Diaries Timeline

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Diaries Timeline

In laying out an exhibition, practical issues override intellectual ones. The wall adjacent to the entrance/exit was big enough; we measured up, and tested viewpoints with the average height of a visitor in mind. The average British woman is 5′3, or 161.6 cm in height; eyeline is of course slightly lower. We tested out our own (different) heights; we also checked what a visitor at wheelchair height would be able to see.

More practicalities ruled. Mr Gresty our designer came up with a very suitable sweeping line, with several bends. We set about an ambitious history, beginning with 1400 BCE, Babylonian clay tablets inscribing information about the movements of the sun, moon and stars – the precursor to the appointment diary, which still gives phases of the moon. With Ego Media in mind, I hoped to fill out the line to the current moment. In such a potentially vast history, there were a great many possibilities, and hence a great deal of editing. I have two of many versions in files labelled Skinny Timeline, and then, despondently, Skinnier Timeline. There was a great deal of editorial discussion to defend inclusions, suggest cuts and check against design for density, visibility and diversity. The timeline enabled us to instance forms of diary which we could not exhibit, especially useful for items from antiquity where survivals are few and lodged securely in museums. It enabled us to gesture to forms of diary beyond the West, though British exemplars crowded in from the sixteenth century on. We knew most about succeeding periods; that meant resisting many temptations to include more, unbalancing the line.

The first practicality, iron-clad, was permissions, most of which had costs attached. The budget was tight. We paid (a three digit sum) to reproduce Dorothy Wordsworth. We ditched others, equally worthy, because chasing permission got too time-consuming. I spent ages trying to find who held the copyright on a nice photo of a man who ran one of the big diary companies; in the end I abandoned him. I was really sorry about this one:

1890 Joseph Conrad captains a steamer up the Congo river; he draws on his diaries of this when writing Heart of Darkness (1899)

I had no idea Conrad wrote diaries when I read him avidly in my youth. Now modern editions print his Congo diary alongside the novel, such ignorance has abated. And so I could let the entry go.

To diversify the timeline, some entries were illustrated and some were not. Hence the second practicality, iron-clad too: image quality. The marvels of online resources mean you can find millions of images. But if you are reproducing, in small scale and up on a wall, you need high res images. Substitutions had to be made to fit that requirement. Then adjacencies had to be considered, an aesthetic imperative as much as an intellectual one: the images had to look sprinkled rather than clumped, and engage by showing different things – an author portrait, a manuscript, an edition, an illustration contemporary with the entry. I wanted to include film, radio and other media besides print, which introduced other challenges. Channel 4’s programme Big Brother had a Dairy Room, for which every season there was a different design, starring a different chair. Many hours went on pondering which was best for the timeline. Once we were into Ego Media territory, it seemed to me helpful to have the timeline show a selection of digital developments as orientation points.

In a life writing way, here is an editorial exchange about two such points:

1990 Tim Berners Lee posts the first website

1990 Word, Excel and Powerpoint appear via Microsoft Office software

Polly: I get why this is significant – but it isn’t the first diary posting, more suited for expo on the www, specifically, perhaps? Interesting but not directly pertinent, and no image

Clare: I think we need this because it’s so easy to forget how recent the web is? No image required – let people imagine?

Polly [re Word etc]: See comment above, more a general observation about technological advancements in software than directly related to diary app development? Part of diary app history sure, but could be dropped? Interesting but not directly pertinent, and no image

We kept the first (with no image) and dropped the second. (In hindsight that feels right.) At the time it was hard not to invest in entries, especially if they’d taken time to devise. I had worked with curator colleagues who seemed to spend a lot of time writing labels. I came to appreciate why. A label is like an epitaph: in Samuel Johnson’s formulation, an epitaph must do three things. It must say something about the person, about death, and in a short space. So with labels; it was definitely disciplined work. Or self-disciplined work. The timeline could accommodate one sentence for most items; items with a quotation or further data ran to two, possibly three sentences. There was room for only a few. This was one possible entry:

2014 Facebook passes 1.23 billion monthly active users, 945 million mobile users, and 757 million daily users, according to thenextweb.com

Polly: Cut – timeline is diary-related, everyone knows facebook is doing well

I wanted to end with a date ahead of where we were, in part because digital is full of projections, and in part because I thought it would let visitors end with an ellipsis not a full stop…

Hence: 2020 the Internet of Things

The Cultural Institute, hosts of the exhibition space, queried that one. I insisted it stay. I should have added a question mark though.

When the timeline went up – in a huge sheet! – it looked beautiful. I was very pleased when one of our clever visitors featured it in a blog post.

Job done.