snapped a line from here to here on your drawing and now you wanna put an arrowhead on and you want the arrowhead to point right at the end of your line where the line sticks out a little bit. So you can bring your line back a little bit but then it's not being snapped to the same place. So marker cutouts are in the specification so you can cut out a region where you don't see the path so the head of your arrow will be sharp without having to worry about snapping, getting things just lined up. Marker placement, you'll be able to add, right now you can add markers at the nodes, these pink circle, places where there are pink circles. You'll be able to, in SVG 2, put them in the center of a line or at a fixed distance along a path. Of course, my favorite is mesh gradients. A mesh is made up of a whole series of these patches. You define the colors at the corners of the patches and then the color inside gets diffused, diffused in. So here's a petal from a flower showing a patch. There was a pepper here. Two peppers and one was done as meshes and one was done as a photograph and you were supposed to be able to tell which is which. I've actually patched Inkscape as a test bed for meshes and in about an hour I was able to get a very nice looking pepper and without it wasn't buggy and with some improvements I had in mind that you probably five, 10 minutes, you could make a nice pepper. Now, there's some problems that I'm facing that give you kind of an idea of some of the technical things you face when you're working on a standard is, here are some, one minute left, here are some linear meshes or linear gradients and the red shows the profile, the color profile and what you'll notice especially in this one here is it looks a brighter where there is a sharp, sharp change in the gradient of the mesh. This is called mock banding and it's a problem that you see, you see even more when you start working with patches you get these little crosses. Well, it turns out that Adobe and Coral draw, what they do is they smooth the meshes and they're actually exporting when they export to PDF because PDF does include these meshes in there. They actually export an eight by eight patch array and if you look very closely at their images you can actually see this eight by eight array and that's something that we'd like to void in SVG and Adobe's, we've asked Adobe and they've said they're gonna look at it whether they can publicly tell us their algorithm and we've guessed what it is with, you're missing an image there, sorry. Okay, so that's the SVG two and I'll go quickly two slides over CSS animations, CSS color, I guess I'll skip this, these things, these are some things that apply, CSS things that apply to SVG. What's missing from SVG even after all this? Flowed text, well maybe we'll get that. Pagination, people would like to have multi-page SVGs, gradients, long strokes, connectors. In the specification already the browsers refuse to implement our SVG fonts, Firefox just simply refuses to implement them and Internet Explorer follows Firefox and this says, well Firefox doesn't do it, we don't have to do it. Also, Internet Explorer refuses to animate, to implement small animation believing that this new animation is the way to go. There are a few other things, I'm not gonna skip because I wanna get to the procedure of how SVG process works. SVG Working Group has created a list of requirements based on public input, the inclusion into the SVG2 specification is dependent on someone in the group taking responsibility for that feature and sometimes you can help, even if you're not a member of the group, if you help write up or say that you document exactly what you want and do a little work, it'll be very helpful. Once it's in the specification, tests must be written and there's a multi-step approval process to get actually released. And now the last thing I wanna stress here is all specifications must have, features must have at least two conforming implementations or they're dropped out of the specification. And since the browser vendors are most active, they're most likely to provide those implementations. And the problem here is we only have a few left. We have Gecko, Presto is gonna be replaced, Trident, Microsoft has actually come out and said they're not gonna do any more SVG work for a while. They'll see what other people do, so you can't count on them. There's WebKit, so that's only two left and you need to have both of them to implement something. And then now we have Blink, so maybe that helps out a little bit. There's some other implementations, but their problems, you know, I can escape those only static stuff. So what you can do, if there's something you want or need, you need to talk to the SVG CSS HTML working group members. You can join their mailing lists. You can submit comments on the drafts. The drafts are publicly available. The newest working draft was just released yesterday for SVG. And you need to tell the browser vendors what you want and tell Adobe. Adobe is very interesting in this because new stuff means they can sell new software to, you know, they're very seriously behind a lot of these things. So, okay, that's conclusion. So it's an exciting time for SVG. Thank you. Thank you.