Advances in digital technology have made the recent past seem like a foreign country. Media historians did things very differently in 2002. In the last decade, hundreds of historical newspapers and periodicals have been digitised and made available to researchers via online archives. Whilst the emergence of these resources has generated contrasting responses from historians, an increasing number of researchers are now embracing the new methodological possibilities created by keyword-searchable digital archives. As the first examples of this scholarship begin to appear on the horizon, this paper considers whether media history is on the cusp of a ‘digital turn’. It outlines the existing responses to digital methodologies, deconstructs digital newspapers in order to explore how they differ from their paper originals and uses case studies drawn from my own research into the late-Victorian transatlantic press to demonstrate how new methodologies might be applied.

THE DIGITAL TURN: Exploring the methodological possibilities of digital newspaper archives

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Review of The Presence of The Present: Topics of The Day in The Victorian Novel

This article offers a theoretical and speculative exploration of the idea of “Women and Political Communication” in relation to two revolutions in mass media: the growth of the periodical press in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and the explosion of the world wide web in the late-twentieth, early twenty-first century. In the first section, this article explores the seriality of the periodical press, its heterogeneity of voice and genre, and the place of gender in the serial press. In its second section, the article explores the democratisation of information and access represented by the world wide web, as well as the challenge to embodied subjectivity of the internet chatroom, blog or website. This article considers the implications of these different communication forms for a politics built on the assumption of embodied subjects defined as ‘women’.

Periodicals and the new media: Women and imagined communities

This article tracks the transmission history of British newspapers from their nineteenth-century printing and library accession through microfilming and eventual digitization. It argues that scholarly use of digitized historical resources has overlooked a largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now. Studying Victorian periodicals against the longue duree of their mediation not only encompasses technological processes but also the discursive contexts in which those practices took shape, including twentieth-century political economies of global conflict, the intelligence community’s alliances with scholarly associations and research libraries, gendered and outsourced labor, and commercial techno-futurism. I follow the lead of several scholars in media studies and critical bibliography to outline—and then pursue—a method for investigating these material histories, an “archaeology” that enables us to better grasp the historiography of our research objects, which have arrived, for the moment, as digital. Such an approach is crucial not only for understanding the mediated conditions of scholarly materials but also for facilitating informed critique of the how they are created, sold, accessed, and used by casual users as well as scholars interested in computational techniques.

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An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

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. Thro...

Patrick Leary

Papers

Googling the Victorians