2. Recreating 19th-Century Stereography for a Scholarly Public

Abstract

Current digital archives of stereocards, a popular form of early photography, offer only 2D scans of the cards' fronts. Such archives make large numbers of stereocards accessible, retrievable and searchable, but lack the informed, interpretive guidance that non-specialist users might expect. They also omit the information on stereocards' backs and privilege the photographs on the stereocards without attention to context or interpretation. Drawing on techniques of new media "edutainment," my virtual exhibit contextualizes and interprets stereocards from the Queen's University Special Collections Library in a way that is friendly to non-specialist audiences while organically promoting humanities research through features such as textual popups and hyperlinks to sources (where available online or in QCAT). Animated GIFs of the stereographs allow users to see the image in three dimensions—something that was available to a 19th-century audience but not necessarily to a 21st-century one. My project looks beyond the popular assumption that new media seeks, or should seek, to uncritically reproduce the experience of past media. Rather, I examine how new media allows us to be critical of past perspectives and biases in ways that were previously unavailable—while still remaining critical of my project's own limitations and potential biases. With the advent of digital media and the Digital Humanities, I argue that the time is ripe to rethink new media's relationship to old media and the past, as well as how to communicate this knowledge in ways that push beyond traditional notions of an academic digital archive.