08 February 2012

A famous painting entitled "TYWKIWDBI"


I was startled to encounter the above on the web yesterday.  It comes from a blog entitled Reading for Pleasure, which apparently was created by a teacher as a vehicle for his students to publish and share their homework assignments.

In 2010 I posted an image of the painting, The Last of the Mohicans, by nineteenth-century American artist Thomas Cole.  The student who created the post in the screencap above apparently searched Google Images for "Thomas Cole."  When you do that, for inexplicable (to me) reasons, the first image that appears is the one I used, but the Google link goes, not to my post (where the painter and title are specified), but to a Picasa Web Album page, where the photo is said to "belong to" TYWKIWDBI.

The misattribution of the painting is of course of no consequence, and I think it's wonderful that these students are learning about classic art and literature, but someone needs to talk to them a little bit about sourcing and crediting material; I scrolled back to the beginning of the blog and don't see any evidence that any student has ever created a link to any source.

3 comments:

  1. I wonder how many people now think TYWKIWDBI is a Native American word and wonder what it means...

    -Chipper

    ReplyDelete
  2. An accquaintance had this happen...
    http://fairfieldtowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/shaggy-dogs-and-transpondian-colleges/

    The "shed" referred to is uk.rec.sheds - usenet for those who remember such things and Arkell vs Pressdram is worth a quick search, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank goodness Thomas Cole took up blogging!

    ReplyDelete