The Friday O’clock News

Hello again,

This week we have managed to temporarily escape the igloo as our work was flexible. The task consisted of creating themes within which all our digitised images can fit. This has taken up more time than you would imagine, we had to write the theme tune, sing the theme tune. Kidding. But we had to initially assess the work that we had thus far completed and devise a set of themes that could be applied to nearly all of the periodicals and their images. This time, we were in the sauna. The top floor has large floor-to-ceiling windows that enhance the warmth from the sun – it feels soooooo nice. It gave us lots of thinking time while we were up there, which on one occasion ended up being a cheeky Snapchat play.

Tuesday, however, consisted of a reluctant return to the igloo and digitisation room once again in order to convert all of the images into high quality JPEG’s. This was utterly soul-destroying because no matter how much we tried we just couldn’t figure out a way to set up a continuous loop that would convert all of the images, so we had to sit and click and sit and click and sit and… you get the picture (ba-dum-tssss). Archivists, suggestions?

Going back to the themes, though, we have managed to devise 15 themes! 15! They sometimes overlap in areas but they are holistic and honestly, we couldn’t think of any more. The point is to allow students to develop their own sense of why these images might have been grouped together, what they mean, which periodical they came from and what type of viewer might have feasted their eyes upon them in good ol’ 19^th century Britain. Initially, to devise the first themes we had to assess the images that we had digitised by looking at what’s in the images, what accompanies the image and how the image is portrayed. This gave us a lot to think about with our first theme in our first periodical becoming “Friendship and Harmony”. It looked ‘positively’ promising. 12 themes and countless books later, the inevitable happened. Our positive attitudes had blocked out the view of negative representations such as hatred, anger, cruelty and injustice. With this and the additional ‘might as well add a theme for exoticism’ we had to go through every single periodical, AGAIN. We decided to divide the images into “Exoticism” and “Cruelty” (as a blanket term) so that students could develop these ideas further. Just to give an idea of what on earth I am babbling about, the full list of themes is as follows;

• Friendship and Harmony
• Love and Altruism
• Cruelty
• Exoticism
• Bravery
• Intelligence
• Family Life
• Physical Beauty and Admiration
• Humour and Satire
• Work
• Transport
• Domesticity
• Metaphors and Symbolism
• Nationalism
• Colonialism

There is a lot, but hopefully they will give a wide range of information for the students along with a good choice!

Below is an image that has an animal in it. Having gone through all of the periodicals a couple of times to divide the images into themes, it is one that stood out to me, not to mention – I felt as though I should include it. The blog is supposed to relate to research that my colleague and I have been doing for the project regarding Victorian animal culture, so here goes: The image is called The Empress of the French and is an image digitised from a periodical called The Illustrated London News. As you can see, it features a well-dressed woman sat atop a lovely and lively horse depicted as wealth. Essentially, this is me. The image is just the epitome of me and that is why I chose it. An avid rider in my childhood, I still have a soft-spot for the beautiful animals. It made it much harder to view the images of horses that have unfortunately had to be categorised under ‘cruelty’. Despite this, the image is a beautiful woodcut print that should be thoroughly appreciated, hence a snug spot dedicated to it within “Physical Beauty and Admiration”;

 

Apologies, but now I am going to add a rather abrupt subject change as I follow on from last week’s post: I will, as promised, include another puzzle page from The Children’s Friend and as it is the following issue, it also includes the answers to the puzzles from last week’s blog. Fingers crossed you got them! The music production is still being organised by myself and a couple of other members of staff along with the pianist and technician. With any luck, a piece of completed music will be up and ready to view by next Friday’s blog. Personally, I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it.

 

I hope you enjoy this week’s puzzles! Don’t forget to like, share and comment with your answers! These features should be available to all readers, even to those without WordPress accounts!

Thank you for reading,

Jade x