Data exhibition at British Library
'Visualising Victorian News'
'Visualising Victorian News'
British Library group show Visualising Victorian News, April-August 2022.
The exhibition uses data from digitised British Library newspapers to explore themes from 19th-century news and reimagine aspects of British 19th-century history. I developed two data visualisations:
- Crime & Tattoo, which delves into the fascinating world of convict tattoos;
- Time, Fire, House, which examines the language used to describe the Crimean War.
Below you can read more about the creative process behind each artwork.
Crime and Tattoo
The first piece was about reconstructing criminal lives through tattoos. Voices of marginalised people are always hard to come by in historical research. But one group is an exception: we have lots of data about people convicted through the criminal justice system in the nineteenth century.
So the goal was to merge two separate worlds, such as crime and tattoos, into one singular narrative and artwork.
Available as a signed, numbered, limited-edition print, please visit my website.
Images courtesy of The British Library.
Time, Fire, House
The second artwork visualises the words used to cover the Crimean War, which brought the war to British readers in more detail than ever before via 19th-century newspapers. The words played an essential role in establishing the new role of the special correspondent during the war.
Each circle represents a year. Around each loop, we have the top 50 most frequent words extracted from a sample of British Library newspapers from the 19th century, revealing interesting patterns in the change of focus. The words are colour-coded by categories: names of places and locations of the battles, nationalities of those involved, reports on casualties and military achievements or losses, and finally, words related to public, economic and political affairs.
Available as a signed, numbered, limited-edition print, please visit my website.
