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
Listings of
regional photographers are at
http://www.hunimex.com/warwick/photogs.html
http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/articles/photos/photos02.htm
This work is being made available under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
Another example of similar collaborative research is Judith Robertson's site: http://robertson.ss.emory.edu
Added in July 2020
Two more examples of similar projects:
The Anonymous Project and
Alan Ward's book "Photographs from Another Place".