INSIDE KNOWLEDGE

The Sound and Vision archive spans a large time scale and a wide range of different material, from a wide range of sources. As a result, you sometimes need a little inside knowledge to better understand the visualisations on this website. Below are some important pieces of information.

Dates

On this website, we have used the 'sort date' to show the distribution of archive material over time. This date has a different source for different types of material. The date is not filled in for all material in the archive, so some material cannot be shown on the graphs over time. For broadcast material, the 'sort date' is the date on which the programme was broadcast. As programmes can be repeated, a programme can have multiple sort dates. It can therefore appear at more than one point in a graph showing distribution over time. Some programmes have odd sort dates, very early, or even dates far in the future. These are probably typing errors, which need to be examined.