Melancholia and the Digitization of Victorian Culture

We’ve been talking recently about the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada’s 2013 conference in Vancouver a few weeks back, so I thought I would add a few of my own thoughts. The conference was a truly fantastic and welcoming weekend of Victorian studies on the topic of Victorian humanity and its others. I learned a lot, and had a great time connecting with some good friends and colleagues.

From a personal perspective, though, one paper in particular really made me think about what it is that we do in Victorian studies, and why our field has embraced wholeheartedly a cultural and print studies turn in literary criticism. At the risk of sounding kind of self-promotional, that paper was by my wife, Allison Fieldberg, who read some new work on silence and the ethics of the novel genre in the Brontes. Strangely, despite the fact that we’re both Victorianists and spend probably far too much of our time together talking about Victorian literature and literary and cultural criticism, we don’t often get a chance to share our ideas with each other, especially as they appear in our formal writing.

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April Conference Report: Methodologies in Victorian Studies

I attended two terrific conferences in April that have spurred me to think about methodological questions in the field of Victorian Studies. The first one, “The Victorianists Workshop: New Approaches to Archives, Methods and Pedagogy,” which took place at Western University, was the first conference I have attended where attendees were asked to think specifically about methods instead of presenting a conventional research paper. The CFP encouraged us to consider the “developments of new critical methodologies, archival resources and pedagogical practices [that have] radically transformed Victorian Studies” and then, at the conference itself, we presented short, 2-3 page papers on our own work as it intersected with these new developments.

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VSAWC

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada conference, Victorian Humanity and its Others, has come to a close. It was held at Coast Hotel in Vancouver, a location that has, ladies and gents, left me feeling a little nostalgic. I attended my first VSAWC meeting at the Coast in 2009 — my first visit to Vancouver. Fellow Floating Academician Daniel Martin gave me a tour of Stanley Park over a lunch hour and was kind enough to introduce me to the Victorian Studies who’s who of Western Canada.

Since then Daniel has moved east and I’ve moved west. It was great to have mini FA reunion at the conference: Daniel, Jennifer Esmail, and I

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THATCamp: Just Go!

I just attended my second THATCamp, a digital humanities “unconference,” in Boston.  And I have to say, even if you know nothing about the digital humanities, you should just go to one!  By nature, they are a lightweight conference that’s easy to organize, which means they are popping up everywhere.  Check here to see if there’s one near you…

This model of attending an academic conference in an area of specialization you have little to no expertise is quite different from other models in the humanities.  Before I presented my first Victorian studies paper at a national conference, there was a lot of preparation. I’d already been in grad school in my field for two and a half years, I’d read the key texts in the field, and I knew the major figures in Victorian studies.  I would never have thought of opening my mouth at an important Victorian studies conference if didn’t already know the difference between Isobel Armstrong and Nancy Armstrong.

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NAVSA 2012

I’m a little intimidated to try and blog about this year’s NAVSA.  We’ve talked here about the pleasures of going to smaller conferences–two of my favourites are the CUNY Annual Victorian Conference and NVSA.  Posting about those is never too bad, because usually you’ve seen most of the panels, so you have some small claim to authority.  But NAVSA is huge!  This year I think there were around 500 participants and up to twelve consecutive panels over ten sessions, not to mention networking lunches and workshops!  So, my post here is a small snippet, feel free to chime in in the comments as it’s entirely likely that people experienced entirely different NAVSAs.

First of all, this year’s NAVSA was probably held in the most beautiful conference center I’ve ever been to, Monona Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright building overlooking Lake Monona.  And the late September weather was perfect in Madison–complete with an autumnal farmer’s market on Saturday morning.  There were a number of ways (as always) that people could take the networking theme.  I liked hearing about technological networks (the telegraph, the postal service), and how their forms might relate to literary forms, and was particularly drawn to work being done on kinship and publishing networks.

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Steampunk in Victorian studies

I’ve been noticing a persistent, sustained interest in steampunk in the various mainstream outlets of geek culture (a phrase I use with affection) such as the Gawker blog io9. (For example: http://io9.com/5917187/gorgeous-portraits-of-steampunks-jetpack+wearing-superwomen) We could probably list dozens of examples of steampunkery in popular culture, from video games to movies to prog-rock concept albums and so on if we wanted to. I have a different question, though — one I’m asking as a fan and marginal practitioner of Victorian studies rather than someone trained and based in it. Has there been much substantial work on steampunk from within Victorian studies, as distinct from fields who study science fiction in the present? Is steampunk something that matters, or should matter, in Victorian studies these days, or has it run its course — and if so, what was that course?

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Zotero!

I have made the resolution to use software to manage my citations more than once.  At the beginning of my MA I took a course on Endnote and dutifully used it to produce my master’s dissertation, which probably wasn’t necessary seeing as it was a twenty-five page dissertation with about thirty works cited.  At the beginning of my PhD, I took a course on Refworks and started gathering material there, but didn’t stick with it.  All in all this was okay; I actually found the recent week I had to spend sorting out my references for that project rather soothing on the whole.  I think it gave me the feeling of being productive without having to reflect on the quality of my arguments and analysis.

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Dickens’s 200th Birthday!

I woke up this morning, opened up my browser to Google, and asked myself if it was Walt Disney’s birthday.  Yes, the sketch on the Google letters that indicates that it’s somebody’s birthday looked like a Disneyfied version of A Christmas Carol, complete with ladies in bonnets with large ribbons and street urchins hanging around gas lamps.  Actually, come to think of it my first exposure to Dickens was probably through Mickey Mouse, so this may be quite fitting!

In celebration of Dickens’s 200th Birthday, here is a round up of links to some of the festivities!

Click here to read free articles on Dickens from Routledge until May.

Click here to see places in the novels in London.  (So sorry I haven’t got the map of where Dickens stayed in Toronto!  I think it was University Ave.)

Click here to sign up for an online conference on Dickens in March.

Click here to search for Dickens in the British Newspaper Archive on a seven day free trial.

Happy Celebrating!

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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?

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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”

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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.

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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).

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peer-review and machine anxiety

As my first test-post, I thought I’d pass along a recent exchange on the Humanist email list. This doesn’t fall squarely within Victorian studies exactly, but it does play on some familiar Victorian themes like machine anxiety and the boundaries of automation. Note that although the given date of the first post is March 31st, it first showed up in mailboxes on April 1st…

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Grants and Victorian Studies

I just read a fascinating article by Russell M. Wyland, Assistant Research director at the NEH, about the symbiotic relationship between the development of Victorian studies and the development of the NEH as a federal grant agency in the 1950s and 1960s.  I had never thought about the vast amount of resources, especially financial, that it took to get a project like the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals up and running, or the impossibility of doing interdisciplinary work in Victorian Studies without these resources.  The article also made me think of the place of collaborative scholarship that enables other scholarship, like editions and indexes and maybe now web-archives, in the academy.  The NEH is now funding projects like the Nines, which are making scholarly editions and articles even more accessible by putting them online.  I wonder if this is a modern-day equivalent to the Wellesley Index or something even more?

I am also reminded of the importance of scholarly indexes and archives in an era when the Google search can make them seem superfluous.  But, if like me, you’ve ever spent an hour trying to Google whether a portrait of Dinah Mulock Craik still exists to no avail, when, if you’d just gone to the library and looked it up in the catalogue of Holman Hunt’s work you’d have had the answer in less than ten minutes, you know how valuable this work is.

Here’s the link, from the August 2009 issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, if you’re interested in following up:

http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n55/039554ar.html?lang=en

p.s. Holman Hunt didn’t finish the portrait, and it doesn’t exist anymore!

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It’s not a Kindle

I recently made the plunge and bought an e-reader last month, and following Jen’s and Daniel’s excellent posts about the digitization of books, I wanted to add in my two cents.

I bought the e-reader before taking a trip to visit family and it was fabulous to travel with–the screen is almost easier to read than a book, and I was able to carry many “books” with me.  As a scholar who works on a lot of non-canonical novels, I’m grateful for easy to access to authors (like Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte Yonge) whose complete works aren’t so easy to find.  My copies of Craik’s or Yonge’s or even Charles Kingsley’s novels are often more than 100 years old, and needless to say they don’t travel well!

I wonder, in fact, how much of the reason for the canon is material rather than about “quality”–only so many Victorian novels are in print at any given time, which limits what we can read and think about to some extent.  I think that projects like Google books and devices like e-readers are doing a great thing in making these books more democratically available.  It can only add to the richness and diversity of scholarship in Victorian studies to have this kind of access.  I wonder if we will see a renaissance in work on lesser-known novels as this access increases.  Or, if more ordinary people will start reading more Victorian novels simply because they’re out of copyright and free on the web.

I’ve read a lot of (usually print) articles worried about the demise of the book with the advent of the Kindle.  I don’t see these two things as being in conflict.  I have both a shelf full of beautiful old books which certainly have an aesthetic and cultural value that the e-reader doesn’t, and an e-reader to take with me when I don’t want to damage those beautiful books.

Another benefit to the e-reader is environmental–I have yet to start reading articles on my e-reader, but it is pdf-compatible and I could see this really cutting down on my printing.  There’s even a disability studies angle to this book technology–the option of increasing the font-size makes the technology accessible to the visually impaired, and it’s easier for people with difficulty with fine motor skills to press a button than to turn a page.

The biggest detraction I’ve found so far in reading Google books on my e-reader is that the software they use to decode the fonts and convert it to e-pub format produces some junk characters.  This would be a problem if I was doing a close-reading of one of the novels or quoting from it, and for that I would switch to my print editions.  But for an initial reading of a novel it’s really not a problem.

Do any of you have a Kindle or other reading device?  What has your experience been?

p.s. I personally decided on a Sony because it has a touch screen that allows me to scribble notes on the text and is compatible with Google books, and it didn’t hurt that it was on sale for $150 and red!–but really this could all apply to any device on the market.

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Looking at the Origin

Word Cloud for On the Origin of Species, 2nd edition

I hope visualizations entertain you as much as they do me.  I’ve recently generated two word clouds which denote the word frequency in the second and sixth editions of On the Origin of Species.  As always, they support what we already know (for example, the increased frequency of “Mr” in the sixth edition confirms that there were more men that Darwin could draw on to substantiate his work in 1872 than he had been able to in 1860).  That said, I’m not sure how to interpret the later text’s dwindling use of the word “varieties” relative to “variations,” or the virtual disappearance of the word “believe.”  I suppose visualizations really do make us question the text, rather than providing us with answers.

Word Cloud for On the Origin of Species, 6th edition

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Victorian Studies e-books and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Designer Kyle Bean's The Future of Books (c. Kyle Bean, 2009). http://www.kylebean.co.uk

The future of academic publishing is an important and complicated issue that concerns us all and I know that we’re all deeply interested in the ways that scholarly publishers are responding to the economic pressures they face. For most presses, digitality seems to be an attractive cost-saving measure.  The University of Michigan Press, for instance, announced last year that they would be switching their list primarily to digital formats (with a print on demand option) in future. Other presses seem to be experimenting with e-book text access in order to figure out business models that work: indeed, various presses, like the University of Chicago Press, are providing access to specific e-books on their list at no charge.

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Where is the Text in Textual Materialism?

"It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!" Image from Harper's weekly serialization of Great Expectations. (Scanned by Philip V. Allingham).

As a scholar working in the field of Deaf Studies who thinks daily about the fraught triangulation of written language, signed language and spoken language, I was intrigued by Bill Brown’s recent call to “extend textual materialism beyond the manuscript and the book and to expand the ways of locating physical detail in a sign system, which is how we make matter mean” (25). Brown issues this call in an introduction to a series of articles on textual materialism in the January 2010 issue of PMLA in which he traces the complementary and contradictory ways that book history, “theory,” digitality, and thing theory/material culture studies combine.

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