Well, in 2013 I… Slept for 2,372 hours Sat down for 4,940 hours Walked, ran or otherwise moved about, or stood still, for 1,448 hours Ate 1,095 meals Drank 1,460 cups of decaff white Americanos Posted 3,118 tweets Sent 10,000 emails Read 18 books Wrote 274 blog posts Sent 350 texts Typed out 638,970 wordsRead More
Month: December 2013
The Newsroom
Every now and again someone will come up to me and say that they like something on my blog, and I have to ask them which one. I have produced too many websites, blogs and the like these past few years, leaving several by the wayside (Screen Research, Diving for Pearls, Moving Image, BardBox, TheRead More
Recording Mandela
The British Library has a television and radio news recording service which we call Broadcast News (and yes we were partly thinking of the wonderful 1987 film of the same title with William Hurt and Holly Hunter when we named it). Broadcast News has been recording UK free-to-air television and radio programmes since May 2010Read More
A Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year
Seasonal greetings from The Demon McGuire, a poem published (anonymously) in Sydney in 1885, with some fantastical illustrations and a Christmassy theme. Just one of the million or so free-to-use images from the British Library’s Flickr pages. A merry Christmas to all!
The mad Victorian scrapbook
Following the release of one million free-to-use images from the British Library, extracted automatically from digitised copies of nineteenth century, there has been an astonishing reaction worldwide. Well over 50 million visits have been made top the British Library’s Flickr pages, and more than just visiting people have been identifying, tagging, blogging and sharing thoseRead More
Mechanical curation
A few months ago, the British Library launched the Mechanical Curator. This was a tool built out of the BL Labs project, which automatically extracted images from 65,000 or so out-of-copyright 19th century books which Microsoft had digitised for the Library backs in the days when it thought it might compete with Google in theRead More
I remember # 8
225. I remember walking past the anti-apartheid protesters outside South Africa House, day after day after day 226. I remember hide-and-seek 227. I remember Mary Hopkin 228. I remember Ilie Nastase, tennis rebel 229. I remember struggling over seven times eight when learning my times tables 230. I remember Disney Time 231. I remember (canRead More
Eroica
Yesterday I saw the five-and-a-half hour restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), which was shown at the Royal Festival Hall between 13:30 and 21:30 (there were three intervals), with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Carl Davis conducting his music. It’s the third time I’ve seen the film (not counting the DVD of the US version ofRead More