A Canadian Family

Did You Get My Postcard? | Immediacy, Intimacy & the Time/Space Compendium of Remediated Semi-Public Correspondence

Regular readers of A Canadian Family know that I began collecting vintage postcards as a means of enriching and extending my own understanding of the local and social histories that are part of my family’s personal history. In fact, the Festival of Postcards was first conceived as a collaborative effort by family history bloggers to encourage the use of postcards as a visual resource, but morphed into a Festival of family historians and deltiologists and we all benefited from the mix.  The Festival is in hiatus  at the moment  but I’ve come across a postcard-related blog that is one of the best I’ve seen in awhile so I’d like to share it with you right now.

“Did you get my postcard?” serves as a public platform for an interesting project by a group of graduate students in media studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. It’s built around Dave’s private postcard collection. These researchers started from the premise that private  collections can be mined for their “personal, historical, geographic and autobiographical potential”. They designed a project where they would experiment with the combination of a traditional medium (postcards) with modern technology. The technical term for this  is remediation  and an example would be the posts which combine  Dave’s postcards with audio tracks. 

Family historians may want to take a look at that use of technology as well as the “Where On Earth?” section which uses Google Maps to portray the places where the postcards originated. Others may be more interested in the section on digital postcards and the use of postcards to promote social justice. Read more »

January 14, 2012 Posted by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault | . | digital postcards, family historians, google maps, postcard collection, postcards, remediation, social histories | Leave a Comment