Investigations of a Dog

I nearly called this post “the Great War on Flickr” but that could easily have been misunderstood…

It’s really about using the photo hosting site Flickr for photos and other documents from the First World War. I’ve uploaded some photos of my great-grandfather here as an experiment in digital history. Flickr is much more than just an image hosting service. I’ve been trying out some of its advanced features to see how useful they can be to digital historians, and what the limitations might be.

One of the coolest features is the way you can geotag your photos (ie drag them onto a map to show where they were taken). You can then view a map of all the locations. There’s an obvious problem with this: you have to know exactly where a photo was taken. So far I’ve only been able to geotag two of the images. One conveniently has the address of the photographer’s studio printed on it. The other has been identified by three people who know Blundell Park. I can’t place this one at all — it was probably taken somewhere in France in 1916, but might just have been taken in Germany in early 1917 (he certainly sent it home from Germany after he was captured). I know that all the rest were taken in the theatre at Cottbus prisoner of war camp but so far I haven’t been able to locate the camp. Here the problem is that Flickr geotagging doesn’t allow for any degree of uncertainty. It would be useful if you could draw an area on the map instead of being forced to select a specific point. Arbitrarily placing the photo at a point that you’re not certain of could be very misleading.

Dating allows for more uncertainty. For example, the football match is tagged with the exact date, while this one from Cottbus is just “some time in 1918″. It would be useful if you could specify a range of years. Although I think the Cottbus photos are probably from 1918 there’s also a possibility that they’re from 1917.

It’s easy to use Flickr photos on blogs and other websites. The owner of the account can copy and paste HTML to link to the photo. It’s also possible to link a Flickr account to a blog (Flickr supports most types of blog, including Wordpress). And there’s a Wordpress plugin, Flickr Photo Gallery, which pulls your photos of Flickr and displays thumbnails in the Write page so you can easily insert them into a post. Here’s an example photo, inserted by copying the code from Flickr:

Click on the thumbnail above to see a bigger version, along with lots of interesting metadata. Down the right of the page are keyword tags, date taken, and link to a map (or would be if I could place it on a map!). This photo also demonstrates notes. If you hover the mouse over the photo (at Flickr, not the thumbnail on this page) you’ll see a box appear with some text in it. I think anyone with a Flickr account can add these notes. You could use them to identify a person, or a cap badge, or draw attention to anything else that you find interesting. You can also leave blog style comments underneath the photo.

In future I’ll probably try to put each document in its own set, so that it makes the relationship between the front and back of a postcard more explicit. Having them all together doesn’t make it clear enough and there’s some potential for confusion. Sets could also contain enlarged details of the photos, especially things like badges. I’ll also try it with letters and postcards that don’t have photos.

I think Flickr has exciting potential despite its limitations. There are already some Flickr groups devoted to the First World War (groups allow users to share and discuss photos). Combined with the depth of knowledge on the Great War Forum it could be exceptionally useful. I’ve started a thread there to see if anyone there has tried using Flickr or would have any use for it, so it’ll be interesting to see what other people think.