PHOTHEREL (PHOTographic HERitage ELearning)

PHOTHEREL was a Socrates (Minerva) project, financed by the European Commission, through which four partners combined their experience: The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen (Belgium), the Service de la Formation Continue of the Universite Toulouse2-Le Mirail (France) and the Centre of Excellence for the Study of the Image (CESI) of the University of Bucharest (Romania). The project mainly aimed at developing a methodology for a "justified" digitization of photographic heritage. The basic assumption was that the digitization of photographic heritage involves more than the technical operations of digital storing of complete classic archives. Digitization can only be called "justified" if the technical process is accompanied by an effort to propose a cultural framing for the digitized material. An image is not only an object that is "seen", but most of all an object that has to interpreted and understood. Concretely the project resulted in a portal site that offers access to: an online course on how to read a photographic image, an online guide on how to digitize photographs and two online exhibitions, developed according to the general principles of PHOTHEREL. All project results are freely available under a creative commons license.

NOTE: This project ended in October 2005.