Dear Diary: A Celebration of Diaries and their Digital Descendants

Delightful exhibition at King’s College in Somerset House looking at the history and future of diaries.

The show was based on the Great Diary Project started in 2007 which seeks to create an archive of diaries. It began by looking at the history including why dairies look the way they do and plotted famous diaries and technological changes on a timeline. The first use of the work diary in English was in 1581. This section also discussed modern diaries such as Facebook and apps. 

The show then looked at the various reasons people keep diaries and how the reasons haven’t changed even if the methods have. One section looked at diaries as a way to log our lives. I loved a quote here that “users of fitness apps are the moral descendants of those Puritans who turned to diaries to review their faults and aspire to virtues”. Guilty as charged! There was an interesting video about online health diaries made even more interesting as it was set where I live.

Another room looked at the variety of diaries with examples of a number of famous examples including Kenneth William’s diary in which he colour coded different subjects in it. I was fascinated to see the artist Keith Vaughan’s diary and the box he kept it in.

There was a super video of people reading sections from the teenage diaries to show how a diary is a record of what we are like at a specific moment in time. Again there was a great quote from Clemence Dane “It seems odd that we should have so poor a memory of our passionate forgotten selves. Our lived are serial novels but we have mislaid the back numbers.”

Closed on 7 July 2018

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