Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA)

Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA) is a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under the Sinergia funding scheme from February 2021 to January 2025.

The PIA project wanted to bridge the realms of data and tangible objects through an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together cultural anthropology, technology and design to examine both analogue and digital archives. It explored participatory knowledge practices within image archives, encourages collaboration across disciplines, and develops digital tools to help contextualise and connect images. This initiative aimed to improve the preservation and sharing of knowledge by inviting both the scholarly community and the public to actively participate in understanding its history and current practices. Through workshops and user interviews, the project identified new needs in digital and process-oriented knowledge creation.

Using three collections from the photographic archives of Cultural Anthropology Switzerland (CAS), the project developed interfaces for collaborative indexing and access to archival content. These interfaces, including both graphical and application programming interfaces (APIs), facilitate the co-creation and visualisation of knowledge and offer a reflective and intuitive user experience. At the same time, the project assessed the analogue and digital phases of archiving from an anthropological, technical and communicative point of view, involving experts from the University of Basel and the Bern University of the Arts.

Atlas of the Swiss Folklore

SGV_05 Atlas of Swiss Folklore consists of 292 maps and 1,000 pages of commentary published between 1950 and 1995. Commissioned by CAS, the collection involved an extensive survey of the Swiss population in the 1930s and 1940s, covering topics like everyday life, local laws, superstitions, celebrations, and labour. The survey was conducted by both researchers and local contributors, resulting in a collection that reflects everyday life in Switzerland before the postwar modernisation period. The project also involved significant efforts in restoration, digitisation, cataloguing, and indexing as part of the PIA research project.

Kreis Family

SGV_10 Kreis Family comprises approximately 20,000 photographic objects, with a quarter organised into 93 photo albums. This collection, spanning from the 1850s to the 1980s, belonged to a wealthy Basel family and was acquired by CAS in 1991. Despite its initial disorganisation, CAS meticulously catalogued and preserved the collection, which offers a detailed insight into urban bourgeois culture and the development of private photography over a century. The materials range from prints to negatives, in various formats and techniques, from daguerreotypes to modern paper prints. While some were digitised in 2014, most of the work was completed during the PIA project.

Ernst Brunner

SGV_12 Ernst Brunner is a collection of about 48,000 negatives and 20,000 prints donated to the CAS archives by Ernst Brunner, a self-taught photojournalist active mainly in the 1930s and 1940s. His work, which documents Swiss society’s rural and urban life, is highly regarded. Brunner, who initially worked as a carpenter influenced by the Bauhaus and Neues Bauen movements, became a key visual chronicler of his era. While the black and white negatives were digitised between 2014 and 2018, the prints selected by Brunner were digitised at the end of the PIA research project.