2023:Program/Poster sessions/VHSFMA-Singapore half a century ago
Title: Singapore half a century ago
Speakers:
Rainer Halama - Wuselig
I was born in the Swabian Region of West Germany in 1957 I was ripped from this idillic life in 1970, when my father took his family of three to India where he was in charge in setting up a joint-venture company for the production of radio parts in Coimbatore. As a thirteen year old I experinced the full culture shock. I went to boarding school in Kodaikanal at an American Highschool that just at this time was in the transition period from beeing a school for the kids of American missionaries to the renowed International School that it is today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodaikanal_International_School). The unique learning experince there, the international diversity of the student and teacher body and the integration of the local enviroment, history and culture into the school curiculum probably made me the Wikimedian I am today. After three years my father was asssigned to Singapore. There I graduated from Singapore American School in 1974. In Singapore I was already old enough to roam about the city on my own, or travel with friends from School or on official School excursions up the west and east coast of West-Malaysia and to Sumatra. Returning to Germany I experienced reverse culture shock. I only learned about the concept of TCKs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid) years later. I finished my German Secondary School, did my military service and studied Generals Economics at Tübingen University, with a two semester stint at the State University at New York followed by a three month trip through the USA and Canada, mostly hitch-hiking. I worked in diverse jobs as Export Manager, Key Account Manager, Sales Manager, tried running an independant sales-representation for a while. Married late, divorced soon, got a depression, found Wikipedia. Trying to illustrate my own articles, I found back to my old hobby photography. As a photographer I become involved in the Wiki loves.. Contests and also in Jury and organization work for these. Mainly via Wiki loves Monuments I also got into touch with the GLAM community. And trying to perfect the description and categorisation of my uploads, I got involved in Wikidata. I have organized local meetups, GLAM-events and aespecially at the later ones was dissapointed that they were mostly one-time highlights, with for the most part, no continuity, or built up of lasting relationships with these institutions. I asked myself, wether we as Wikimedians, for all the effort the institutions put in regarding, time and human ressources, really gave anything back to the institutions. Did we just click photoes of their exhibits and dump them in Commons, or where these photos of any use for future research in AND outside of the Wikiverse? Wonderful projects, like Coding da Vinci have evolved in the meantime. If we manage to also cooperate accross our own projects, transfer that know-how into the GLAM-Institutions, demonstrate to the institutions, that by collaborating with us, they can broaden their outreach and also find new research tools via structured data, we still can accomplish a lot. This is my goal as a “Kulturbotschafter”. Today I live in a stable relationship with a partner that doesn’t do any active editing, but found a niche as juror in Wiki loves … contests and is very tolerant ans supportive of all the time I put into Wikimedia projects. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/2016_06_25_-Wikimania_2016-086%28cropped%29.jpg (Marco Calvo, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Room: Expo Space
Start time: Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:54:00 +0800
End time: Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:56:00 +0800
Type: Poster session
Track: No (pretalx) track id specified
Submission state: confirmed
Duration: 2 minutes
Do not record: false
Presentation language: en
Abstract & description[edit source]
Abstract[edit source]
Poster Category: ESEAP (East, South East Asia, and the Pacific) Region Session Time: 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM in Singapore
This Commons-User lived in Singapore for one school year in 1973/74. He decided to to take his own slides out of the closet again, find a way to digitalize them and upload them to Commons. See if you can recognice anything today!
Description[edit source]
I want to encourage Wikimedians, but also our Chapters to provide means for digitalization projects across the world.
The general copyright status that allows us to use only illustrations by authors that have been dead since 70 years, robs us of the ability to illustrate most of the last century.
Some of us Wikimedians are old enough to have such treasures hidden away in cellars, attics or other storage. Much more is available at our family members, or neighbors. Most of it will not survive the death of these photographers, because their heirs, don’t even recognize anymore what they are seeing there.
If we are discussing oral history projects and their validity in Wikimedia projects, I would like to point out that beyond the oral discription of what we see in such old photographs, we at least have the images as physical evidence that can be cross checked, or if clearly identifiable also serve as an illustration of historical change.
We should therefore encourage and also use our financial resources to promote the rescue of these historical treassures, before they are lost forever.
Further details[edit source]
Qn. How does your session relate to the event themes: Diversity, Collaboration Future?
How shall we remember how diverse (or segregated) our past was, if we let their rcords be destroyed?
We can open our projects to people who have not participated as Wikimedians yet. If we can show them with their own physical contributions (their photos, their slides), how these can be incorporated into our projects, we might also find new people who want to collaborate as volunteers.
But we can also integrate our own local communities and utilize their local knowledge to identify and catatlogize these images.
Qn. What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
Everyone can participate in this session
Qn. What is the most appropriate format for this session?
Onsite in Singapore
Remote online participation, livestreamed- Remote from a satellite event
- Hybrid with some participants in Singapore and others dialing in remotely
- Pre-recorded and available on demand
