Photomediations: An Open Book

The Europeana Space project aims to create new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative industries sector based on Europe’s rich digital cultural resources. As part of this, pilots within six thematic areas (TV, Photography, Dance, Games, Open and Hybrid Publishing, Museums) explore different scenarios for the re-use of digital cultural content, with a special focus on the re-use of the content accessible via Europeana.

The team from the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot are pleased to announce the launch of Photomediations: An Open Book. The pilot redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience to produce a creative resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. Photomediations: An Open Book uses open (libre) content, drawn from various online repositories (Europeana, Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons) and tagged with the CC-BY licence and other open licences. In this way, the book showcases the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources.

Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. The book’s four main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which will be populated with further content over the next 18 months. The three open chapters are made up of a social space, an online exhibition and an open reader. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on photomediations, will be published in a stand-alone book form later in 2015, in collaboration with Open Humanities Press.

Blog image Photomediations: An Open Book’s online form allows for easy sharing of its content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open access’, ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open education’, the project also explores a low-cost hybrid publishing model as an alternative to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.

Photomediations: An Open Book is a collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University. Apart from being part of Europeana Space, it is also a sister project to the curated online site Photomediations Machine: http://photomediationsmachine.net

Project team: Professor Joanna Zylinska, Dr Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Dr Michael Wamposzyc.
Project advisor: Professor Gary Hall.