GLAM/Newsletter/July 2023/Contents/France report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue VII, July 2023

France report

New milestone reached: already 500 portraits of geographers uploaded on Commons

Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, “world capital of geography”.

Last April, volunteers from Lorraine crossed the 500 portraits milestone in a project to make available on Commons, Wikidata and Wikipedia hundreds of exceptional portraits of geographers through a partnership with the City of Saint Dié des Vosges.

In 1990, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges launched an International Festival of Geography, a unique event attracting around 50.000 visitors every year. One year leater, the prix Vautrin-Lud (known as the “Nobel prize of geography”) was created, cementing Saint-Dié-des-Vosges's status as the “capital of geography”. Over the years, thousands of pictures were taken during the festival.

That collection is an extremely valuable contribution to the documentation (and illustration) of the recent history of geography. Geographers are seldom seen in the mainstream media, and are therefore less frequently targeted by amateur or professional photographers.

Since about 2007, Wikimedians have been covering the festival regularly, which has allowed them to greatly enrich Wikimedia's contents pertaining to geographers, but many portraits were still missing on Wikimedia projects.

In 2022, a new collaboration with the City of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges has made available many more early pictures for the period 1990-2007. The City has authorized access to the festival archives and a selection of more than 500 portraits has been digitized and uploaded on Commons. 68% of them have already been inserted into Wikipedia pages (or Wikidata items) in 38 languages (ar, arz, az, bg, bn, ca, cs, cy, da, de, el, en, eo, es, eu, fa, fi, fr, he, hu, hy, it, ko, la, lb, no, oc, pl, pt, ro, ru, sl, sq, sv, tr, tt, uk, vi).

The selection includes portraits of world-renowned geographers such as Jacqueline Bonnamour, Paul Claval, Françoise Cribier, Yves Lacoste, Thérèse Saint-Julien from France, Antoine Bailly, Bruno Messerli and Heinz Wanner from Switzerland, Peter Haggett, Doreen Massey from the United Kingdom, Bertha Becker or Milton Santos from Brazil , Ronald F. Abler or Peter Gould from the United States, as well as prominent authors and personalities who attended the festival, such as Yamina Benguigui, Georges Charpak, François Cheng, Françoise Héritier, Ahmadou Kourouma, Jean Malaurie, Erik Orsenna, Léon Schwartzenberg, Haroun Tazieff or Théodore Zeldin.