Pity the poor British Library, an institution which simultaneously does such great things, yet at the same time seems to have utterly lost its way. The cyberattack of 2023 has created damage not only to its digital infrastructure (the full extent of which I fear has yet to be admitted…) but to the institution’s mindset.Read More
I have a third past paper that I am publishing on this site. Back in 2011 I was invited to speak at the 8th Seminar on the origins and history of cinema, a series hosted by the Museu del Cinema in Girona, Spain. The title of the seminar (a conference really) was ‘The Construction ofRead More
I’m continuing to look through the files at papers I wrote which were published but are no longer available, or which were never made available in the first place, with the aim of publishing them on this site, in the hope that this is useful to someone. One paper that falls into the never madeRead More
Such has been the flurry of business surrounding the British Library’s exhibition on the history of British news, Breaking the News, that I have neglected to mention here what should be its most lasting legacy: the book. So, at the end of April 2022, the British Library published Breaking the News: 500 Years of NewsRead More
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
Two years I wrote about an exhibition of the remarkable infographics of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and said that I was working on an exhibition of infographics myself, due to be shown at the British Library in August 2020. Then fate intervened.Read More
Here’s some breaking news for you… On 22 April, and running until 21 August 2022, the British Library will be hosting a major exhibition on the history of news in Britain. Entitled Breaking the News, it will (according to the press release) spotlight the role news plays in our society, exploring issues of choice, interpretation,Read More
On 24 September 1621, London printer Nathaniel Butter published a newspaper. It wasn’t called a newspaper, but there were sufficient elements that we recognise as those which make a newspaper. It had reports on a number of news stories, all of them current. It was published on a specific date. It was one a seriesRead More
It is good to be involved in a good thing. Last week, after years of development and the coming together of assorted initiatives, the British Library made one million pages from historic newspapers freely available online. Next year it will publish one million more, and million the year after that. At the same time rawRead More
I have been reading We Are Bellingcat, by Eliot Higgins. Subtitled ‘an intelligence agency for the people’, it is an account of the rise of of a group of dedicated open-source investigators, whose means of analysing openly available material on the Internet to investigate such stories on the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 to theRead More