Simon Tanner's keynote presentation to the Europeana Photography Group in Leuven, January 2015.

1. @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

2. 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/

3. @SimonTanner@SimonTanner
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/us-art.html
Charging Models & Rights Strategy for Images in Museums

4. @SimonTanner@SimonTanner
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship

5. @SimonTanner@SimonTanner
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html
The Balanced Value Impact Model

6. http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/when-crowdsourcing-was-called.html
Telecrofting - a tale of Puffins
Shetland Isles Museum and Archives
http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/

7. @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 jove
amb un llibre a les mans ,1839
Courtesy of Ajuntament de
Girona on Europeana

8. 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

9. The Attention Economy
We will compete:
– for attention,
– for eyeballs looking at our collections and resources,
– for time, funds & engagement from our communities.

10. The Economics of Digitisation
European 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 Comité
des Sages of the European Commission
Prepared by Nick Poole, the Collections Trust November 2010
http://nickpoole.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/digiti_report.pdf

11. @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

12. @SimonTanner
A Digital Death Spiral?

13. @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

14. “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

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

17. 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

18. © BBC

19. The advantages of
setting your data
free

20. 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

23. @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