Medievalists love their subject. As a medievalist, you not only spend most of your working week researching the medieval past, but you probably visit medieval sites in your spare time too. And during these visits, you’ve probably taken photo after photo of castles, abbeys, churches, houses etc. In fact, there’s a good chance that you have a whole cache of photos sitting on your computer from visits to various medieval sites. So what can you do with those photos? Well, instead of boring your nearest and dearest with them, why not submit them to the Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition?
Wiki Loves Monuments, the world’s largest photography competition, starts on 1 September and runs until the end of the month. It’s a chance to tap into a huge audience and shape how the online community perceives the medieval past. Images are an important way of presenting historic sites, both for understanding them and inspiring further interest. So, if there is a site you care about, why not share your pictures of it through this competition?!
What’s special about Wiki Loves Monuments is that it links up to Wikipedia and its huge audience. In July, 4.4 million people read Wikipedia’s article about archaeological sites in the UK – 4.4 MILLION! That’s an enormous number of people – and it’s an audience that wants to learn more about our subject. We can help promote this by sharing images of our favourite medieval sites to illustrate Wikipedia articles. Any images submitted to the competition will be under an open licence, meaning anyone can reuse them.
More and more, researchers are using Wikipedia to share information. The Hillforts Atlas Project run by the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh have shared a large chunk of their data with Wikipedia so that it will be easier for people to find information about these sites. Images of medieval manuscripts from the British Library are being shared under an open licence to accelerate research. Adding your photos to Wiki Loves Monuments is a great way to take part in a bigger movement helping to promote the medieval past.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a competition without prizes: the top ten photographs will get prizes, and the best image will win £250.
All entries are welcome as long as you took the photos yourself. They could be photos taken especially for the competition, or ones you took ten years ago and haven’t found a use for yet. So go to the competition website and explore what heritage sites near you need photographs.
And, just think, your images could soon have an audience of millions!
Richard Nevell, PhD student in Archaeology