[On the 17 March 2012 I gave this as a talk at the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House. It's quite long, so I'm going to blog the talk in five parts. More Great Expectations pace than Our Mutual Friend, hopefully...]

Part 1: Introduction

The quotation – ‘Scarers in Print’ – comes from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. In Boffin’s Bower, the Golden Dustman, Noddy Boffin, listens to Silas Wegg, one-legged ballad-seller and sometime runner of errands. Boffin, the retired servant of a recently deceased, rich, miserly dust constractor called Harmon, wants someone to read to him in the evenings and Wegg, who Dickens describes as an ‘igneous sharper’ on account of his wooden appearance and wily ways, is more than happy to oblige – at twice the proffered rate.¹ Boffin wants what he calls an opening into print, but the revelation of the contents of the book, which turns out to be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, startles him. The narrator tells us:

Mr Wegg, having read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and articulate “Tomorrow.”²

Here, the action of Silas Wegg transforms the book from one thing – a smart set of volumes, ‘red and gold. Purple ribbon in every wollume, to keep the place where you leave off’³ – into something quite different. For Boffin, Wegg has performed some sort of arcane rite, unlocking the contents of the book while, at the same time, bestowing it with depth so that it becomes a container.

Boffin is struck by this transformation of object into archive, turning the book into a repository, in a way that Wegg, who reads on by rote and dwells not on what he reads, does not. Boffin thinks this is because of Wegg’s worldliness

‘Commodious,’ gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: ‘Commodious fights in that wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character only! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Commodious, in another character, kills ‘em all off in a hundred goes! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats six millions’ worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don’t see a way to our bettering ourselves.’ Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the Bower and shook his head, ‘I didn’t think this morning there was half so many Scarers in Print. But I’m in for it now!’⁴

The scarers here are ghosts, conjured out from the archive by the apparently magical process of reading. However, the scarers are not in the book, but are produced through overlapping sets of technology put to work in a particular social configuration. The technology of writing creates a decipherable code that can be transposed without deformation from one material context to another. In this instance, the code is inscribed onto the printed pages of the book; but to become meaningful the book must be opened, there must be light to see, and there must be a reading mind able to process the information produced by the eyes. But there is even more here. Wegg’s mind processes what he reads and his vocal chords (mellowed with gin and water) articulate his translation of the marks on the page as sound. These utterances are, in turn, received by Boffin’s ear, which detects the vibrations in the air. His mind processes this information, separating Boffin’s voice from the other sounds in the room and isolating the spoken signs from one another as comprehensible units. This mental reckoning is not divorced from bodily reaction, and what Boffin hears affects his body, giving rise to sensation that provokes further articulation.

As Walter Ong reminds us, the scene of communication is always complex, taking place in the company of both speaker and listener, writer and reader (even if the latter is imagined), and depending on a range of learned competencies, technologies, and material. Yet in Orality and Literacy, Ong is suspicious of analyses that foreground media as they suggest ‘communicaiton is a pipeline transfer of units of material called “information” from one place to another.’⁵ As Ong makes clear over the course of the book, he recognizes the constitutive role material media play in enabling communication, but he argues that focusing upon these risks neglecting the necessarily intersubjective nature of human communication. However, I want to follow the lead of people like Friedrich Kittler and try and explore what happens to material media in acts of reading and writing.⁶ Literacy rests on doing things with things: in these posts, I want to explore what happens to those things during the production of text.

These posts explore whether Mr Boffin is right. Taking Boffin’s impression that there are ‘Scarers in Print’, I consider both the apparently uncanny nature of textual content as well as its putative location in print. Is content really ghost-like? And in what ways is it imagined as being within media? My argument is that reading involves learning to ignore (or at least unconsciously process) the material media necessary to permit text to be in the world. This is not, of course exceptional, but happens all the time, whenever a piece of text attracts a glance. The industrializtion of print in the early nineteenth century led to the proliferation of text upon a wider range of surfaces. The effect was to emphasize the promiscuity of text while lending it presence. The same words appeared in lots of places and appeared in the same fashion, reifying themselves as objects, while occluding more of the material world by bringing it into textual discourse. There had never been so many texts, and they had never been so dispersed. The result, I argue, is an unprecedented opportunity for objects to misbehave, to assert their agency in unexpected ways.

There are four posts to come. The first explores the role of materiality in media more thoroughly, arguing that shifts in material presence underpin the practice of reading. Although literacy is usually described as a cognitive process, deciphering signs inscribed in written code, it necessitates interactions with objects of various kinds. Rather than understand these interactions as secondary, I argue that they are the condition of reading. The second turns to Our Mutual Friend, offering the novel as an explication of the agency of material. If, as Ong argues, writing is predicated upon an economy of death and resurrection, then this novel – published in parts, featuring characters who play parts, and, in the case of Wegg, become alienated from their parts – reminds us that this economy is based on material media. The third turns to the present, and applies this analysis to the digital objects that enable textuality today. If the nineteenth-century archive betrays a concern about keeping things in line, then the web, the largest, most ill-disciplined archive we have ever created, permits new material possibilities. Taking Facebook as an example, I demonstrate how a different technology of inscription – a set of networked servers and a carefully designed software architecture – create different conditions of reading and writing. As Facebook forces us to live with alienated ghosts from our pasts, we are reminded of both the central role that material plays in literacy, as well as the potential for objects to exert themselves against their prescribed passivity as media. The final post offers some conclusions. While I argue that we need to remember both objects and what we do with them when we think about literacy, recognition of the reflexivity of these process tends to be bit alarmist. Looking briefly at this history, I nevertheless stress that in disciplining the material world by making it legible, we too are disciplined.

Notes

¹ Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), p. 40.
² Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 45.
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 39.
⁴ Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 43.
⁵ Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 176.
⁶ See for instance Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800 / 1900 (Stanford NJ: Stanford University Press, 1992).

[This is the abstract for the paper I am giving at Transforming Objects, 28-29 May 2012.]

My paper uses the controversies surrounding the well-known nineteenth-century proprietary medicine chlorodyne to explore the relation between commodity culture and the unknown. Chlorodyne was a proprietary medicine and, as such, its inventors, J. Collis Browne and John Thistlewood Davenport jealously protected its composition. However, this secret came under sustained pressure over the period. When rival versions of the drug appeared on the market, Browne and Davenport were unable to prove that their chlorodyne was the original without giving away its composition. When the British Medical Association looked for a test case in order to regulate the market in medicine, they chose chlorodyne and contrived a way to make it confess its constitution. By maintaining the mystery of its composition, its creators found that others were able to transform chlorodyne into something else

The composition of chlorodyne was not really a secret, but it functioned as such because of the way its materiality was rendered knowable by chemical, commercial, legal and medical discourse. By concentrating on two key moments in its history, this paper explores how the imponderable otherness of materiality is converted into a knowable set of properties that allow objects to play a part in social life. Through an analysis of chlorodyne, I argue that objects play an important cultural role, operating as interfaces to the unknown. Standing on the threshold of what is knowable, objects not only provide the material media of social relations, but also, in always exceeding the discourse that describe them, constitute an inexhaustible and generative resource for narrative desire.

[On the 24 February I participated in a panel on 'Victorian Beginnings' at a Study Day on the News of the World hosted at King's College London. Below is my position paper]

As you would expect for a London paper with a circulation as large of the News of the World’s, it has an entry in the first number of Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory in 1846. This is what it says:

This is one of the many papers which compresses into a capacious double sheet the news of the week; and the manner in which it is arranged adapts it for the the perusal of a class of readers who, though respectable, may be supposed – through incessant occupation in the week – not to have had much opportunity before the Saturday evening for newspaper reading.  It has no very distinctive feature in its composition, which simply aims at giving as much news as possible; and of a general as well as political character. There is some attention given to literature; and a small selection of sporting news.  Its commercial intelligence is good, and its ‘Grocer’s Gazette’ seems to mark it out as favoured by that class of traders. It is well suited for the respectable tradesman and intelligent persons in that sphere; and its being cheaper than any newspaper (except one), tends of course to enlarge the circle of its readers. It appears to be designed in a great degree for country circulation; and the main feature in its management is, the number of its editions – in fact from Friday evening to Sunday morning, there is a perpetual succession of editions, with augmented if not amended intelligence; so as to secure to every post through which it is sent out the latest news from every source.

Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory (London: C. Mitchell, 1846), pp. 79-80.

I think the insistence that the NOTW is not distinctive in terms of its composition is important. The entry makes clear that this is not an innovative paper, but nonetheless has some noteworthy features. I think the following are the key points:

• it was based around news but there were other types of content such as literature and sport
• it was aimed at a class of readers who didn’t read during the week, probably because they were keeping shop
• it was cheap
• and it published multiple editions

Below, I explore these aspects of the NOTW with reference to its run over the nineteenth century. What I think this analysis reveals is an often overlooked aspect of the appeal of the newspaper: its stability, despite the changing material of the news.

1. Content

From its first number in 1843 until the 1890s, The NOTW consisted of eight pages, each with six columns. The front page was notably consistent over the run. The first columns were always devoted to advertisements: in the early issues, this space was reserved for its proprietor John Bell’s publications, but in the 1850s a much wider range of advertisments appeared, including advertisements for the theatre. From the 1860s, the theatre advertisements moved onto page four, in an important space immediately before the leading articles, leaving the front page to carry miscellaneous advertisements for a range of goods.

The front page also carried a column called ‘The Politician’, the NOTW’s main political content. This ran I until the 1860s, when it was replaced by a weekly letter by ‘Hampden’ – a regular contributor whose letters had already been printed within the paper for a decade. Its other main feature was a column of jokes from the previous day’s Punch. This appeared from the very first issue of the paper in column six and was joined by jokes from Fun in the 1860s. This must have proved popular, as it was a consistent feature of the paper up until the end of the century.

The literary content was also a regular component of the paper. Throughout the run there were two columns dedicated to literature on page 6. Until the 1880s this always consisted of reviews, nearly always of nonfiction and featuring copious quotations. In the 1880s the NOTW began to publish serial fiction, but still within the two columns of ‘Literature.’ In the 1890s, however, when the NOTW sold for a penny but consisted of twelve pages, each with seven columns, usually two pages were devoted to literature, including serial fiction for the adults and content aimed at children.

Unlike literature, sport became more important over the run. Initially published on page five, after the late news and alongside reports about army and navy deployments, it occasionally made its way onto the front page throughout the 1850s. In the 1860s it obtained its regular space on the last page, often extending to a column and a half. By the 1890s it was five columns, covering a range of sports and taking up most of the back page.

News occasionally appeared on the front page, but it was mainly relegated to pages two and three, where regular columns of ‘Foreign News’ were followed by ‘Country News’ and then, from pages five onwards a miscellany. Court reports were a regular feature, usually appearing on page seven. Page eight carried the closing market prices from the Saturday. The NOTW clearly saw its news as important and the gesture towards the international was not empty rhetoric – in fact, in 1853 the paper claimed that ‘every publication that is issued from any country on the globe’ was duly examined ‘(in addition to private correspondence) for interesting articles for the News of the World’ – but the paper also, as the press directory noted, published much more.

2. Readers

The readers of the NOTW are difficult to pin down. There was a ‘Correspondents’ column from the first issue, which usually just printed the paper’s responses but occasionally printed a (signed) letter from a reader too. Reader’s letters did not appear until the 1890s, and then only sporadically. Advertisements were for a range of goods and services: men’s and women’s clothes; as well as the usual clutch of advertisements for insurance and patent medicines. Perhaps most revealing are the frequent advertisements for emigration, which complemented the regular columns of ‘Emigration News’ in the 1850s and 60s. These were readers interested in the colonies, and readers advertisers thought might become emigrants themselves.

By the 1890s, there was a deliberate attempt to target women. In the earlier decades there was plenty of content considered suitable for women, and the lighter matter – especially the regular ‘Varieties’ column – that might be marked as feminine. The introduction of serial fiction, too, can be seen as an attempt to broaden the readership. However, the expanded NOTW in the 1890s had dedicated columns such as ‘Our Home Circle’ (by ‘Clarisse’) covering fashion and gossip, as well as the much extended literary sections. It also had a separate column of advertising dedicated to women.

3. Cheapness

The NOTW’s cheapness was an explicit bid to gain a large circulation. In the first issue cheapness was justified as an attempt to bridge an apparent divide between journalism for the rich and the poor; with the former characterized ‘by the the manners, the dress, and the habitations of the rich’, while the latter was marked by ‘the customs, the squalor and the dens of the poor’ (p. 1). Melissa is going to say a bit more about this, but when the paper claimed that it represents no classs or party, only ‘truth’, and its prime motivation was to serve ‘dear old England’, it was clearly trying to occupy as neutral an ideological position as possible for a liberal, reform-minded Sunday paper.

On the News of the World’s tenth anniversary the paper recast its price as a deliberate response to the reduction of the newspaper stamp in 1836. Rather than lower the price by a penny, as many of its competitors had done, the NOTW boasted that it had set its price as if it passed on the whole saving to its readers. This revisionist account of their pricing strategy – I’ve not seen anything about this in the early issues – seems to be an attempt to ally the NOTW to the agitation for the repeal of the remaining ‘Taxes of Knowledge’. What is notable about the price is the extent to which the paper advertised it while insisting that it would never change. Price was clearly the NOTW’s main selling point, but this was complemented by a concern for the quality of the paper. This was literalized in December 1844, with a boast that ‘Our newspaper shall be perfect in information – perfect as respects the quality of the paper it is printed upon – and perfect also with respects to its type’ (p. 1). Throughout the run there were frequent claims that it was a ‘First Class’ paper, and this clearly refers to both its content and properties as a commodity.

4. Editions

From the outset the NOTW published three editions: the early edition published on Friday was sent by evening post and rail so that it was available Saturday; the second edition was published on Saturday; and the final, late edition early Sunday morning. News was inserted, usually around the middles, up until publication so the NOTW, especially the Sunday edition, was up-to-date. Yet I am a little puzzled by the Newspaper Press Directory’s remarks about editions. It was common for weeklies to publish multiple editions in this period, certainly for those published on Saturdays. Perhaps this was a bid on behalf of the directory to appeal to advertisers?

Conclusion

So what can we make of all this? Well, the NOTW obviously found and maintained a large readership throughout the nineteenth century and it did it by steadfastly not innovating. I suspect that the NOTW, although clearly serving to deliver content of various kinds to its readers, also served to represent ‘the newspaper’. This is why the paper continually stressed its quality: although it was cheap, it was not second class, in terms of its form or content. Of these, I think the form was more important. The remarkable consistency of the NOTW performed that often undervalued aspect of the newspaper: stability. The NOTW was able to offer a consistent framework through which to accommodate the events of the past week. It provided readers, week after week, with a stable form that promised mastery over the recent past. In buying the NOTW readers were buying a fairly robust, crafted object that warranted its readers’ participation in the emerging force of public opinion.

[On the 17 March 2012 I'm giving a paper at a day-long meeting of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar to mark the end of the series. The theme is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: my paper uses Ong to explore the relationship between media and memory in the nineteenth century and today. Here is the abstract - I'll post the talk once it's ready.]

Building on the work of Walter Ong, this paper explores a broad definition of literacy that considers what we do with objects as an integral part of making them meaningful. By placing that extended Victorian discussion of literacy, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, in dialogue with current discussions of literacy in the digital age, I advance a model of materiality that is emergent and rooted in practice. Considering materiality in this way directs us to the multivalent and unsuspected properties of objects, bringing to light their disruptive potential when out of place. Moving from nineteenth-century mechanisms for ordering information to more recent implementations in digital culture, I argue that mediation is always in some way haunted. When Mr Boffin says that he did not know there were such scarers in print, he not only alludes to the macabre details told by Silas Weg, but also reminds us of the necessary processes of repression that allow us to make sense of the world.

In 2011 the annual conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) was hosted at the University of Birmingham. The theme was ‘Composition and Decomposition’, an attempt to signal both the processes of production (artistic and industrial) and decline. The conference was held in the University’s Business School and ran from 1-3 September 2011. There were 117 speakers and 140 delegates; plenary lectures were from Herbert Tucker, Tracy Davis and Colin Cruise; and the conference finished with a plenary panel that featured a talk about ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’ from Shearer West with comments from Linda Bree, Regenia Gagnier and Sarah Parker. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition of objects from the University’s Cadbury Research Library that was curated by Nicola Gauld. The exhibition flyer is available here.

As far as a I know, this was the first BAVS conference to have a dedicated hashtag (#bavs11) and a lively discussion ensued online. I preserved the tweets with TwapperKeeper until it became part of HootSuite in January 2012. Using Martin Hawksey’s excellent Google Spreadsheet (following the instructions posted on his blog), I’ve exported the tweets into Google Docs and shared them here

Given that this post is archiving various things to do with the conference, I thought it might be a good place to host links to the conference program and poster too. The conference website hosted by the University of Birmingham is actually still up and running, but the bulk of material was hosted elsewhere. So:

• to view and download the conference prgram, click here
• to download the conference poster, click here

If there is anything else from the conference anyone would like made available then let me know.

The new British Newspaper Archive (BNA) was launched a couple of months ago, publishing (at the time of writing) 3 million pages of historical newspapers from 144 different publications. Given the importance of the press in the period and the methodological difficulties when working with it today, the publication of the BNA is a major achievement and marks a significant event in nineteenth-century studies.

Shortly after its launch, Bob Nicholson, who blogs at the digital victorianist published an excellent review of the resource, as well as a thorough critique of its pros and cons. Since then, Bob has added a couple of further posts, exploring some of the points in his review (here and here). For a full description of the BNA and an introduction to the context in which it has been published, I recommend you take a look at Bob’s review; below, I’ll offer a few observations of my own.

As Bob notes, the BNA must be situated alongside the British Library’s decision to close its newspaper library at Colindale, shifting most of its holdings to their site at Boston Spa. Although not the most welcoming of ‘interfaces’, the buildings at Colindale facilitated a variety of users, including students and scholars, genealogists, and those using the collections to revisit the newspapers of their past. This new resource, it must be assumed, stands in for the physical buildings and it’s holdings. If the purpose of Colindale was to allow readers to locate and read articles from the nineteenth-century press, then this resource easily surpasses the existing facilities. But of course, there is much more to Colindale that simply the provision of articles: there is all the material in the building not represented in the resource; there are the things you can only appreciate from looking at the printed copy (and even more that can only be realized by comparison between digital and print); there is a wealth of reference material on the shelves; and sometimes it is only by browsing pages, one after the other, that you realize what is you are looking for. This resource offers its digitized page images and transcripts as surrogates for the printed copies housed at Colindale, but really it offers something entirely different.

What is clear from the BNA is that it is not a resource aimed at academic researchers. The interface is relatively cluttered, foregrounding things such as the premium print service (“from only £39.95”) and free example pages recording famous events from history, neither of which are of much interest to those who know the period.  Nor is it a resource aimed at those interested in the press more generally (although such users will find it indispensable).  The BNA is designed to encourage as many users as possible to access articles with the minimum of fuss, and it achieves this very well.  Of course, given that the user is charged per article view this makes commercial sense, but the effort to open up the press beyond the (still relatively small) community of academic researchers is, of course, to be welcomed.  There is some contextual information to help users understand what it is they are reading.  Clicking on the small ‘i’ by the publication title opens up a brief description of the newspaper that will be of interest to experts and newcomers alike (my thanks to Ed King for bringing this to my attention).  At present this information is a little patchy – perhaps understandably given the size of the resource – and mostly only extends to a couple of paragraphs.  However, given the neglect of the press, especially that outside London, these snippets, when considered together, are a very helpful compilation of information about the press.  It is a shame that they are not searchable (as far as I can tell), and they, like the articles, are only available for reading, one by one.

One of the challenges of digitizing historical newspapers is the scale of the resulting data set.  Given the sheer amount of print represented by a run of newspapers, it rapidly becomes very costly to carry out extensive editorial work.  Brightsolid, like ProQuest and Gale before them, have opted to concentrate on search as a mode of access, designing a metadata schema to facilitate this process.  From the home page the user is offered the chance to search for some text. The hits (and there are likely to be many, even with the various filters) are presented in groups of ten. One major problem here is the way in which the user scrolls through the pages of hits. Although the user can jump to the first or last page, and those before and after the page he or she is on, it is impossible to jump to anywhere else. If you are browsing a run of issues, it would take you something like 240 clicks to get to an issue ten years into the run.  Each hit is presented with a thumbnail of the page and a snippet of the textual transcript. It is on the basis of this information that the user must make his or her choice and, given that page views are metered, this is not a casual decision. A click on a hit will open a page viewer that allows the user to move around the page and scroll in or out. This interface is fluid and intuitive, probably the best executed aspect of the resource and by far the best example of its type. The decision to offer the user the page rather than article nicely foregrounds context and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, simply providing page facsimiles helps users to understand many different aspects of nineteenth-century print culture. However, at no stage is there any information about things like page size, price, important textual divisions, or anything else about the newspaper. The user is asked to choose a hit (and pay for it) purely on the basis of the few words, taken from an uncorrected transcript, that they can see.

Given the commercial model of this resource, the emphasis on breadth over depth is understandable. This resource banks on users finding lots of relevant hits and then spending credits or time, depending on the subscription package selected, sifting through them. It is notable, though, how much user activity is commodified by the resource. When looking at pages from newspapers, users can do the following:

• print
• download
• bookmark
• tag
• comment
• buy print

The first two options are fairly generic and the third, the creation of personal bookmarks, quite common in similar resources. The option to buy prints makes explicit the commercial ends of the resource. The remaining two options, however, are a little more interesing. The addition of tags and comments allow users to annotate the content, improving the resource for others. These, along with the option to correct the OCR-generated transcripts, constitute an admirable commitment to crowdsourced information by Brightsolid. The size of most runs of nineteenth-century newspapers means that crowdsourcing is really the only way to create reliable edited resources. The question, of course, is whether users will be willing to provide their time and expertise freely to improve an explicitly commercial product. Unlike, say, Wikipedia, this labour will be locked behind a paywall rather than contributing to a resource that feels like it is owned by a community of users. I suspect Brightsolid and the British Library looked at the success of the pioneering Australian Newspapers Online, now available via the portal Trove, for an example of crowdsourced OCR correction. The difference, though, is that the Australian resource is publicly-funded and free to access. Users are helping to improve their cultural heritage for all, not for a select group of paying users or to improve profits for a bunch of shareholders.

Brightsolid are not alone in allowing their users to work on and improve their products. ProQuest have long encouraged users to tag content and Gale Cengage’s forthcoming Nineteenth-Century Collections Online (NCCO) features a range of crowdsourcing options. Time will tell whether users will contribute sufficient material to make this worthwhile. While I would be happy to contribute my time and expertise freely for a resource that was free to use, I am very reluctant to lock up my contributions so that someone else can make money from them. Mind you, I’m aware that this describes much of academic publishing too, but that’s another story.

The BNA demonstrates what happens to our cultural heritage when there is no political will for public investment. The nineteenth-century newspaper press was one of the period’s greatest achievements but, rather than celebrate it, opening it up and giving it back to the nation, the British Library have been forced to sell it off. This is not just a gripe over having to pay for access to what is already public property, although this is obviously important; rather it is a lament over the opportunity lost through this compromise. Brightsolid have done a good job with this resource and I suspect that it will be a commercial success. However, as a model of funding digitization projects it is a disaster. Firstly, to become commercially sustainable one set of users have been privileged over all others. While this is not a bad thing (opening up the nineteenth-century press to a wider audience can only be a good thing!), it restricts what I, as a media historian and teacher, can do. Bob’s post is good on this, but I can’t stress enough how short-sighted it is to finance a resource that is currently impossible to use in the classroom.

This leads me to my second point: the way Brightsolid have digitized this material also restricts possible uses. This is a resource for finding articles, not reading newspapers, and this is done by Brightsolid’s search engine and database on the user’s behalf. There is no scope here for data mining, for analysis of textual transcripts, or for the interrogation of metadata. This actually runs counter to the dominant trend within both the digital humanities and commercial digital publishing, making BNA seem a little old fashioned. Gale Cengage’s NCCO, for instance, allows users to carry out rudimentary data mining. This is no mere moan about the way the project was executed. Taking advantage of the digital properties of digitized materials is the way in which we learn new things about them. Locking the data away means that users are stuck with old methodologies, treating the articles as if they were printed paper even though they clearly aren’t.

Perhaps most importantly, the resource restricts reuse through its implementation and explicitly forbids it in its (admirably clear) terms and conditions:

You can only use the website for your own personal non-commercial use e.g. to research newspaper archives and other archives featured on the website that you are interested in and to purchase goods that we may sell on the website. We are also happy for you to help out other people by telling them about the newspaper archives and other information available on the website and how and where they can be found. However, you must not provide them with copies of any of the newspapers (either an original image of the newspapers or the information on the results page), even if you provide them for free.

So, not only are you forbidden from sharing facsimiles of material out of copyright, but you are also forbidden from using content for commercial ends. Instead of a publicly-funded resource, open to many more users and many more uses, sparking off innovative pieces of research and entrepreneurial commercial activity, the British Library have locked up a key piece of our cultural heritage so that Brightsolid can make money selling access to interested users. There is no chance for any of this content to enter digital culture, becoming recontextualized as it interacts with other content; instead, it is trapped within the interface, pretending that it is paper, so users can read articles, one after the other. On these terms, it must be said, the BNA is excellent (and let me repeat, the page viewer is one of the best I have seen); but as a resource that contributes to the UK economy, scholarship, or even one that helps us learn more about nineteenth-century print culture, it is limited. One can only hope that the British Library does not now consider this material ‘done’, It is essential that they recognize that this is one possible implementation, one possible representation of this content amongst many others, and so should be open to other uses of the data – whether transcripts, page images, or metadata – that might come along in the future.

[N.B.  Corrected paragraph about contextual information 10 January 2012]

[In our department research seminar today, we had a discussion about editing. Each of us had a few minutes to set out our views on editing prior to a general discussion. Below gives a fuller account of my position.]

I think that the digitization of our cultural heritage places editing at the heart of the humanities. Although the editorial role can go unremarked or concealed, it remains a crucial part of every digitization project. Representative objects must be selected, decisions made about the extent to which they define the work, and a way found to represent both the absent object and the work it represents in digital form. As Jerome McGann argued a few years ago, scholars have a vital stake in the future of this material. They also have valuable experience in the methods, practice and politics of scholarly editing. For me, this means editing must be at the heart of all branches of the humanities, but not necessarily under this name.

The flexibility of digital media, including the computer’s capacity for simulation, means that it is possible to edit – and so interpret, reproduce and transmit – a much broader repertoire of cultural artefacts. It also means that these artefacts can be edited in a wider variety of ways. For instance, we can provide digital editions of buildings, paintings, ephemera, journalism, towns; and these can be presented as fairly fixed reproductions, with an emphasis on fidelity to the source objects, or as manipulable representations that can be interrogated, transformed or repurposed by the user. Editions might be (or include) databases, maps, timelines; they might offer their content as data that can be queried or exported; they might be representations of objects, or attempt to define or provide their content. Selection remains a crucial (and difficult) part of the editorial process and editing, as always, operates within an economy of loss and gain, yet the crucial point is that the different conditions under which digital technologies represent historical artefacts means that we can rethink what an edition might be. If we think a series of printed volumes is the best way to represent text, then these can be modelled in digital media; however, if there are better ways to represent the wide range of things we inherit from the past – and there are – then we have the tools to build them.

Editing in digital media forces us to recognize the assumptions that underpin print editions. Crucially, this includes the persistent myths that media are neutral; that content can be separated from form; that text alone can adequately capture what is important about the past; and that print is a privileged container for text. No editor is this naïve, of course, and editing projects are always dialogic, engaging with the properties of both source materials and the final edition. But, as many critics have noted, republishing texts in printed editions leaves many of these issues underexamined.

But I think there is a further dimension to this. The skills associated with editing are not just vital for the creators of digital content from historic objects, but also those who use digital resources to access material from the past. Of course, one of the things the web has done is collapse this distinction, allowing many more people to contribute to resources, becoming editors in their own right. In fact, many digital resources explicitly place the user in the position of editor, allowing him or her to select and configure their own material (within certain prescribed limits). But I think an understanding of editing is vital for anyone using digital resources to access historical material. All edited works represent a particular type of translation: one that makes explicit how it differs from its source materials. Not all digital versions of historical objects are accompanied by an editorial (or methodological) apparatus – in fact, very few are – and so the user must reconstruct the editorial process as best he or she can. This is important for two reasons: firstly, it can reveal what has been lost and what has been retained in the digital representation; secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it allows the user to imagine what might be done with the digital representation to learn about the past. Meaning is always created from practice. If we are to take full advantage of material in digital form then we need to recognize it as such, and not simply as a partial representation of something nondigital. By recovering the process of digitization, we can discover different ways in which the material might be used and, crucially, what this might mean for our understanding of the past.

The term ‘editing’ might not be capacious enough to encompass both the wide range of digital representations and the various skills required to make sense of them. At times, what I have called editing, whether carried out by the creators of digital resources or those who use them, might better be described as curation, process or methodology; equally, the skills necessary to make sense of digital representations of historical objects might be called critical analysis, experimentation, or simply digital literacy. I’ll let others worry about the terminology: what is clear is that we all need to become familiar with the methods and conventions that underpin editing if we are to take seriously the radical transformation of our cultural heritage that continues around us.

As part of the Birmingham Book Festival (around the city, 6-16 October 2011), the Barber Institute of Art and my department have teamed up to produce some literary-inflected podcasts for some of the works in their collections. Here is mine, on Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist’:

More used to being looked at, Salome here gazes on the figure of John the Baptist, having secured the right to his head. For Oscar Wilde, Salome was a figure of desire who dared to desire in her own right. Here, she is in the background, fully-clothed, and showing no signs of the energetic (and erotic) performance that she has just given for her stepfather. Instead of Salome, our gaze is drawn to St John who, radiant with devotion, kneels naked to the waist with his palms open, waiting for the blow that will send him to heaven. A figure of stillness, a fragile masculinity, he is contrasted with the dynamic executioner, muscles rippling as he performs his grim task. These two figures dominate the composition, but it is Salome’s partially-hidden red gown, the colour of blood and wine, that tells both of the coming of Christ and the violence about to unfold.