@SimonTanner

The Impact of Digitization on Photographic Heritage

Simon Tanner

Department of Digital Humanities,

King’s College London

Twitter: @SimonTanner

01/02/2015 17:45 ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 1

Digital Humanities:

the application of digital technology to humanities disciplines

reflection upon the impact of digital media upon humanity

> 50 academics & researchers

~ £2.5 million research income per annum

>5 million digital objects, 130+projects

200+million hits over 5 years: 2009-2013

www.kcl.ac.uk/ddh/

@SimonTanner@SimonTanner

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/us-art.html

Charging Models & Rights Strategy for Images in Museums

@SimonTanner@SimonTanner

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html

Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship

@SimonTanner@SimonTanner

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html

The Balanced Value Impact Model

http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/when-crowdsourcing-was-called.html

Telecrofting - a tale of PuffinsShetland Isles Museum and Archives

http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/

@SimonTanner@SimonTanner

“the daguerreotype image was as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, fleeting and much more difficult to reproduce than an engraving. There was a general consensus that photography would become a force only once it could produce durable, infinitely repeatable images...”

Aubenas, S., ‘The photograph in print. Multiplication and stability of the image’. In: M. Frizot (editor), A new history of photography. Köln (Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft),1998, pp. 225-231.

Where we started from

Retrat d'estudi d'una dona joveamb un llibre a les mans ,1839Courtesy of Ajuntament de Girona on Europeana

How many photos have ever been taken?http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-in-shoebox

What happened next? ~3 Trillion Photos

Approx. 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook, and roughly

350 million photos are uploaded every day

The Attention Economy

We will compete:

– for attention,

– for eyeballs looking at our collections and resources,

– for time, funds & engagement from our communities.

The Economics of DigitisationEuropean museums house >485 million photographs

Library collections > 34 million

Archives > 8.3 million

Approximately 90% of the photographic record is recorded as orphaned

“Based on 8.64m photographs (30% of the total estimated un-digitised holdings)... can estimate the total cost range between €14m and €19.44m to digitise 8.64m photographs across European libraries. “

“of all of our estimates, this one is perhaps prone to the greatest margin of error “

The Cost of Digitising Europe’s Cultural Heritage A Report for the Comitédes Sages of the European Commission Prepared by Nick Poole, the Collections Trust November 2010http://nickpoole.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/digiti_report.pdf

@SimonTanner

Curation Challenges & Unfunded Mandates

Digitisation

Web Archiving

Collection Development

Material heritage

Intellectual

heritage

Digital Preservation

Virtual

heritage

Web 2.0 /

Interactive heritage

User Generated Content

Born digital

Preservation

&

Conservation

@SimonTanner

A Digital Death Spiral?

@SimonTanner

“digitisation = funding”

“Digital is everything today”

“who knows how much it’ll cost, but digital’s bound to be wonderful”

“Planning is so 20th Century, let’s be Agile”

“cos our competition / Google / my mate is doing it”

“cos if we build it, they will come!”

Signs you are in the Digital Death Spiral

“the measurable outcomes arising from the existence of a digital resource that demonstrate a change in the life or life opportunities of the community”

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html

A Glance at the Future

“things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only... the spinning of the given moment's scenarios.”

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

© BBC

The advantages of setting your data free

We have 125,000 art works available in high resolution. Anything you want, you can do with it...

So now we can say “I love Rijks”, the Rijksmuseum was a very dull, traditional museum and now we can say proudly “I love Rijks”...

So if you think about impact then maybe love is the biggest impact. Peter Gorgels

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW17d-OQsIs

I love Rijks

@SimonTanner

The Impact of Digitization on Photographic Heritage

Simon Tanner

Department of Digital Humanities,

King’s College London

Twitter: @SimonTanner

01/02/2015 17:45 ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 23