Beautiful Science at the British Library is a little gem

I went to the British Library for the main exhibition on comics but first I went upstairs for a coffee and that took me past the Beautiful Science exhibition. Coffee over, I gave it a look.

This exhibition space is really just a corridor that is just wide enough to put displays either side yet the British Library have managed to do some fine things in this space, including Children's Illustrated Classics and An A-Z of Crime Fiction.

Beautiful Science was about infographics, a new world for an old technique.

A very old example, and one that surprised me, was the charts that Florence Nightingale kept of hospital deaths. She marked the number of deaths for each month in the categories death by injuries sustained on the battlefield, preventable diseases and other. From this she was able to demonstrate that preventable diseases were the biggest killer and this helped her cause for improving hospital improvements.

Another medical example was John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on to a map which famously led him to identify the water pump in Broad Street as the source of the infection.

My favourite display was The Tree of Life produced by OneZoom.

This was an zoomable display based on fractal technologies, i.e. the shape of the tree always looked the same but the details of the leaves and branches changed as you moved along and in to it.

A sign on each branch indicated when it diverged from the main tree and how many species were in that branch, e.g. the 11 species of elephant  first appeared 75.8 million years ago.

The use of fractals is what made this approach work for me. Other versions of the Tree of Life that I have seen get too busy in the detail in trying to show as many species as possible at the same time whereas this approach hides the detail until you zoom in.

There was more to Beautiful Science than this, including a section on weather, and, as before, a small exhibition managed to suck me in to it for longer than I expected, and that is always a good sign.

Picture This: Children's Illustrated Classics at the British Library

I do like the way that the British Library puts on small exhibitions on the space on the first floor next to the cafe. About a year ago I went to see Murder in the Library and this time it was Children's Illustrated Classics.

This exhibition explored ten classic children’s books from the 20th century including Paddington Bear, Peter Pan and Willy Wonka and classic works such as Just So Stories, The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit.

Few of these were books that I could claim to have loved as a child (The Wind in the Willows was one that I did) but I did know most of the characters and that familiarity helped.

The exhibition was quite simple; for each book/character there was a brief history of the book and its illustrators and a few examples of their work.

For example, for The Wind in the Willows there was a classic illustration from Ernest H. Shepard and several others including this rather pretty modern one from David Roberts.

One of the interesting things was to see how different artists had reinterpreted familiar characters, sometimes trying to keep faithful to the original look and sometimes doing just the obvious.

The other interesting differences came from the style of the drawings. In the Wind in the Willows example I think that the character, Mole, is very like the original whereas the drawing style is very different from EH Shepard's.

My highlight of the exhibition, surprisingly, was The Secret Garden, a book I had never read. The three illustrations were all very colourful (subsequent illustrators following the style of the first) and utterly charming.

Sadly I cannot show you what they looked like as photography was banned, the exhibition space was out in the open so I could not easily break the rule and they are not on the web. That is a good reason for you to go there and for me to go back.

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion Exhibition at The British Library

My third exhibition of the day was Propaganda: Power and Persuasion Exhibition at The British Library. I had been meaning to go to this for some time and just managed to sneak in before it closed.

My interest here was mostly in the political posters. I have long loved these and they are often the highlight of a museum or gallery visit in a strange land. They were also the highlight of several visits to the Tate Modern.

The thing about propaganda is that it is trying to deliver a clear message that can be quickly understood, whereas most art is trying to do just the opposite. This makes propaganda simple, bold and dramatic.

The British Library showed how to do this with their poster for the event which reused a familiar propaganda image and added a few short words to explain what was on show and to persuade people to go. It worked on me.

Inside the exhibition there was a lot more on show besides posters including audio, video, monuments (including lots of models of the Eiffel Tower that forced me to thing about The Lavender Hill Mob), t-shirts, board games, mugs and much more.

Sadly I have no pictures of these as photography was strictly forbidden and those that I did manage to take were either not very good (no flash, obviously) or I could find better examples on-line. So all these pictures were stolen from the internet and not from the exhibition.

I have chosen two images from China not because the exhibition was full of them but simply because I like them visually.

The exhibition was nicely done with explanations given for each of the items, particularly important when I did not understand the political or cultural context.

For example, the white haired girl above is a figure from a ballet based on Chinese legends and the picture of Mao has him carrying an umbrella to show that he carried on his work whatever the weather.

It is these visual symbols that I find so appealing in propaganda. The words are almost irrelevant except for their appearance which is always best in a striking solid font and preferably in a different alphabet.

I expected the political propaganda but there was a lot more than that on show. The exhibition was split into themes ranging from health (small babies should not mix with pigs apparently) to self-promotion by counties.

I had to admire the French for their "we are better than Germany" poster from before Word War I that proclaimed the successes of Napoleon and Joan of Arc and the technical might of their automotive and aerospace industries.

The example below is a wonderfully evocative picture in a series showing a British family going to India via places owned by the Empire which, at that time was vast and still included places like the Suez Canal. Of course it is highly topical today with the recent sabre-rattling between Spain and Britain over Gibraltar.

The biggest shock of the exhibition came at the end when a tannoy announcement said that it would shut in ten minutes. Somehow I had spent two hours looking at and reading about propaganda without noticing the time slide away. Luckily I had built plenty of contingency in to my schedule for the day, all I had to do was take out the time allocated to "rest".

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion was an interesting exhibition that informed, surprised and delighted. The British Library has every right to be very proud of itself.

Murder in the British Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction

Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction is a small exhibition at the British Library that caught my eye.

My interest in crime fiction comes more from the TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Adam Dalglish, Miss Marple, et all and that was enough when combined with my experience of previous exhibitions at the British Library to pull me in.

The exhibition is on one of the funny landings between the entrance and the reading rooms near to the cafe. It is generally accessible to the public and is free to enter.

It consists of 26 alphabetical displays of around A3 size. These covered topics like Agatha Christie, Kidnapping, Locked Rooms and Villains.

In each case it explained the history of the theme, e.g. the first story to feature a murder in a room locked from the inside (which is The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe), gave examples of where else it was used and described how the trope developed.

For somebody who has read none of the books mentioned, not even the Enid Blyton, I was surprised at just how interesting it was and I read every word on every display.

Growing Knowledge with LIKE

The Growing Knowledge exhibition at the British Library showcases innovative research tools and LIKE went to see it.

This was not an official LIKE event as such but it's best to see something like this in a group, one of LIKE's founders works at BL and LIKE are good at organising things like this.

Numbers were limited due to the size of the room and only the first 22 of us to sign-up were able to go. Strange to think that only a few months ago LIKE's monthly venue only held that many, now it seems a ridiculous restriction.

Growing Knowledge is an experimental room in the public part of the library (in the far right corner from the main entrance) that has modern technologies in what looks somewhat like a trendy bar, in a good way.

Or maybe it looks more like the SS Enterprise with its clean lines and bright surfaces.

The dials you can see here on the right are showing the real-time volumes of tweets in various locations. You need to know that.

The room impressed but the technology less so.

While it was cool to scroll along at a very long image, to zoom in on parts of it, to jump to embedded links and to do all this on a large touch screen, there is nothing intrinsically new in any of this.

Perhaps it seems new to librarians used to curating old books. But new or not, it is clearly useful to scholars to be able to see images of old documents that are so detailed that the marks made in erasing text can be easily seen.

Of more interest to me was the use of social networking in research with tools that show you things like people who read this also read that.

Social tools can help researchers to build collaboratively on each other's work by, for example, sharing links between documents and notes on those documents and links.

So, some food for thought there. And, this being LIKE, there was food to eat too and we made our way to the Somerstown Coffee House for, in my case, a spinach and mushroom pancake washed down agreeably with a couple of pints of London Gold.

There the conversations continued until sanity prevailed and the joint decision was made to home happy and safe in the knowledge that we would be meeting again in a couple of weeks.