Links Round-up: Digital Platforms, Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

In the last few weeks, I have read some thought-provoking articles/essays/posts on scholarly publishing. My ideas are still percolating but I invite you to check out these links and contribute your thoughts in the comments about some of the questions raised by these writers:

If, as the MLA has repeatedly recommended, we should be moving away from the proto-book model of graduate dissertations, what should we be moving towards?

How do we, as scholars, ensure equitable and open access to our published research?

Has it been your experience, like Aimee Morrison’s (below), that “the more you write, the more you write”? (That is, that writing that doesn’t “count” because it isn’t peer reviewed, for instance, can facilitate increased writing output in the kinds of writing that do “count”? )

How have you successfully integrated blogging (and twitter?) into your research and teaching?

How have you been addressing these various issues of access and digital publishing  in your own publishing practices?

CFP: Victorian Thresholds: Between Literature and Anthropology, 28 April 2012

The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario is soliciting paper proposals for its annual conference, which is happening on April 28th this year, at York University’s beautiful Glendon campus in Toronto.

The call for papers might be of interest to those working on or around 19th-century borders, boundaries, hybrids, peripheries, dusks, dawns, doorways, vestibules, amphibians, fringes, frontiers, ambiguities, or other similarly delicious ideas that relate to that of  “the threshold.”

Dickens’s 200th Birthday

Charles Dickens beat out Keira Knightley for the lead story in the entertainment section of the Toronto Star today, with an article featured here on a local collector of his works.  The paper also had a cool map of places in Toronto that Dickens visited on his 1842 visit to North America, which I don’t see reproduced online.

We are still a couple of weeks away from Dickens’s 200th birthday, on February 7th.  It will be interesting to see what kind of mainstream media coverage the big event gets, in addition to the academic conferences and special publications being planned.  Seems like the Victorians have enough cachet to trump starlets.

CFP: Special Issue of Women’s Writing on Dinah Mulock Craik

Sketch of Dinah Mulock, 1845, by Amelia Robertson Hill, National Portrait Gallery

Guest Editor: Karen Bourrier, Consulting Editor: Sally Mitchell

Throughout her lifetime and since her death, Dinah Mulock Craik (1826-1887) has been considered either ahead of her time or a touchstone for all things Victorian. Henry James, for example, assessed her work as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental.” At the other end of the spectrum, Elaine Showalter found that she excelled at a “peculiar combination of didacticism and subversive feminism.”1

This special issue of Women’s Writing seeks to re-evaluate Dinah Mulock Craik’s life and work, moving beyond assessments of her work as either too sentimental or subversive. Recent scholarship on Craik has contributed new contexts to the appreciation of her work. The rise of disability studies has spurred scholars to re-consider the role of invalids in Craik’s work, and her complicated relationships with Ireland and Scotland have led to a re-evaluation of the role of the nation in her novels. Her personal involvement in and fictional treatment of controversial topics such as adoption and the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Act, along with her widely-cited series of essays, “A Woman’s Thoughts on Women,” continue to act as a touchstone for scholars considering women’s roles in Victorian family life. This issue aims to interrogate what was idiosyncratic in her views and writings and what was more representative of Victorian thought, in order to gain a fuller understanding of her work and multi-faceted career.

Sandowing and Other Resolutions

I’ve spent the last three years writing about the origins of bodybuilding as a middle-class pursuit. The project has been a pleasure: I’ve been able to splosh about in seas of Victorian ephemera, most of which did not turn out to be immediately germane, but which were still well worth the wade. As we head into what I consider the cruelest month (really, Eliot, winter may have kept us warm, but the fight to stick to new year’s resolutions is fraught with more potential for heartache than wet feet are in April), here’s some advice from the comic song Oh, Mr. Sandow! (Father’s Been Sandowing in his Gown). Lampooning the famous strongman Eugen Sandow, the song warns about the perils of too much exercise:

At last [Father] left off practicing
But that was worst of all,

For quickly though his muscles rose

More quickly did they fall!

And ere a day or two elapsed 

The change in dad [sic] was dire,

For all his muscles had collapsed

Just like a punctured tyre!



Oh, Mr. Sandow, you’ve a lot to answer for!

Now none of father’s clothes will fit.

They all want “taking in” a bit!

We all thought father’s cranium

Would soon be turned, so mother burned

His model gymnasium.

Do be careful, and happy new year!

The Heroic Life of George Gissing

In the spirit of Karen’s Holiday Reading post, I thought I’d offer a few words on a book in which I’ve been luxuriating this holiday season: the first volume of The Heroic Life of George Gissing. Pierre Coustillas’s eagerly-anticipated, triple-decker biographical tour-de-force has been several decades in the making, and, judging by this first installment, the completed project will deliver a masterfully detailed account of Gissing’s strange life.

Holiday Reading

Byatt, from the Guardian

I’m embarrassed to say that I read about two non-Victorian novels a year, and that even those novels are often related to the Victorian novel stylistically or thematically.  A perennial favourite of mine is the contemporary realist novelist Margaret Drabble, especially The Peppered Moth (whose Darwinian themes are related to The Mill on the Floss).

This year it’s even worse–one of my favourite reads was A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which slipped by me when it was first published in the fall of 2009 but which I was happy to pick up in paperback when I needed a break in November.  Byatt’s neo-Victorian novel stretches from the 1880s to WW1, and centers around several sprawling families involved with the Arts and Crafts movement and the Fabian society, and is certainly engrossing as well as rather disturbing.

The Challenge of Writing About George Eliot’s Writing

As Tedra Osell has noted at Crooked Timber, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been posting sporadically about his experience reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the first time. (Osell also helpfully provides links to Coates’s posts on Middlemarch).

I have enjoyed reading Coates’s attempts to wrestle with what it is about Eliot’s prose that makes it so, well, wonderful, I suppose. For instance, in his post “Greedy of Clutch,” Coates explains that he believes it is his lack of grammatical knowledge that renders him only able to appreciate “the beauty of this sort of writing on a rather unspeakable emotional and spiritual level.”

Call for Papers: Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics

I’m currently organizing a conference at the University of Amsterdam with a colleague and I hope it will be of interest to writers and readers of the Floating Academy.

Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics

University of Amsterdam

June 13-15, 2012

Ouida

The November 21st issue of The New Yorker had a poem about Ouida by Christopher Stace, in case any of you missed it.

On First Seeing Ouida’s Tomb at Bagni de Lucca

Nature she knew by heart; on birds and flowers

She could discourse for hours and hours and hours.

Sententious, sentimental, repetitious, she

Would never choose one word if there were three.

Pith was her weakness; clichés were her strength.

And here she lies now, as she wrote, at length.

Now, I’ve only read The Moths, but it strikes me that the bits about boring nature writing, sentiment, and length are more clichés about the Victorian novel than actually applicable to Ouida herself.  The descriptions of high society, make-up and fashion in The Moths (not to mention sordid affairs with opera singers) seemed pretty fast-paced to me.  I also wondered how many typical readers would know who Ouida was.  (My informal survey revealed that 3 out of 3 PhDs in other areas had no idea.)  What do you think?

Darwin and the Mechanisms of Human Expression

Duchenne de Boulogne and Patient, from The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy

A recent bout of research on photography and duplicity has led me back to Cambridge’s indomitable Darwin Correspondence Project. This editorial project is an extraordinarily valuable resource for Victorianist researchers, but I’m especially impressed by the compelling points of access the site provides into a mass of information that might otherwise seem quite imposing. I imagine that many curious but casual readers have been drawn in by the site’s weekly blog posts.

One especially intriguing item popped up a couple of weeks ago. It’s an interactive quiz that recreates an experiment Darwin conducted on his own friends and acquaintances. The DCP takes you through a series of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne’s famous photographs of electrically induced emotions, first collected in his Mechanism of Human Physiognomy (1862), and later included in Darwin’s Expression Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). (Have a look at the photos here.)

Victorians in The New Yorker

I’m a little behind on my New Yorker reading these days, which is too bad because there have been a huge number of Victorian-related articles lately. (I’m counting one on H.G. Wells from the October 17th issue as Victorian, never mind that he published most in the 20th century.)

Henry James was a through-line in the article, and one sentence that really struck me compared the two men’s sexuality: “Henry James’s famous celibacy is more fertile for our imaginations than Well’s amorousness–just as James’s artistry is more compelling than Wells’s productivity” (85).

One thing I learned in the article was that Wells slept around a lot. Now, I’m used to critics rather problematically linking prolific women writers to unconstrained sexuality and maternity (as in, “Margaret Oliphant wrote too much and had too many kids to support!”) but this one about men’s sexuality and writing productivity was new for me. What do you think? Have you seen this before?

The Value of Victorian Studies: Papers from BAVS online

The Journal of Victorian Culture Online site recently published four papers given at the 2011 BAVS conference on “The Value of Victorian Studies.” I recommend the whole series of papers, by Shearer West, Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier, on various aspects of the question of the value and impact of our field. While the papers engage quite closely with the particular situation of British academia, the issues involved – from rising tuition fees, the value of a University education, the imperative to demonstrate the “impact” of humanities research, or the bleak job market for graduate students – will certainly be familiar and of interest to a North American Victorian Studies audience.

I welcome your thoughts about these papers and their divergent claims and recommendations including:

• West’s call for academics in the Humanities to contribute more to “policy making and public services”
• Bree’s desire, as an editor, to see Victorian Studies books on subjects that are “more ambitious, bigger, and broader”
• Parker’s description of the various economic and ethical worries of graduate students
• Gagnier’s celebration not only of “the good society” but also her more specific appreciation for collaboration and her claim that “as we develop large interdisciplinary projects, often with teams of researchers and digital technicians, the expectation is for collaboration, and the generation of young Victorianists will find that it is becoming the norm”

CFP of Interest: ACCUTE/NAVSA Joint Session: Victorian Technologies and the Technologies of Victorian Studies

From railways to telegraphy, typewriters to telephones, Victorians were engaged with new, and developing, technologies of connection and communication. Innovations in technology over the course of the Victorian period influenced wider cultural ideas of connection, of scale and of human capacity. Like the Victorians, researchers in Victorian Studies are using new technologies of reading, writing, research and social connection that are changing the nature of our work and its dissemination.

This call is for papers that critically address Victorian Technologies and/or the technologies of Victorian Studies. Whether you are interested in the Blackberry or the trans-Atlantic cable, you are invited to submit a proposal for a 20 minute paper to be presented at the ACCUTE/NAVSA joint panel at the 2012 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Waterloo, Ontario.

Reading Postures

I attended the Harvard English Institute two weeks ago, and intended to blog about it immediately.  Better late than never I hope!

The conference draws scholars from all around Boston as well as the U.S. and Canada, and makes me wonder if this is what a more local conference culture is like, rather than geographically spread out conferences North Americans often attend.  Of special interest to those of us who work on nineteenth-century literature and culture was a talk Patricia Crain (NYU) gave on “Postures and Places,” which was about children’s practices of reading in the U.S.–or, more literally, what nooks children in read or were depicted as reading in, and what physical postures they took up as they read.  Crane concentrated on the child curled up in the window seat (or sitting cross-legged in the window seat as Jane Eyre does); and on what I learned was a new practice of reading in the 1870s, the bed-time story, where a (middle-class) child is read to in bed.  This practice seemed so natural from my own middle-class childhood that it was fascinating to learn it had a history, though I suppose I should be used to that sort of revelation by now!  Crain’s talk also reminded me of Robyn Warhol’s discussion of the reading postures we take up now and the embodied experience of reading in Having a Good Cry.

Probably either of the postures Crain outlined is preferable to the way that I often read now—hunched up over my computer.  I’d be curious as to what postures and places others read in, and how it affects the experience.  Does it depend on what genre you’re reading?  Does fiction entail a more relaxed posture than criticism?

Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 2012 Conference

The following call for papers seems ideal for all of us here at the Floating Academy, and to many of our readers as well. I hope to see you all there next April.

CFP: VSAWC Conference, “Victorian Media,” (Victoria, British Columbia, April 2012)

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals for a conference on Victorian Media. The conference, hosted by the University of Victoria, will be held from 26-28 April 2012 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

We seek proposals for papers that focus on the theme of media in relation to Victorian culture and knowledge: that is, the relation of Victorian media to the culture of the period and the relation of new media to the study, dissemination, and archiving of Victorian materials. In particular, we invite proposals on topics related to three main threads:

E-Reader Update

About this time last year, I acquired an e-reader, which I blogged about here, and I thought it might be time for an update on whether the technology was really worth the $150 I shelled out.  Without a doubt the answer is yes.

I have learned a few things about myself with this e-reader. First, I am careless with my possessions in a way that I’m sure would get me called a “slattern” or something equally unflattering in a Victorian novel (I’ve lost the electronic pen and the cover that went with the reader.  It still works.)  Second, despite being trained in close reading, I will read almost any Victorian novel, no matter how garbled the text.  I have read entire novels where Google Book’s character identification software has substituted a question mark for an apostrophe.  Even whole un-paragraphed books.  No matter.  I still enjoyed Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior, Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial, and the first volume of Oliphant’s Hester.  Google Books didn’t digitize the second volume.  I like to think this replicates the experience of the circulating library, you know, when the next volume of the novel you were reading was out.

The number one thing that has changed my use of the e-reader has been renewing my acquaintance with Project Gutenburg.  I had previously used this purveyor of plain vanilla electronic texts to search for passages by keyword that I knew existed and needed to quote, but couldn’t find in my physical copy of the book.   Once I found the passage, I’d check the chapter and flip back to my physical copy.  But, as it turns out, Project Gutenburg now has their texts up in formats to suit every e-reader: ePub, HTML, and even the propriety Kindle format.  And because someone physically typed them in and proofread them, there are no garbled characters.  And if a novel has more than one volume, they’re all there!

Unfortunately they haven’t put up Hester yet.  But I think it’s safe to say that she marries her cousin.  (The brooding one, not the dapper one she turns down at the end of Vol. 1).

Victorian Curiosities at the Courtauld Gallery

Back in May, I went to see the exhibit, “Life, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours” at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Many were works apparently shown for the first time. There were some beautiful Turner watercolours depicting Swiss scenes, such as “The Fall of the Rhone at Schffhausen” and “Brunnen, Lake Lucerne.”

I was most struck, though, by the female portraits, like William Etty’s chalk drawing “Female Nude with a Cast of the Venus De Medici” from 1835-7. An exploration of the real and the ideal, the illustration shows a nude model standing next to, and embracing, the cast of Venus. Oddly, though, the female forms are almost entirely identical, so that the painting doesn’t seem to reveal the shock of the real woman in contrast to the idealized sculpture.

“Novel Forms of Immanent Death”

“Novel Forms of Immanent Death”

My thoughts on accidental phenomena in Victorian material culture have been a long time coming, so I apologize for my inability to sit my butt down and write. Having done so, finally, I want to focus on a peculiar, but actually quite commonsense, aspect of Victorian social theories of accidents and catastrophes, namely the period’s realization that new forms or types of accidents could have significant future payoffs with regard to accident prevention. Our own “risk society” is so preoccupied with the travesties of large-scale industrial or environmental disasters that it sometimes seems, especially if we compare ourselves to the Victorians, that we have lost any sense of forward thinking. Perhaps, rightfully so, because it’s a hard sell suggesting that major catastrophes and disasters can teach us something about how to prepare for future accidents, or even teach us something about living in a industrial-capitalist economy. We’d rather believe, perhaps naively, that there won’t be any future industrial catastrophes, that it can’t happen here, whatever “it” is.

Out-of-place technological artifacts and productive unease

An alleged time-travelling cellphone user caught on film in 1928

Gregory’s last post on Babbage and railroads, illustrated by that arresting Montparnasse train wreck photo, got me thinking about Victorian visual technologies and their ability to register accidents as phenomena. At the same time, Daniel’s analogy between aircraft data recorders (black boxes), on the one hand, and Babbage’s proposal for their 19th-century railroad equivalents, on the other, got me thinking, too, about technologies with unexpected histories. We know that 19th century technologies like film and photography changed how people thought about time and experience, but there’s also something about 19th century technologies that makes them seem, themselves, prone to accidents of chronology. The conspiracy-theory subgenre of pseudoarcheological “out-of-place artifacts” seems like good fodder for the kind of alt-history thinking that Victorian studies has absorbed from steampunk.