Below is the text of a paper I gave recently at ‘Language Matters‘, the 5th Transfopress Encounter in Paris. Transfopress is an international network of archivists, librarians and scholars interested in the study of foreign language press. The subject of this conference was printed news in English abroad and foreign-language publishing in the English-speaking world.Read More
Category: Work
New ways of seeing
Here’s what tomorrow looks like. At last week’s Google Cloud Next Conference held in San Francisco, Google announced a new API (application programme interface) entitled Cloud Video Intelligence. With such an application, developers will be able to detect objects within videos and make them word-searchable, as well as detecting scene changes and tagging objects accordingly.Read More
R.U.R.
According to the BBC’s handy calculator, Will a robot take your job?, there is a 38% chance of my being replaced by a robot at some point in the future. Out of a list of 366 jobs, based on research by Oxford University, a curator (or archivist) comes in at number 206 of jobs atRead More
Analysing the past
There are exciting changes happening in how we use newspapers to study the past. After decades in which the use of newspapers in research meant leafing through volumes or scrolling through microfilms, digitisation made millions of newspapers more readily searchable and far more widely available. But now that digitisation that taken us to the nextRead More
What is radio?
At the British Library we are in the middle of a major programme entitled Save our Sounds, which I’ve mentioned before. Its goal is to to preserve the nation’s sound heritage, or at least a good proportion of it. Much of the programme is concentrated on historical sounds, too often held on formats at riskRead More
From print to digital
This is the text of a blog post on the archiving of news which I wrote recently for the British Library’s Newsroom blog. Wherever possible – or wherever it interests me – I’m reproducing texts here which have been written on other platforms. The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are toRead More
Céline and Julie go to the library
At the British Library (the institution which kindly helps me keep body and soul together) we regularly make promotional videos. They are snappy little numbers, designed to show what a bright, inviting and relevant place the Library is. The editing is brisk, the graphics float informatively over the screen, and the music is toe-tapping. YetRead More
Audiovisual archives and the web
This is the text of the talk I gave on 29 January 2016 at the Institute of Historical Research’s Winter Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘The Production of the Archive‘, and I was asked to say something about sound and/or moving image archives in a section of the day called ‘Beyond text andRead More
Something in the air
In all of the long and notable histories of the UK’s national film archive and its national sound archive only one person – to the best of my knowledge – has worked for both institutions. Me. This is not through any great archival ability stretching across the two media. My contributions to film archiving haveRead More
Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War centenary?
Deep indeed is our need of round numbers. We count the past in intervals of ten, fifty or a hundred years, making sure that we are standing in the right place and composed of the right thoughts when the time comes round to commemorate the historically momentous. Anniversaries and centenaries seem always to be uponRead More