Folkwang Photo Talk by Verena Kick

17.11.2022

Our »Folkwang Photo Talks« series continues on November 17, 2022, with Verena Kick from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Currently, Verena is a research fellow at the KWI in Essen, thus it is a welcome opportunity to invite her to our university. She will speak about

Stop writing! Curate! Digital Curation and Photobook Research

When defining Digital Humanities, it is often about how a research question can be approached with digital methods or tools. When thinking of digital curation (a part of Digital Humanities), at first the curation of exhibitions online may come to mind, which was a necessary step once the Covid-19 pandemic started to spread globally in 2020, and museums and other cultural institutions had to close to the public. My contribution to the Photo Talk series is about a different kind of curation: neither museum curators nor archivists are the curators in this case, but scholars who curate their research in a digital way. In their act of digital curation, it is not only their primary work—in my case the photobook—that is curated online, but also their related research and argumentation. 
Digital curation enables researchers to move away from presenting their research in a primarily written way. They may, for instance, choose a mainly visual way, which, in turn, allows experiencing the primary work differently, possibly gaining new perspectives and insights. In this talk, I will present my digital project on a Weimar Germany photobook as an example of digital curation. On the one hand, I showcase how to possibly curate a photobook online, and on the other, I want to demonstrate how this approach can change the way the photobook is seen and experienced, possibly also opening up different and new ways of understanding it.

The talk will take place on November 17, 2022, at the Quartier Nord, room 2.13. Registration is not required. All friends of photography, and of the photobook in particular, are welcome!