Leverhulme Lecture by Prof Joan Schwartz - 'Between Analogue Photographs and their Digital Surrogates'

Under pressure from institutions, funders and users, collections managers often make photographs available online as searchable single items. In the process, meaningful information about the physical and intellectual contexts of creation, circulation, and viewing is sacrificed at the altar of speed, quantity, convenience, and the almighty dollar. In this lecture, Prof Schwartz is concerned with troubling changes, subtle and otherwise, brought about by digitization, whereby in the name of searchability important information about materiality, context, and meaning are often lost. Drawing on professional experience as a photo-archivist and scholarly interests as a photographic historian, she critiques examples of digitization and description initiatives, with a view to highlighting their potential pitfalls and encouraging best practices grounded in a deeper understanding of the power of photography as a form of visual communication. The result, she argues, is a broader appreciation of the critical differences between search and research, content and meaning underpinning access to and use of online images by cultural and historical geographers.