Seeing the ring:
a collaborative research project on a Nineteenth Century Photo Album
established
in July 2003 by David Zeitlyn
A school group in
Staffordshire(?) towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. Enlarging the image
in order to try and read the message on the blackboard a ring on the finger of
the woman holding the board becomes visible. This is not visible to the naked
eye, and is a small, perhaps trivial, may be not, example of what work with
digitised images can achieve.
You can see the full image from which this detail has been extracted
Photo 9
This project starts with an album of 22 Nineteenth Century Photographs
purchased at a car boot sale in Cambridge on 29 June 2003. As a social
anthropologist I am interested in ways in which photographs act as repositories
of meaning and ways in which their meaning may be changed as information about
them is made available. I am not a photo historian nor do I work on
Staffordshire history so, inspired by the Open Source software movement, I am
going to use the photographs as the kernel of a collaborative research project:
any people inspired to contribute are welcome to send in contributions which
will be added to the project website. If interest seems to warrant it I may add
a discussion list and other collaborative research tools in due course.
To begin with there only the photographs and some basic information
about them, culled from the inscriptions and the photographers information on
the back of some of the 'cartes de visite'.
A nineteenth century album: 22 photos
Summaries
People named
Named photographers
- G Renwick, Burton on Trent,
Photo 6
- L.E. Desmarais, 14
St.Lawrence, Montreal c1870 according to
http://www.
rootsweb.com/~qcmtl-w/photographers.htm#D,
Photo 5
- R. Hudson, Birmingham,
Photo 13
- Fieldhouse & Lamb, Rugeley,
Photo 14
According to Heather Dowler,
Research and Data Co-ordinator, Staffordshire Past Track this shows
Trent Valley Railway station in Rugeley.
Photographers: Fieldhouse and Lamb.
- William T Davey,
Acton,
Photo 16
- I.
Bosworth, Rugeley,
Photo 17
- Sunderland & Hudson, Birmingham,
Photo 18
- T. Lloyd, Southport,
Photo 19
- W. Baker,
Birmingham, Photo 11
- A&G Taylor, Liverpool,
Photo
3
- W.Croydon, Westbourne Park London,
Photo 1
- Currie and Bridges,
Hyde Park London, Photo 20
- W& J. Stuart, Brompton Road London,
Photo 21
Listings of
regional photographers are at
http://www.hunimex.com/warwick/photogs.html
http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/articles/photos/photos02.htm
Contact David Zeitlyn
d.zeitlyn@ukc.ac.
uk
This work is being made available under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
One model for this is the Australian 'Biggest Family Album' project:
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/bfa/fph00.htm
(thanks to Kevin Meethan for the reference)
Another example of similar collaborative research is Judith Robertson's site: http://robertson.ss.emory.edu