The first thing that we did for this project was take a look at the types of photos and their different components in the dropbox file. There were a few different categories and patterns that we could see, from the date of the picture to the type and subject. Once we sorted the files into broad groupings, we looked into the history of Le Marais to get a sense of what the area was like and what types of people it attracted over time. This is because we initially wanted our exhibition to be educational, so we needed to factor in the sociocultural context of the pieces themselves and determine who would be interested in the area.

What we learned was that Le Marais is a neighborhood whose identity has changed multiple times and which is famous for its architecture. Not only did this help us narrow down what we wanted our exhibition to be on, but it also made us question what our curatorial goal was. Le Marais was once aristocratic, and was also once a Jewish community. We thought that the causes of these changes could lead to interesting conversations, which made us want to pursue a less purely educational and more open approach, similar to that which was described in the second article.

We settled on photos that displayed public spaces in the area, with our rough title being “The Evolution of Public Spaces in Le Marais, Paris.” As we sorted through the photos, we realized that this was too broad and narrowed down our topic to areas where people tended to congregate, e.g. public squares. Our goals for this exhibition are broad; ideally, visitors would get a sense of where the communities that were prevalent in the area gathered and what they saw in those spaces, and be able to draw their own conclusions about the relationships between the two. We think more historical background and context, plus a better layout, would need to be included to make this more useful for public audiences.

We had quite a bit of trouble with Omeka and generally agree with all the other posts impression of it- the site isn’t user friendly at all; we had to individually upload images and couldn’t get the csv to match up with the data.

http://evolutionpublicspacemarais.omeka.net/items/browse?collection=1