Historic GIFs wot I did
I spent just over a year at the Bodleian being sassy on social media and making GIFs out of centuries-old collections.
The animation of the Bodleian’s collections lent them new life. Beautiful images painstakingly made by monks and illustrators hundreds of years ago leapt from their pages anew onto Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds.
At times I thought that altering these images verged on the sacrilegious, but their animation brought them more attention than they ever would have if they remained static. We used them to celebrate national days, to tell people it was hot in Oxford, to show the meaning of an illustration, to be stupid and to make people laugh.
Our first experiment marked St Patrick’s Day and driving the snakes out of Ireland.
Could it be interpreted as offensive? Perhaps.
Did anybody complain? The complete opposite — people loved it.
Our GIFs were sometimes a perversion of what the illustration intended. This scene of damnation, for instance, was most often used light-heartedly on hot summer days in Oxford:
And others were heavily altered to fit in with hashtags such as:
#InternationalCoffeeDay…
The death of Dr Heimlich…
#YorkshireDay…
The anniversary of Dolly the Sheep’s cloning…
#WorldBeardDay…
And the Oxbridge Boat Race.
A lack of hashtags didn’t get in the way of a good GIF though.
If they didn’t exist, I made them up. Like #InternationalJumpThroughARingDay.
Others pushed the boundaries and took tentative steps into meme territory, or were just plain silly…
I also explored how animation could convey the intention of an image, such as this anamorphic head:
And this myriorama, when animated, suddenly made sense:
GIFs also allowed us to reimagine past events, such as when a couple of statues fell off the Clarendon Building…
Or bring to life the beautiful cosmic illustrations of the Duce Pliny…
And the 57 beasts and fish making up Alexander the Great’s Horse from Manchester’s John Rylands Library (then on loan to the Bod)…
In short, animating our historic collections is a good thing.
They can enlighten and they can entertain, and that is what museums and libraries should be doing.
Many online collections are now free to remix and reshare (as long as you don’t make money from it), so go download something, learn how to use GIMP or Photoshop, and animate something stupid.
All of these images have been used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence. Follow the Bodleian on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr.
(The ones that got away)
Not all GIFs are created equal though. Two of them in particular stand out.
The first was a GIF which did not do so well. It was made to celebrate World Chocolate day but, lacking any medieval illustrations of chocolate, I improvised with a Yorkie and a bear. It ended up looking just weird:
And another was made simply because the original illustration was so weird that it demanded to be animated. The weirdly sexual result, though, never made it to a Bodleian account:
