I set out with a simple aim: to make a Twitter entry for one article each day from the British Newspaper Archive, and to do this for a year. I managed to create 349 tweets, between 30 November 2012 and 18 December 2013. (Remember, the links on Twitter will take you directly to view the page and article, if you have already subscribed to the BNA. If you have not yet subscribed, then you will need to do so, to view the article of your choice.)
Please forgive any Tweets of a personal nature, not connected to the BNA. 349 tweets is not quite one Tweet a day, but nearly.
Hopefully, you can see all my my Tweets made in 2012-2013 at my Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/embk11
Newspapers contain details of all subjects – that’s the easy part. More challenging was to select an article for each day, which might resonate with the Twitter audience. The subjects frequently selected themselves. For example:
·
Names mentioned in any recent television or radio programme;
· - natural
phenomena (storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) ;
·
famous people;
·
authors;
· collectors
(e.g. Sir Hans Sloane)
·
Criminal acts or accounts of trials and court sentences
·
names or subjects or events in books that I was reading;
·
events that happened ‘on this day’, but many years ago;
·
popular entertainment;
·
maps;
· war
reports;
·
royalty;
· shipping;
· illustrations
of buildings;
· engineering achievements -
especially ships and the railways
Advertisements (these were
the lifeblood of many newspapers, and there are millions of them, so selecting
some of these was fun. )
·
Atlantic cable laying of the 1860s.
·
A review of Trollope’s great novel, the
Prime Minister ; plenty of resonances today!
·
A Prussian siege battery before Paris.
·
The dash for the South Pole – map and reports
·
Boulton and Watt new fire engine, 1779.
·
Liptons’ teas are the best
·
Pony rides on Weston Sands.
·
Aldeburgh election poem
·
Bowling the cheese on Cooper’s Hill
·
England vs. Australia: 1st Test Match – collapse by England
·
Ballet in elk skins; Stravinsky’s Rite
of Spring
·
New dining saloon of The Flying
Scotsman
·
Mr. (John) Harrison’s timekeeper (longitude)
·
Funeral of Florence Nightingale
·
Burgess’ essence of anchovies (and many more on the same page)
·
Funeral procession of the Duke of Wellington
Have fun searching for what you want. (Remember, the links will take you directly to view the page and article if you have already subscribed to the BNA. If you have not yet subscribed, then you will need to do so, to view the article of your choice.)
So, what has it been like to tweet an article from the BNA for a whole year?
It was a great voyage of exploration. The glory of being able create simple searches which then trawls vast tracts of texts, for the user to receive answers in seconds was, and remains, awe inspiring. It is truly impossible to do the range of these searches (and subsequent Tweets) by conducting a manual reading of each newspaper. It was also great to be able to limit the search quickly by filtering to just one newspaper; or to delimit the search by time rapidly with the date filters. It will be indispensable for any serious research to look at all of the search results for famous persons – be they monarchs, businessmen, authors, Bishops, military figures, aristocrats, farmers, actors, singers, and many tens of thousands more. Nor should the pictorial elements of newspapers be ignored. Many had engravings from the 1830s onwards, and from the 1860s, newspapers such as the Graphic or the Illustrated Police News has large numbers of illustrations in every issue. The reproduction of photographs in newspapers from the late 1880s vastly increased the images, to the point today where we live in a visually dominated media.
For me, both the voyage of exploration and the results have been equally gratifying.
Edmund King
June 2014
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