Photo book comes into digital age

As I write this, my great uncle Cal is being digitized.

Let me explain, or try to.

About 10 months ago, Elizabeth Starbuck stopped me on the street and gave me an amazing gift. Betty and I are second cousins; we share a great-grandfather, Judge Haynes, though my link is through my mother's adoption.

The gift was an album of photographs.

It seems that our mutual great uncle Calvin H. Haynes had taken a trip around the world in 1920. And he took a camera along.

Not only did he take some remarkable pictures, he assembled them complete with typewritten captions in a single album in chronological order.

Turn the album's pages and you cross the Pacific by steamer, you watch a Sunday baseball game in Japan, you gawk at ox-pulled wagons in The Philippines, you see a street barber give a haircut in Beijing, you witness funeral pyres in India, you take another ship up the Suez Canal to Egypt, then you cross into Western Europe, touring a continent that only a few years before had been the scene of the most brutal and pointless war in human history.

It's a fascinating journey, and I'll be forever grateful for the gift.

Last Thanksgiving, I shared it with my sisters. Over Christmas, our daughters lost themselves in its pages.

But since then, it has sat pretty much idle on a coffee table at home.

That struck me as a shame. There ought to be, I figured, a way to share this with a larger audience. I toyed with the idea of doing a book, but there wasn't much in the way of a narrative to hold the pictures together. Uncle Cal was born in 1864, the next-to-youngest of the Haynes brothers. He was a grocer in Portland about the turn of the century, then he was involved in sales with the Haynes Automobile Company, first in the South and then on the West Coast. He left the company before it went under and later had an auto finance business in San Francisco. He never married, and he was my mother's favorite uncle. That's the sum total of what I know about the guy, not the sort of thing you build a book on.

Then it hit me. It was time to try a different medium.

So I gave a call to Nancy Carlson, a professor in the telecommunications department at Ball State University. Nancy and I met back in the early 1990s when she was just starting on her TV documentary on Gene Stratton-Porter.

In a brief conversation, I sketched out the album's contents while she took notes.

About a week later, Uncle Cal's album and I went to Ball State to meet with Nancy and some graduate students excited by the prospect of a project for their master's degrees.

And about a week after that, three of the grad students made the trek to Portland to laboriously scan each and every page, captions and all, into digital computer files.

With that done, they'll use the digitized contents as a jumping off point for something for a broader audience. The brain-storming is still under way, but the possibilities are exciting: A PBS-style documentary on the world in 1920, seeing the globe through the eye's of a small town Everyman; a Web-based interactive site that would link images to a wealth of data about the countries and the period in history; a touch-screen museum exhibit aimed at an elementary school audience; and more.

The bad news is that the not-acid-free pages of the album are slowly but surely eating the photographs themselves.

The good news is that the images are now safe and secure for another generation. Instead of passing on the album, I'll be able to hand my kids a thumbdrive with all of its contents.[[In-content Ad]]