If I’m not writing as much as I would like to, it’s because I’m working on a great many things, and when it gets to the evenings I’m just tired. But I hope it’s all going to be worth it. One of the projects is a small exhibition of infographics, to be held this AugustRead More
I have this vague plan to bring all of my blog posts under the one site. I have too many websites, either active or passive (but still kept live), and it is increasingly difficult (and costly) to keep on top of them all. Whether having all posts from different sites will work, I don’t know,Read More
Here is a remarkable image. It looks, at first sight, like a collection of prosperous mid-Victorian gentlemen: perhaps a gathering of local politicians, or merchants of some kind, preening themselves with civic pride. But then we see the caption that accompanies the image: ‘The Great Pugilists of England’. They are boxers, presented in their SundayRead More
What are newspapers made of? One could say that they are made of accounts of current events, collected in the form of a document for the interest of a particular readership. One could equally say that they are made of assumptions that covertly or overtly express an ideology of one kind or another. One couldRead More
The British Library is currently engaged on a major programme entitled Heritage Made Digital. The aim of the programme is to transform digital access to the British Library’s heritage collections by streamlining digitisation workflows, undertaking strategically led digitisation and making existing digitised content available as openly as copyright and licensing agreements allow. Heritage Made DigitalRead More
In two years’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the newspaper in this country. The first known newspaper in English, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c. was published on 2 December 1620, in Amsterdam. A year later, on 24 September 1621, the first newspaper was published in this country, the Corante, or,Read More
Below is the text of a paper I gave recently at ‘Language Matters‘, the 5th Transfopress Encounter in Paris. Transfopress is an international network of archivists, librarians and scholars interested in the study of foreign language press. The subject of this conference was printed news in English abroad and foreign-language publishing in the English-speaking world.Read More
Here’s what tomorrow looks like. At last week’s Google Cloud Next Conference held in San Francisco, Google announced a new API (application programme interface) entitled Cloud Video Intelligence. With such an application, developers will be able to detect objects within videos and make them word-searchable, as well as detecting scene changes and tagging objects accordingly.Read More
According to the BBC’s handy calculator, Will a robot take your job?, there is a 38% chance of my being replaced by a robot at some point in the future. Out of a list of 366 jobs, based on research by Oxford University, a curator (or archivist) comes in at number 206 of jobs atRead More
There are exciting changes happening in how we use newspapers to study the past. After decades in which the use of newspapers in research meant leafing through volumes or scrolling through microfilms, digitisation made millions of newspapers more readily searchable and far more widely available. But now that digitisation that taken us to the nextRead More