All
Perhaps not quite so relevant for Claire,
but the Open University has now put many of its course materials online –
and they can be used as the basis for developing courses – see a unit on
photographs as evidence in family history
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2688
Course blurb below – for those that
are interested.
D
Senior Policy Advisor (Digital Futures)
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council
Victoria House,
Most of us today take photographs for our family
albums. The lucky ones among us have also inherited family photographs from the
past. These photographs provide another type of record that can offer insights
into our family history. But what can they tell us? How can we elicit the
information they hold? And how do we analyse or evaluate that information? The
purpose of this unit is to suggest how to approach the interpretation of the
photographic record.
Please keep referring to your own family photographs
as you work through the unit. This will help you assimilate the information and
assist in the analysis of your own photographs.
Don't assume that once you have studied a photograph,
you will have garnered all the information there is to be found. I am constantly
surprised at how much I fail to see when I look at photographs. I have given
talks using the same images to different audiences. Frequently somebody seeing
an image for the first time will point out details I had not previously
registered.
In addition, of course, an insight you discover about
an image in your collection may have repercussions for others. So the process
is one of continuous reading and reappraisal. Bits of the jigsaw gradually fall
into place.
This unit looks at some of the ways photographs can
reveal, and sometimes conceal, important information about the past. It will
teach the skills and provides some of the knowledge needed to interpret such
pictorial sources.
__________