Not long after YouTube appeared in 2005, I started to take note of the phenomenon of online Shakespeare. I had been interested in Shakespeare and film for a long time – it was really Shakespeare that encouraged my interest in film in the first place – but here was something quite new. Previously Shakespeare filmRead More
I’m going to start up an occasional series. It’ll bring together web resources on a particular theme. Often it will be triggered by a new resource that I will have come across, and then added links to other such sites to fill out the picture. And I promise (to myself) to keep the accompanying textRead More
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
Next up in these reviews of the year is my year online. Rather than review particular sites or name one as the best, here is a list of some of the sites I discovered and/or enjoyed in 2015 – some new, some not quite so new, all well worth exploring. In alphabetical order… BBC ShakespeareRead More
Could there be a better idea for a website than Six Degrees of Francis Bacon? Launched in beta form this week, the site is designed to demonstrate the social network of Britain over the period 1500-1700. Created by data miners and digital humanities scholars at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University, the site uses dataRead More
As previously noted, I am republishing a number of old posts from blogs that I have previously managed that are now defunct and/or difficult to find. I’m republishing them with the date adjusted to the date on which they were originally posted, so that gradually this site will build up to be a single sourceRead More
‘A million minutes of filmed history’ – someone in the communications team of the AP Archive must have been mightily pleased when they came up with that tag line for promoting their release online of the entire British Movietone newsreel archive onto YouTube. For that is what the have done. Apparently every story from everyRead More
This website has had a bit of a redesign, chiefly to make it responsive so that I no longer have to peer at minute print whenever I look at one of the posts on my mobile phone. A few more tweaks are required, but in general I’m pleased with the template and the results. I’veRead More
YouTube is ten years old. On 23 April 2005, Jawed Karim stood before a video camera wielded by Yakov Lapitsky in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo. Karim gave the anxious look at the camera we all give when we sense that filming has started and we ought to have to sayRead More
My favourite website of the moment is the marvellous Forgotify.com. It is based on an absolutely inspired idea that also reveals a profound truth or two. Its simple premise is that there are four million songs on the music service Spotify which have been played by no one – around 20%. So Forgotify makes theseRead More