Tag Archives: history

Locating London’s Pasts

Posted on October 27, 2011 by johnl

Last week I attended a seminar on the latest venture from Sheffield and Hertfordshire Universities’ family of digital history projects, Locating London’s Past. The aim is to create a sort of geographical front end to a number of London-centred datasets, … Continue reading →

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Making the TCP-ECCO texts accessible

Posted on August 12, 2011 by johnl

In April, the Text Creation Partnership released into the public domain over 2,000 eighteenth century works,  in plain text. You can read more about this project and the texts on their blog: TCP Releases Over 4,000 New EEBO-TCP Texts What the … Continue reading →

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The Clerkenwell House of Detention

Posted on May 28, 2011 by johnl

The recent Clerkenwell Design Week offered a rare chance to visit the vaults of the Clerkenwell House Of Detention, opened up to host an exhibition. These cellars are all that remain of the 1847 prison, demolished at the end of … Continue reading →

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What I Learned From ‘Luddites without condescension’

Posted on May 16, 2011 by johnl

A couple of Fridays ago (6th May 2011) I attended the Luddites Without Condescension event at Birkbeck. What I took away: 1: The Luddites are politically charged. The word is commonly used today as a slur to anyone questioning modern … Continue reading →

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Luddite Bicentenary and Luddite Song

Posted on March 11, 2011 by johnl

Alerted today that this year – and the next two – is the bicentenary of the great Luddite movement. Still much maligned as backwards-looking, anti-progressive, and if I may be permitted an anarchronism, ‘technophobic’, it is important to remember these … Continue reading →

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Victorian Books: The Frequency of Revolution

Posted on February 1, 2011 by johnl

Opened to the public late last year was the long awaited Victorian Books, ‘a Distant Reading of Victorian Publications.’ Working with data from Google Books,  Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs are text mining every book published in Britain in the … Continue reading →

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Google Ngram Games

Posted on December 17, 2010 by johnl

Google have just opened up their text mining project, a vast and ambitious project to allow searching their digital library for the frequency of words and phrases. It’s an astonishing resource, not only for its research potential but also for … Continue reading →

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The Return of History Workshop

Posted on December 3, 2010 by johnl

For some time I’ve been considering writing a post entitled “Whatever Happened to History Workshop?” Once it was the flag-bearer of radical history, a product of the struggles of the 60s and 70s, as much a movement as a publication. … Continue reading →

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Simon Schama’s pick of the historical pops

Posted on November 9, 2010 by johnl

Simon Schama, advisor to the government, has outlined his vision of history in schools. Despite the bizarre claim that Hong Kong runs the world and some purple prose, it’s not as facetious as one might fear; certainly, in his choice … Continue reading →

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What I learned from Wu Ming

Posted on October 12, 2010 by johnl

Last night, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 visited Dalston. The salient points: 1: Wu Ming is a band. If musicians can group together, why not writers? 2: Wu Ming 6 is the waste paper basket, and a most … Continue reading →

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