Innovate your photographic heritage and your future business!

Share

Prof. Fred Truyen of KU Leuven recently published an interesting article on his Digital Culture blog, under the title Europeana Space Photo pilot: Innovate your photographic heritage…and your future business! The article tells the commitment the E-Space project is devoting through its Photo Pilot to demonstrating a range of possibilities offered by apps, Europeana API’s and a multitude of tools developed by the open source community to come up with innovative models involving historical and present-day photography, with monetising potential and investment appeal.

 

Investigated possibilities are grouped around three main focus

  • Museum applications providing access to Europeana and similar resources can yield new types of visitor-experiences;
  • Storytelling web applications and apps allowing for users to create new stories by mixing historical images from Europeana and other public sources with user-generated content;
  • Augmented reality applications enabling historical images to be layered with actual experiences and other material, such as maps and social user data.

 

Silver gelatine glass plates reprinted in HDR with very high resolution give a totally new photo experience, with these beautiful girls laughing at you from decades away. Gaston Paris | location unknown (France), 1935 Young women at a fun fair. Roger-Viollet collections © Gaston Paris/Roger-Viollet

Silver gelatine glass plates reprinted in HDR with very high resolution give a totally new photo experience, with these beautiful girls laughing at you from decades away.
Gaston Paris | location unknown (France), 1935 Young women at a fun fair. Roger-Viollet collections © Gaston Paris/Roger-Viollet

 

«The web and the smartphone have changed photography irrevocably» Truyen observes. «The classic business models have suffered from this […] in particular, the IP-based business models underlying the photo industry are under strong pressure, forcing photo archives, photo agencies, museums and publishers to innovate or perish […] But of course the new situation also holds tremendous opportunities. Some of those are currently underexploited». E-Space aims to explore and exploit those opportunities, trying to find «the links between the photographic heritage content, the wide variety of general public, amateurs, pro-ams and professional developers through an intermediate software architecture that provides real role identification and task burden sharing while at the same time improving transparency on rights […] This is the place for innovative, sustainable, professionally maintained infrastructures. In this way Europeana Space hopes to contribute to the overall success and relevance of Europeana».

 

Read the full article on Fred Truyen’s Digital Culture blog

 

About the author:
Fred Truyen (°1961) holds a PhD in Philosophy (1991) and is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium. Head of the Faculty’s Computer Department since 1989, he is currently chairman of the ICT Council of the Group Humanities and Social Sciences at KU Leuven.
Fred Truyen is a member of the Institute for Cultural Studies, where he leads the CS/Digital Media lab.

 

Leave a Reply


Related Articles

E-Space creative marketing workshop. Innovation for Cultural Heritage
The E-Space creative marketing workshop "Digital Culture, Social Media and Innovation for the Cultural Heritage” is taking place in Pisa on 9 October. It will explore different ways of communicating cultural contents with the use of new media and will show how a greater audience can be reached by combining the power of social media and storytelling. The event, hosted by Fondazione Sistema Toscana in cooperation with Invasioni Digitali, is being held in the framework of the Internet Festival...
Europeana Space Jam at Culture Jam 2015
At the Europeana Creative “Culture Jam” event, closing conference of the widely praised Europeana Creative project at the National Library of Austria (July 9th and 10th), the Europeana Space project was brought to the attention of the creative industry scene in Austria. During various sessions the EuropeanaTV pilot was demonstrated and the upcoming hackathons and business modelling workshops were announced.
Hacking Culture Bootcamp SUPER-success in Amsterdam!
This weekend the first E-Space hackathon took place in Amsterdam, from the evening of the 8th until the 10th of May. The event, organised by the Europeana TV pilot of E-Space project, was challenging game and app developers, storytellers and interactive designers to create new multi-screen experiences with a focus on digitised historical footage. Winners will now fly to London for an intensive Business Modelling Workshop!
Europeana Photography review meeting: eye inside
On March 5th 2013, the Central University Library in Leuven hosted the first review meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project. Digitalmeetsculture.net editor, Valentina Bachi, was present to the whole event with both the roles of speaker and of correspondent. Next appointment for the EuropeanaPhotography project is the plenary meeting in Athens on 13-14-15 March 2013