Views of the World. Digitisation and cataloging of photographic archives of important explorers

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thomas Bürger; Professor Dr. Gilbert Lupfer, since 4/2016
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265081894

The project will digitise a selection of the photographic legacy produced by German explorers be-tween 1870 and 1950, enrich it with descriptive metadata and publish it in the image database of the Deutsche Fotothek (German Photographic Collection of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden [SLUB]). The legacy represents an internationally important photographic documentation of scientific explorations for the purpose of regional studies research from the collections of the Deutsche Fotothek and the Ethnographic Collections of the Saxon State (SES). The photographs were taken by renowned explorers, ethnologists, anthropologists and geographers, including Carl Troll (1899-1975), Günter Tessmann (1884-1969), and Karl Weule (1864-1926). The ca 85,000 mostly unique photographic sources document the history of the investigation and documentation of the world by German scientists in the 19th and 20th century. Collectively, they allow an insight into life, culture and environment in all continents. While the photographs were taken with a variety of research intentions and thus provide a view of the world from specific points of view, they trans-cend the Eurocentric perspective and, as a collection, open up the opportunity for a transnational understanding.Despite their status as first rank sources these materials lead a hidden existence, as most similar sources. While said collections are kept at public archives, they are insufficiently catalogued or indexed, if at all, and therefore poorly accessible to researchers.This project will considerably improve the structural prerequisite for an interdisciplinary discourse within historical research by making selected photographical collection digitally available. The im-age sources are not only relevant to the discipline within and for which they were originally created. They are furthermore essential for a variety of image-based research approaches. The aim of the project is therefore to facilitate the contextualisation of these materials with related materials doc-umenting expeditions and travels and the collection of artefacts and natural produce, thus expand-ing the scope of interdisciplinarity to include the exchange between archival institutions and aca-demic research. It will promote this by licensing the descriptive metadata under CC0 licences and by making the digitised photographs available for research purposes as fully available and re-usable digital images in order for said materials to be harvest via an OAI/PMH interface by the German Digital Library, Europeana, and research information services, or indeed any other re-search information hub.The likely research impact will not be confined to Germany or Europe. Researchers from countries depicted in the photographs will equally profit from the output by gaining sources for and witness to their history, providing an additional foundation for furthering the transcontinental discourse.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Sebastian Lentz
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Hartwig Fischer, until 3/2016