Links
Interview 1: 24 September 2024, Corina, (creative)
Recording can be found here.
Published gallery can be found here.
Independent artist/creator of fire-related visual and video artworks.
Took a Europeana Academy course back in June; creating a gallery was part of the lesson.
Her priority is to be able to upload her own content and add it to a gallery. This gallery was just to ‘test it out’ - check with Henning how we approach this.
Galleries express her work and style of expression.
She is inspired by fire and how it represents transformation.
Even if she could upload her own work, she would still create galleries of content from Europeana’s existing collections.
To express the art, to study, and to educate the public about fire, her process and work.
She primarily has used desktop & chrome to create her gallery. She has used the website on her laptop too; she hasn’t tried on mobile.
She is interested in using videos to study fire art techniques; the technical and scientific side of fire.
She will start with the search term ‘fire’ in the main search bar on the home page of the site (not the top search bar).
Once she has created a gallery and added items to it, she will drag and drop them to create flow in the gallery itself.
‘You need to make the public feel and think; you need to transmit something.’
Interest in thermal science items, there are many in the gallery (less visual, as items, which is interesting)
Artistic inspiration:
‘It’s not about burning for fun', it’s about transformation and expression.
She is interested in ‘controlling [herself] and knowing her limits’.
Why publish it? ‘More people will find and study these materials’.
‘Fire is not only mine, it’s something we all use.'
She wants people to know that fire is not about destruction, but transformation.
Some audio items were not playing? Check with team.
Her video work is more impactful, and thus she wants to upload and share it.
To educate the public about fire art, fire control and safety.
Her main audience is for adults, not for kids.
‘It’s too emotional'
She doesn’t want kids to play with fire to try and copy her
Ok to reach out to her for future sessions.
Interview 2: 25 September 2024, Susanna (CH professional)
Recording can be found here.
Published galleries can be found here:
Works for PHOTOCONSORTIUM, mostly on social media / website / online magazine
Contributes to meeting their data space goals: 6 stories and 8 galleries per year
Also works with Historiana
She knew about Europeana before working at PHOTOCONSORTIUM but learned about creating galleries when she started there
Uses Europeana often in her processes of producing editorials
She has 5-6 published galleries and 1 public gallery
Publishing galleries
She has two types:
To group story media together in one place
Often she’ll stat with the idea for the story, and then look for images; but it’s sometimes the other way around too
She will select media, often photos as that is PHOTOCONSTORIUM’s interest
She groups her ideas and picks form there for the story
Therefore there are always more images in the gallery than in the story
(IDEA - Check transitions between stories and galleries on Matomo)
Standalone galleries with more images than content for a story
About her published galleries
They range in size from 15-32 items
Alexander Dumas gallery - has a story attached
Unpublished items = pain
She removes them as needed
Preference - still likes to be aware if something is unpublished, rather than it automatically disappearing
But could be in the form of a notification so she knows which item sit is and can replace it if desired
Would keep an unpublished item
if it still has the thumbnail; but she still wants to know WHAT it is and if it’s been unpublished so she can decide what to do with it.
Process for creating a gallery
Ex/ engravings one
Searches with fiters using the main search bar and sometimes the aggregator filter to sleect from PHOTOCONSTORIUM collections
She leans heavily on the search bar, which gets a lot (thousands) or very few results depending on the search terms - not very useful
Q: Does licensing matter? Yes, she prefers Public Domain
Q: Will she use items form any provider? Yes, but particularly those with PHOTOCONSORTIUM
Q: Would it be able to save her searches? yes, she repeats a search combination multiple times over the 2-week period it takes to create a story and gallery. She likes to repeat the search to see if something new ha been added. So a saved search feature sounds useful to her and she would be interested in testing one with us.
Q: Any other missing features? Saved search would be great, but it’s mostly a smooth process otherwise. for example, Historiana website doesn’t work as well in comparison, so what they can deliver might be affected. That’s not the case with Europeana.eu.
Interview 3: 27 September 2024, Daniela (primary/secondary teacher)
Recording can be found here.
Galleries can be found here:
English teacher in Romania, teaching for 29 years
Loves being a teacher
Worries that students' creativity is being lost due to technology, AI, etc., so she tries to encourage it
Students are 11-18
Europeana has been helpful to her for 5 years
Helps her teach her students about culture and more historical topics/media, which is good because they usually only see contemporary media
Also has a 15yo son
Her students are motivated to learn English
And thus the culture of the world because English is a global language
She starts her lessons with new cultural information to make them more curious and to give context
She has found this really works so she keeps doing it
Has a poem, video, or text book lesson and then she creates a gallery or uses other materials to create context & curiosity
e.g. Wonderopolis is another site she uses
Examples of using Europeana galleries in her lessons:
Her 3 published galleries:
Sibiu, Long Ago - Sibiu is her town where she and her students live and go to school.
She asked students to look at paintings or old photographs, go to where they stood, and take photos of their own to put them side by side; for an elective course in English that she teaches
She likes black and white images because “people’s expressions are more emotional” if the ohotos are high quality
Manhattan gallery - A lesson with 13yo’s
Started with a Tom and Jerry cartoon in which Jerry moves to the city
She played Jazz music and a few other cartoons
She told them about the statue of liberty and skyscrapers
The gallery she created depicts images of those features of Manhattan, and by the time the students looked at it they were excited and curious
It was for an English assignment covering descriptive language and also giving/asking for directions
Dolls gallery - based on the poem ‘Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick sick sick’, in the lesson she found a picture form the collections with a little girl and her doll
English past tense simple for 11yo’s
Q: Does licensing matter? Only if she creating public resources like Open Educational Reosurces that will be used by others elsewhere. Usually in her classroom presentations/lessons it doesn’t matter.
Rejected gallery
She had a gallery about the Beatles rejected because there were too many similar items (repeititve photos).
She asked that we put that in the criteria for submitting galleries.
It was still a helpful and popular gallery in one of her lessons
Another challenge: Search gives to many false positives (the plants form OpenUp! show to much when they aren’t related).
Ok to reach out to her again for future sessions.