James Mussell

The nineteenth-century press in the digital age

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: From Front Page to Home Page From the Margins and For the Margins: Studying the Nineteenth-Century Press Today Bibliographic Codes and Visual Modes: The Role of the Visual on Page and Screen Editions and Archives (with Suzanne Paylor) Newspapers and Periodicals in Class Conclusion: We Have Always Been Users Bibliography

Elemental Forms: The newspaper as popular genre in the nineteenth century

This paper considers the way the nineteenth-century newspaper was oriented towards information. Despite their political differences, nineteenth-century newspapers were often discussed as if they were universal, with a paper for every segment of society. My argument is that this apparent universality, where the newspaper was figured as a print genre potentially open to all, laid the foundations for the emergence of the popular press. The paper is in two parts. The first considers the nineteenth-century newspaper as a genre, arguing that its periodicity enabled it to serve as a perfect medium, passing on content derived from elsewhere. The second explores the way information was conceived in the period. By looking at the way the newspaper drew upon, represented, and distributed information, it is possible to understand how it functioned as material media. In conclusion, I look at the way the nineteenth-century newspaper is changed through digitization today. When scholars access nineteenth-century newspapers through digital resources, they engage with a different material media that, in turn, reconfigures the source material. Such encounters foreground the importance of genre while providing new opportunities for its study.

THE PASSING OF PRINT

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialisation of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies—scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them—and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive.

Arthur Cowper Ranyard, knowledge and the reproduction of astronomical photographs in the late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

The development of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century permitted images in a range of visual media to be published in the press. Focusing on the popular scientific monthly Knowledge, this paper explores the evidentiary status of reproductions of astronomical photographs. After succeeding its founder Richard Anthony Proctor in 1889, the new editor of Knowledge, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, introduced high-quality collotype reproductions into each number of the magazine. One of Ranyards main interests was the structure of the Milky Way, evidence for which was only available through astronomical photographs. As Ranyard reproduced photographs in support of his arguments, he blurred the boundaries between the published collotype, the source negative and the astronomical phenomena themselves. Since each of these carried different evidentiary value, the confusion as to what, exactly, was under discussion did not go unremarked. While eminent astronomers disputed both Ranyards arguments and the way in which they were presented, Knowledge disseminated both striking astronomical images and also a broader debate over how they should be interpreted.

Conservative attitudes to old-established organs: Oliver Lodge and Philosophical Magazine

In 1921 Oliver Lodge defended Philosophical Magazine against charges of mismanagement from the National Union of Scientific Workers. They alleged that its editors performed little editorial work, the bulk being done by the publishers, Taylor & Francis. Lodge reassured Natures readers that the journal did consult its editors, and suggested ‘a conservative attitude towards old-established organs is wise; and that it is possible to over-organise things into lifelessness.’ The paper explores Lodges response by considering the editorial arrangements at Philosophical Magazine. Founded in 1798, it remained remarkably unchanged and so appeared old-fashioned when compared with its closest rivals, Proceedings of the Royal Society and Proceedings of the Physical Society. We argue that for Lodge the management of Philosophical Magazine gave it the flexibility and independence required to sustain the kind of physics, also open to accusations of obsolescence, in which he believed.

Ownership, Institutions, and Methodology

My own area of research, the study of nineteenth-century serials, has been and will continue to be radically transformed by the impact of digital technologies. Whereas before periodicals were the main objects of study for a relatively small group of scholars, and were treated as a source of background information for most others, the digitization of the nineteenth-century print archive, through the simple fact of making this material more accessible, has the potential to return the periodical to its central place in nineteenth-century studies. Whereas previously the study of periodicals meant recourse to indices and hours over bound volumes in libraries, it is now possible to search and read a vast range of titles from your desktop. However, the proximity of the nineteenth-century periodical archive to nineteenth-century research is not enough: without developing corresponding methodological approaches in how to think about and use these resources, we remain trapped in methodologies shaped by our encounters with certain forms of printed objects in certain dusty rooms. The amenable condition of the periodical press for digitization – there is lots of it; it is largely out of copyright; substantial swathes of it are available on microfilm; there are demonstrable profits to be made – has lead to a situation where there are, at present, three large digital projects, all of which are producing large resources of nineteenth-century periodicals. Two of these resources are being produced by private companies, Proquest and Gale, and the third is by the British Library (but distributed by Gale). Of these, JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) will provide free access for to the British Library project for HE institutions, while access to the other two is by subscription from Proquest and Gale respectively. This immediately raises the question of ownership: as the material that is digitised is in the public domain and looked after by public institutions, should the public have to pay again for access to it? Scanning material and constructing appropriate user interfaces and data structures is labour intensive and expensive. The costs of digitization must be met somehow, and subscriptions allow the large sums involved to be worked in to more modest institutional budgets. Indeed, the costs involved are so high that the academic sector, which usually makes its digital products available free online in exchange for public money, is largely priced out of this market. Instead, the pattern of granting one-off awards over fixed periods of time to projects with definite deliverables has produced, as Julia Thomas and Jerome McGann note, a host of

Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era

The ongoing digital moment has made scholars see print differently. Just as the decline in the circulation of the printed newspaper has asked hard questions as to what a newspaper is, so too digita...

From the Margins and for the Margins: Studying the Nineteenth-Century Press Today

The study of the nineteenth-century press has been dominated by a narrative of discovery and recovery. The condition of the surviving print archive and the traditional concerns of the disciplines that constitute nineteenth-century studies have meant that newspapers and periodicals have been relatively neglected as resources for studying the past until fairly recently. Over the past 40 years a growing number of scholars have been making the case for the importance of the press in understanding the nineteenth century. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its journal, Victorian Periodicals Review (1968-), provides a focus for much of this research, making persuasive arguments for the centrality of the press in nineteenth-century culture as well as providing examples of how such research might be carried out. Despite this increasing body of work, the study of the nineteenth-century press remains tangential to nineteenth-century studies more broadly. Access to the surviving print archive is uneven and scholarly interest remains dominated by canonical authors, texts and historical events.

Editions and Archives

The relatively low cost of producing scanned pages and searchable transcripts makes it possible to republish periodicals and newspapers from the nineteenth century for the first time. The constraints of print publication — both the expense of publishing in paper and the requirement to produce editions in the form of the codex — prevented the republication of these often lengthy and visually rich serial works. Now, however, it is relatively easy to scan in the pages of periodicals and newspapers and produce a working — if barely edited — digital edition. What we lack are two sets of methodological principles. Firstly, we need to establish how best to edit newspapers and periodicals so that we can represent them in the present and ensure they are available for study in the future (Price, 2009, p. 10). We have a range of well-established methodologies for textual editing, but they are restricted to certain types of work and make tacit assumptions about what aspects of these works should be edited. Newspapers and periodicals, as multi-authored and diverse print genres characterized by miscellaneity and seriality, challenge editorial strategies predicated on establishing an authoritative text that represents a coherent work and can be encoded within the form of the book. Secondly, we have to find ways to represent these works in digital form. Electronic scholarship is still nascent, but there are a range of accepted methodological practices that can guide the production of digital resources.

Introduction: From Front Page to Home Page

The digitization of our cultural heritage radically transforms our encounters with the past. This book focuses on one area where digitization has played a particularly important role: the nineteenth-century press. The out-of-copyright status of most work published in the nineteenth century has ensured that it has a digital life. Many thousands of volumes of nineteenth-century print have become the foundation of large open resources such as Google Books and the Internet Archive , as well as more focused collections offered by commercial publishers. Never before has the work of the nineteenth century been so accessible and in a form that so closely resembles the printed page. Whereas previously it would take a trip to a specialist library to see the pages of a nineteenth-century volume, now they can be found as a result of the most cursory search of the web. Newspapers and periodicals, previously neglected due to their complicated bibliographic condition, have been returned to their central place in this corpus of print. This book argues that the digitization of the press provides an opportunity to reimagine what we know about the nineteenth century. However, to do this scholars must be able to engage critically with both the newspapers and periodicals they read and the digital resources in which they are found.