James Hamilton
photography, history and culture
About Me
This site is a hub for my writing on photographic history and culture and links to my other activities.
I live in Edinburgh and am currently Research Principal for the WS Society who can also be seen on Twitter and on Instagram. Under the WS Society umbrella, I am also the administrator for the local children's education charity John Watson's Trust.
I am on Bluesky, Mastodon, Substack, Twitter and Linkedin: my photographs are at Lixmount. My former Twitter account is now purely an archive.
Current Projects
- A short book about the 1846 Hill and Adamson album A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews
- A full account of the life and work of the photographer of the Victorian Chelsea riverside, James Hedderly (1815-1885)
- A full account of the creating of the 1928 "Elliot Book" about Hill and Adamson, and the relationship between bookseller/publisher Andrew Elliot and photographer Thomas Annan that gave rise to it.
For about the last decade, I've been conducting a photographic survey of Leith and Edinburgh, some of which can be seen on my photographic site.
Selected Publications
"The Signet Library" Legal Information Management 21 (3-4) December 2021 166-170
"Five Hundred Years of the WS Society Archive, Edinburgh" Archives Hub Blog July 2021
Building the Palace of Bokes: Robert Reid, William Stark and the Signet Library" The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club New Series Volume 16 2020
The Archive of the Society of Writers to the Signet at the Signet Library, Edinburgh; Scottish Archives Vol 21 (2015) 113–129
Recent Projects
An online talk to the Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group, Returning to Robert Adamson: the Origins of A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews 1846.
The WS Society online Annual Exhibition, The Signet Library's Long Eighteenth Century 1722-1835
An online portal for the WS Society and Signet Library's heritage collections, exhibitions and digitized materials.
An exhibition at the Signet Library in March 2023, with lecture and accompanying brochure - Hill and Adamson at the Signet Library: A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews, 1846
A talk at the Broughton History Society at McDonald Road Library on Monday February 6th 2023, A Signet Library journal of the Deacon Brodie summer: The 1788 Diary of George Sandy
Curation of The Signet Library’s Long 18th Century 1722-1837 - The Signet Library's Summer Exhibition 4th to 7th July 2022
A paper entitled "From Chiang Yee to IIIF: 200 years of ‘spreading the word’ about Edinburgh’s Signet Library" given at The Independent Libraries Association Conference in Birmingham on 14th May 2022
About this Site
This site is a static site comprising HTML, CSS and Markdown files, a form that has in mind Jeff Huang’s Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web and Derek Sivers’ outline for Tech Independence. The design is an adaptation of a theme by Andy Brody based on the visual presentation approaches pioneed by Edward Tufte, the Tufte Handout by John Smith and Dave Liepmann’s Tufte CSS.
Away from here, I use Markdown and plain text for practically everything (originally inspired by William Hern’s 2006 Living in a Single Text File ) and since 2005 I’ve organised my work along the lines originally sketched out as GTD by David Allen. More recently I’ve organised my research in the form of a private Zettlr Zettelkasten based on the ideas of Niklas Luhmann and Bob Doto.