What do you do with too much information?

Elizabeth Robins, early 1890s, Elliott and Fry. Enhanced and colourised by Henfield Museum, 2020

Formatting the graphics took some time to begin with. There is a balance of enough and the right graphics to catch someone's attention, but not so much that they can’t process it in the 30 seconds they spend looking at the graphics. However, once the basic layout was decided on it has just been a matter of changing the content around for the next topic. The hard part, as I talked about previously, is condensing the material done to a short paragraph that leaves the reader to make their own determination about the information. It is still a process that I am working on. For myself that process is a really good indication just how well I know a subject. The less I know the harder it is.  

The family member that seems to get the most attention of the Robins is Raymond’s older sister Elizabeth. There is a great deal of information about her available. There are 4 biographies with a 5th on the way, several scholarly websites and papers, let alone her own writing of over 40 novels and plays. She is also the Robins I know the least about, which is making writing a 100-word paragraph about her especially difficult. Margerat and Raymond have been comparatively easy. Their accomplishments are important but more specific, or at least the accomplishments were easier for me to kernelize into a paragraph. Elizabeth is complex. In terms of the historic site, she is the reason it exists. It was her funding that purchased the property for Raymond and herself, and she was the funding that financed the rebuilding of the manor that was falling apart in 1905. The reason she was able to do that was she was a very successful novelist from the 1890s until after her death with her final book, Raymond and I, being published in 1956. Elizabeth was a premier actress on the American and primarily on the London stage. Her friends were people like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. She was a suffragette leader in the votes for women movement in England where she campaigned and wrote plays and novellas supporting the cause. So, the problem that I have is how do you decide which point to focus on when you have limited space and too much information that you have not fully assimilated into something meaningful? Well, stay tuned till next week. I am heading to the Hill for the weekend and will get input from Chinsegut staff.