SGER: To Establish Links Between a Digitized Photographic Archive Dating From 1953 and a Computerized, Nominally Based, Demographic and Economic Data Base of a Village Community

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project will be undertaken by Dr. Joel M. Halpern, who has conducted research in the Serbian village of Orasac for over fifty years. In addition to numerous publications, his research has produced a collection of 4006 photographs. Halpern has deposited copies of his materials at the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF); there, the photos were digitized and preliminary labeling done. Now he will take the photo data base back to Orasac to have older members of the community identify the photos, locate the pictured individuals in kinship networks, and link them to detailed official census records (of landholdings, tax records, and demographics) that date back to the 1860s. Eventually links also will be made to descriptive interviews, tape recordings and to an existing ethnographic film concerning the researchers and the community. Thus the goal of the project is not simply to better label photographs, but also to generate new information about Orasac kinship changes structure over time, as well as other aspects of social and economic change. The research also will contribute to analytical, historically oriented ethnologies of science, and protect this unique collection for future generations of researchers, both in the United States and in Europe. Because the informants who can best contribute to this project are aging, the research meets the SGER criterion of urgent research to collect ephemeral data.