Visualising Victorian News

Fascinating display at the British Library of infographics using data from digitised 19th century newspapers from their collection plus other data sources.

The display, researched by curators and scholars but presented by three designers, allows us to reimagine Victorian history. It is arranged in seven themes looking at tea to highlight colonial trade, reactions to machines to look at railways plus work, diseases and science to look at cholera and smallpox, advocates of freedom to look at the abolition of slavery, the rise of newspapers, crime and tattoos and the Crimean war.

I preferred the white boards with lots of graphics to the dark ones which tended to have one more complex image.  I would have liked to see more definition of the measures but there was some interesting use of newspaper data eg measure of how often words tea, coffee and sugar appear in each year in the papers and tracing where US African American advocates for abolition spoke in the UK. 

Closes 21 August 2023

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