Back in July last year I had an idea. I had been interested for many years in eyewitness accounts of people’s experiences of cinema-going. I’d collected a lot of these while researching the early years of cinema in London, treasuring the special quality they had for making history come to life in all its untidy,Read More
I’m back. This site has suffered an attack from the gremlins and went down for a week. It’s a strange life when your virtual identity disappears, even if I do have several other websites and web feeds to reassure other denizens of the virtual world that I still exist (virtually). It makes you think thatRead More
256. I remember ‘It’s number one, it’s Top of the Pops!’ 257. I remember the heatwave of 1976, and how rain only started to fall soon after the unfortunate Denis Howell had been named as minister for drought 258. I remember the illustrated history books of R.J. Unstead 259. I remember when the 1970 WorldRead More
‘New ways of doing journalism‘ was the enticing title of a seminar held last night at City University in London. It brought together leading practitioners in the new modes of web-based news production whose success (social, and in some cases commercial) is challenging existing models and exciting a lot of people in he news world.Read More
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
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
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
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!
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
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