The Value of Newspaper Clippings
Sure, we all know newspaper clippings are valuable. I attended a lecture at the Fogg Art Museum tonight by Anke te Heesen of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science called Clipping Culture in Art and Science. She touched on “… the cultural and scientific significance of collecting and deploying newspaper clippings in the modern age,” focusing on the work of several specific clippers. She also showed slides of many art works that made use of news and magazine clippings, like collages. When she projected an image of a scrapbook, the man in the audience in front of me remarked that it’s like a text-based aggregator.
Te Heesen remarked that people often save news clippings to collect items on a particular topic or person. Just like blogging, right? A person’s clipping collection and how s/he uses the clips says a lot about her/him, which is also similar to what you can learn from someone by reading her/his blog.
For a few months short of three years, I was in charge of a clipping library that contained thousands of files of ephemera. Let me tell you: I miss that collection dearly. It was so rich with history and valuable information. I still haven’t found something that compares to it. The Internet is wonderful and everything, but it just isn’t the same.
The lecture accompanies an exhibition, but I couldn’t find information about it online.
