Welcome to the Photo Gallery
Introduction
Written documents are the traditional bedrock of historical scholarship, but recently historians of modern science and technology have come to appreciate the potential that visual materials offer in adding to our understanding of the daily life of scientific and technological research. Photographs of daily activities, architectural and floor plans, even seating arrangements at banquets can provide evidence of informal collaborations, lines of communication, and influences not recorded in written texts. This is particularly valuable information for scholars reconstructing the work of innovative, interdisciplinary groups, in which unorthodox influences and unlikely collaborations can be especially important-- and maddeningly difficut to reconstruct.
At the same time, pictures are hard to decode. People can be hard to identify, settings obscure, or contain critical details that escape anyone who wasn't a participant. With this in mind, we have created a Photo Gallery featuring roughly 600 photographs taken at the SRI Augmentation Research Center in the early 1970s. These pictures were donated to the MouseSite by Douglas Engelbart in 1999. Our objective in making these available is to stimulate memories and encourage feedback from participants, and to provide visual documentation of the ARC's work and environment for future scholars. Ultimately, we hope that the Gallery will contain both images and the information necessary to interpret them.
Organization
The Gallery is accessed via several pages of thumbnails. Each thumbnail is hyperlinked to a page containing a larger version of that picture, and other pages of the same person; a few other pictures show groups of people, or events. As we acquire information about the pictures' dates and contents, we will add them to the the pages.
A collection of images of artifacts-- mice, key chord sets, workstations-- can also be viewed. Finally, there are images of spaces, meetings, and people using the NLS.
Feedback
Several photographs are featured in the Forum, the MouseSite's arena for discussing documents, artifacts, and events related to the ARC and its work. There, visitors can help us identify people, places, technologies, and events in pictures. If you recognize (or are) a person in a picture, we invite you to contribute. We're particularly interested in gathering material about who people in featured pictures were, knowing what work they did in the ARC (both their official job descriptions and real work-- which are sometimes quite different), and learning more about their subsequent careers.
If you have information that you would like to share about pictures not in the Forum, please feel free to e-mail us. Please make sure to include the URL of the page you are commenting on.