I was browsing in a bookshop today, and ended up looking at Played in London: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play by Simon Inglis. It’s a handsome and enticing publication about London’s sporting venues, clearly the product of superb research, which is top of my must-buy list, just as soon as I haveRead More
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
The news that the entire British Pathé newsreel archive has been published on YouTube has made a huge impact. There have been news broadcasts, web news and newspaper reports, and the story has spread widely across social media, which is very much was British Pathé wanted. 85,000 videos, or 3,500 hours of film ranging fromRead More
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
The World Chess Championship has started, and I am glued to my screen. Along with millions of others, I am able to follow the contest between India’s Vishy Anand (the current world champion) and Norway’s Magnus Carlsen through a bewildering variety of options, as the internet connects up all of us across the globe toRead More
Here’s a curious anecdote. I live in a town rich in brick walls of every age and description. I like photographing them (I wrote a post about this a while ago). I put several of these photographs on my Flickr site, should anyone want to look at photographs of brick walls for themselves. Time movedRead More
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
“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper. The regulations now coming into force make digital legalRead More
The British Film Institute has issued a new version of its database, which is a huge improvement on what has been available online before now. The new service, BFI Collections Search, for the first time combines its bibliographic, filmographic and technical databases, something the BFI has been trying to engineer for years (decades even). ThisRead More