A history of an encyclopaedia

As Florian Kräutli, PhD student at the Royal College of Art, says, ‘Wikipedia is not only an encyclopaedia, but also a history of an encyclopaedia.’

Florian is presenting work including his temporal visualisations of Wikipedia article histories on 1st February 2015 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. The event forms part of the CTM festival and transmediale and is open to the public.

See the item on Florian’s blog.

Slides and audio of talk for The National Archives

The National Archives have very kindly put the slides and audio of my talk in their Big Ideas series on the web.

It is a visually-led talk, so please view the slides while listening.

Link: http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/big-ideas/

Leap second: good, bad and indifferent

An extra ‘leap’ second will be added to the hour at the middle of 2015. I enjoyed the different headlines...

One of the first to appear on Google News was Radio Australia with a neutral tone to its headline and introduction:

For the UK Telegraph headline writer it was a typically dastardly plot by the French to interfere with the natural order of things:

CNN International seemed to like the idea, calling it a ‘bonus sliver of time’:

But the reporter at 3News NZ seemed to have got out of the wrong side of bed:

Science Recorder implied that it is not human measures of time that will be adjusted but our planet itself...

The UK tabloids’ taste for SHOUTING seemed particularly unnecessary here. What would they have done if it had been a MINUTE or an HOUR?

The UK Independent these days imitates the Daily Express’s ‘we are all doomed’ stance on any story. Remember all those planes that fell out of the sky at the Millennium?

And the Grimsby Telegraph was not going to be outdone if there was some gloom to be had out of the story...