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
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
It’s well known how vast YouTube is, and the rate at which it is growing. Recent figures suggest that 400 hours of video are added to the site every minute (back in 2013 it was a mere 100 hours per minute), and that it is serving some six billion video views per day. It isRead 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
I was rather thrilled to read a piece in the Times Educational Supplement, in which Sanjay Sarma, director of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for teachers to stop relying on traditional teaching methods and instead use ten-minute videos. He is quoted as saying: The way we teach today is based onRead 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