Picturegoers

Nine years ago I started up a website that gathered examples of eyewitness testimony from people going to see motion pictures. I called it Picturegoing, which felt catchy, and the dot com address was available. Today, I am happy to announce, the book version has been published. The book is entitled Picturegoers – because aRead More

Encountering the news

One of the special features of the British Library’s Breaking the News exhibition is a large-scale panorama, created by designers Northover&Brown. Objects and graphics have been placed into flowing pictures of networks, places and people, tracing the changing ways in which we have discovered the news over five centuries, from town squares to what ElonRead More

Theatregoing

I’ve just launched a new website. It’s called Theatregoing, and it’s a companion to my Picturegoing site. The subject of Picturegoing is eyewitness accounts of going to see pictures. The subject of Theatregoing is eyewitness accounts of going to see a show. The aim of Theatregoing is to document the experience of going to theRead More

TV watching

I’ve written before about my website Picturegoing, which is progressively gathering evidence of people viewing pictures. It started off by covering cinemagoing, as recorded in diaries, oral histories, memoirs, news reports, novels, poems. pictures and so on – any form of evidence that records directly, or indirectly, the personal experience of viewing pictures. But whatRead More

Picturegoing

I’m happy to announce a new website that I’ve been working on for the past couple of months, Picturegoing. I say a couple of months, but this builds on research which I’ve done for some years now. Back in 2005 I was co-researcher on The London Project, a Birkbeck University of London project looking atRead More

Radio times

The BBC has just celebrated its ninetieth anniversary (November 14th to be precise), though the current storm clouds hanging over the Corporation have possibly dampened the fervour. Nevertheless the BBC has marked ninety years of radio broadcasts (BBC television did not begin officially until 1936) in a number of ways, including Radio Reunited, a simultaneousRead More