img. Pig-rider, Europeana’s most shared image: Mr Wingfield’s Tame Animals, Agence Rol, 1914, Public Domain.

Retronaut is a curated blog and a digital collection of pictures from across the past, selected from archival content with the aim of unleashing their power to twist the sense of time and dissolve the barrier between present and past. The blog was started by Wolfgang Chris Wild in 2010 and since then it has grown under the motto “See the past like you wouldn’t believe”. The basic idea was to create a time-machine to travel back and forth into time, hence the name “Retronaut”, through vintage photography.

In 2013, Wild was guest curator at Europeana, the European Digital Library, and the SPEED selection model created for Retronaut (Seen, Positive, Easy, Emotive, Disruptive) proved simply magical at Europeana for helping identifying, among million resources accessible via their portal, the content with most potential of impact on social media, resulting in huge increase of impressions and outreach to audiences, particularly on Facebook. This experience culminated in Europeana’s publication of the paper “Disrupting History”.

Many aknowledgements to Retronaut have followed, including a pop-up exhibition on the 5th Avenue, New York, in 2016, and the first book, “Retronaut: A Photographic Time Machine”, published by National Geographic, which received top reviews.

Two further books “The Retronaut Guide to Raising Children” and “The Retronaut Guide to Keeping Pets” were published later.

Visit Retronaut: https://retronaut.com/

Europeana’s paper Disrupting History