Cathy's Art Diary

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at 500 years of news in Britain via news stories. It was arranged under a series of questions eg what makes a good story, can the news be objective and includes some fabulous items such as the earliest surviving piece of printed news in Great Britain, a report of the battle of Flodden 1513! They also had the first newspaper published in England “Corante” which only has continental news due to censorship under James II. It was great to see whole bound newspapers included as you see the context of adverts etc around them. I found yourself drawn to the salacious stories and came out with lots to look up on old murders, political scandals etc. It comes right up to date with Covid reporting and #wagathachristie. There were some great juxtaposition of stories eg Civil War opposite Brexit as each saw opposing sides using a relatively new technology to spread ideas and the Daily Worker and Blackshirt reports of Cable Street Riots. T...

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 ...