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Modes of Seeing: Case Studies on the Use of Digitized Photographic Archives

Digital humanities scholarship has expanded beyond its deep foundations in text analysis to find new meaning and knowledge through the creative reuse of historical photographs and other visual resources. Visual studies scholars in the humanities who wish to work primarily in the digital domain face a fundamental dilemma in the choice either to create “purpose-built” thematic collections tailored to specific studies (Palmer, 2008) or to make use of collections digitized for general purposes by an archives, a library, or other cultural heritage organization. “General-purpose” digital library collections are simultaneously mechanisms for delivering digital surrogates of archival holdings and new archival collections in their own right that reflect the decisions that digital curators make throughout the digitization process (Ross, 2007; Conway, 2008). The research issues associated with the actual use in humanities contexts of these large-scale general-purpose collections of digital images are profound and as yet largely unexplored (Saracevic, 2004). Concluding an important study establishing a typology of use in image retrieval, Graham (2004, p. 324) observes that “these uses do not tell us what was actually done with the images once they had been found.”