Photo Restoration Live Streams: A Pedagogical Practice
In celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2020 on November 5, we’re sharing a series of posts by University of Pittsburgh Library System librarians and archivists that highlight their expertise and work to preserve the digital!
This post was written by Dan Kaple, Digital Creation Specialist for the University of Pittsburgh Library System
As a unit within Digital Scholarship Services, The Digital Stewardship Lab has a tradition of providing hands-on access to digitization tools for members of the University of Pittsburgh community. We provide patrons the necessary training and access to both 2D and 3D digitization tools as well as one-on-one project consultation. One of the more common projects we have assisted with is personal archiving. Patrons have used the Stewardship Lab to scan materials from their own personal family histories with the purpose of preserving these for future generations.
With the onset of COVID-19, the Stewardship Lab had to suspend its hands-on services and, as a result, find new ways of supporting and providing instruction for digital creation and digital preservation. One way we have done this is to produce a series of live stream events. These live streams present a project-oriented workspace with the intention of demystifying the digital creation tools and exposing users to the workflow and problem-solving processes.
One of our most popular segment topics is photo restoration. Given our instructional focus, we view photo restoration as a pedagogical activity and have found that it presents us with several opportunities. Working on photo restoration projects is a good way to show digital creation tools at work; to explore the thought process that goes into making specific problem-solving solutions, and from a digital preservation perspective, it provides an opportunity to explore photo restoration best practices. During live streams we discuss how to work non-destructively on our photographs in Photoshop. We demonstrate tips and tricks for fixing particularly difficult cases of image damage or staining. We also discuss more conceptual issues such as the ethical line between photo restoration and photo enhancement or manipulation.
Our goal is to get attendees excited and interested in restoration, leading to broader conversations about digital creation and digital preservation and how both are essential for academic research as well as historic and cultural conservation. We want attendees to consider how that photograph of Great Grandma can tell us a lot about broader issues concerning society, culture, and class during her lifetime; to recontextualize these family relics and imbue them with greater value. We want them to think about how digital preservation is relevant in their own lives. To start thinking about the long-term care of modern, born-digital materials, our social media feeds, and online repositories, so we can reevaluate them as the cultural relics of the future.