Prof. dr. Frederik Truyen

The EuropeanaPhotography project, with its unique partnership involving both renowned public heritage institutions and private curators and photo agencies, offers a hitherto unaccessible view on how Europe’s history has been captured through the eye of the photographer. Whether it are wedding pictures, portraits, city scapes, sports, nature or politics, colonialism and war, the manifold dimensions that have shaped todays Europe in the pivotal period of 1839-1939 are expressed in the rich collections that we are about to disclose to the general public through Europeana. Together with the history of Europe and its citizens, a story unfolds on the language of Photography through different techniques such as daguerreotype, calotype, glass negative, etc. which had an impact on how the subject was framed and rendered. In this lecture, we will focus on the importance of the digital reproduction and representation of these images for the preservation of our photographic heritage and the lessons learnt within the consortium.

Information about the speaker:

Prof. dr. Frederik Truyen is associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, Leuven University (KU Leuven). He publishes on E-Learning, ICT Education, Digital Culture and Epistemology. Head of ICT Services at the Faculty of Arts. In charge of CS Digital, the mediaLab of the Institute for Cultural Studies. He teaches Information Science at the BA and Online Publishing at the MA level. Currently chairman of the ICT council for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University. Fred Truyen is programme director of the MA in Cultural Studies. He is involved in many projects on Open Educational Resources, such as OER-HE, Net-CU and OCW EU, and on projects in digitization of Cultural Heritage, such as IDEM, RICH and EuropeanaPhotography, is a coordinator of the latter one.

International conference “Digitisation and photographic memory”