Mussell 2012

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Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Book Notes

Intro

3.17.17: Go back and focus on Ch 1 and Ch 4

  • impt to differentiate between periodical, serial, and newspaper
    • serial as the super-category or as a feature?
    • 30:...As print genres, newspapers and periodicals are predicated on miscellaneity and seriality. These two properties produce a complex textual environment in which individual component articles are set alongside others in a composite object, produced at a certain moment, that is itself a part of a larger whole.... As miscellanies, newspapers and periodicals provide something different with each of their textual components; as serials, they offer something new with each issue.
  • 1: The digitization of our cultural heritage radically transforms our encounters with the past.
  • The out-of-copyright status of most work published in the ninteenth century has ensured that it has a digital life.
  • Intervention: 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. Digitization always represents a transformation of the source material and it is essential that the users of resources can understand how material has changed in its passage from the shelf to the screen. To understand the C19 one must be a critical reader of the C19 press; to access and interpret this material in digital form, one must become a critical user of digital resources. Through an account of the politics, practices and pedagogy of digitization, this book examines both the transformation of our print heritage [2] and the way such a transformation changes what we can learn about the past.
    • the long history, almost reception history of digital objects
  • 2 one of the reasons that digital tech is so important for C19 studies is its capacity to model complex print forms while subjecting them to some sort of bibliographic control.
  • There was no position from which to appreciate the sheer diversity of material that constituted C19 print culture.
  • For us, considering the print archive that we have inherited from our C19 predecessors, the problems of bibliographic control are even more complex. For C19 readers, the challenge was to keep abreast of the publications that clamoured for attention. We have the same problems of abundance and diversity, but readers in the present have an additional hermeneutic problem. The C19 presses might now be silent, but what survives is incomplete. We not only lack the details of those who produced and contributed to the press, but also the shared cultural resources that came from being a contemporary.
  • 4: Editing is thus an interpretive exercise and all editions must make some sort of argument about whatever it is that they publish. However, most newspapers and periodicals appear in digital form as surrogates for the printed objects stored in libraries and archives.... The capacity for the digital to simulate elides the dramatic changes printed objects must undergo before they can be represented onscreen.
  • 5: For instance, in books that model works previously published as books, many of the formal aspects are simply reproduced and so editorial scrutiny is focused upon the meanings in the letterpress. As the digital is completely different from that which it models, the scope of this hermeneutic process is made explicit. The entire object is available for translation, forcing editors to identify the significant aspects that must be modelled in digital form.
  • The increased visibility of C19 newspapers and periodicals within the emerging digital archive can return the press to its central position in C19 print culture. However, to appreciate this material and understand its relation to the culture that produced it, it is important that scholars and students can engage critically with the digital resources that make it available. This book argues that we now need to cultivate two sets of skills to understand the C19: familiarity with the forms and genres of the periodical [6] and newspaper press; and the ability to interrogate the resources that present them in digital form.
    • textual scholarship as underpinning both of these skills
  • 7: Even in the digital age, and perhaps more so, the book represents a relatively stable way in which to exert bibliographic control over textual information. It is a well-established technology...there are also institutions that entrench the cultural importance of the book...the single bound volume, the codex, asserts an attractive symmetry between text, author, and book.
  • 8: Kirschenbaum - formal materiality (granted by environments in which they operate) and forensic materiality (describes the way they are encoded and read from storage media)
  • 9: In his A Rationale of Textual Criticism, G. Thomas Tanselle draws attention to the counter-intuitive nature of the term 'work'. The word suggests that something is being produced by someone's labour; yet this something, which is instantiated in some sort of material form, is always an imperfect representation of whatever it represents.
  • 10-12: situating in recent textual criticism: Shillingsburg, Searle, Barthes, McKenzie.
    • Deeply situating the project of using digital eds of C19 periodicals within the wider intellectual project of modern textual scholarship: both a form and media to which that field is still adapting but a set of skills, Mussell argues, that can take us forward
    • Forms of sociology in Houston and Mussell: Bourdieu cultural fields, McKenzie sociology of texts
  • 12: ...Barthes's insistence on a text as 'methodological field' [in "From Work to Text"] is vital: text provides the means through which readers discriminate between those aspects that they think represent the work and those that can be ignored as properties of its media.... Neither work nor text is prior to any encounter with a material object.
  • 15: It is only when we understand the properties of digital objects that we can properly account for the way these texts intervene in the histories of the works they represent.
  • 17: Text is not produced despite bibliographic codes McGann 1991, whether textual or material, or regardless of how and when reading takes place, but rather is an effect of these contingent factors and our own particular competency as readers. If we are honest about what we want from digital resources, we will admit that it is access to whatever material has been digitized. We may express admiration for a resource's functionality and excitement about what it allows us to do, but the most important thing is that it allows us to encounter objects from the past. What we want are Kindles: resources that do not intrude between us and whatever it is they represent. But it is too late: digitization is both interpretive and transformative and so the resource already shapes the way in which we encounter its contents. We are already users ["doing" something, though I'd quibble about the differentiation from "reading" as "inactive"] whether we admit it or not: what we must do is recognize how use affects meaning, whether this is in our encounter with historical material or the digital resources that provide access to it.
    • how do we separate them?
  • The illusory proximity of text, which allows its mediating technology to disappear, is an effect generated by the learned behaviour of readers. It is not a property of text, but the result of a social practice [18] that depends upon a contingent encounter between an individual reader and a specific object. Use is a central component of literacy, but it is too easily overlooked in the search for fixed and generalizable meaning.
  • 18: To be literate is to be a user and a reader, but critical literacy depends upon understanding how use permits reading.
  • 19: Our interest in C19 printed objects tends to be determined by what they say, and the use of textual transcripts produced from scanned pages has further entrenched the idea that what a text means is what is written upon it. Verbal content is, of course, important - these publications were designed to be read after all - but the tendency to treat printed texts as repositories of information risks overlooking the significance of the way they are instantiated [their media, to use Claude Shannon's negative definition of media as noise opposed to information].
  • 20: The materiality of printed objects - their hard edges - gives them an illusory integrity, allowing them to appear consistent despite their immediate context. Yet materiality can also be understood as a function of use, a process where the properties of an object only become realized in contact with those of something else. This may seem a little abstract, but the point is that the printed object also behaves as an interface, allowing us to posit its abstract historical context, how it was used [21] in the past, on the basis of how we use it in the present. Consequently, when recreating these objects in digital form, we must attend to the various formal properties that affect meaning, of course, but not overlook those that also structure use. Editing, when considered this way, is no longer simply a hermeneutic process, but also a curatorial process, preserving not just the work, but the way in which that work was made available to a specific set of cultural circumstances.
    • Returning from contemplating the digital to give insight into materiality and editing more generally
  • 21: As digitization is always interpretive, digital resources cannot be considered as exhaustive representations of the hard copy, and certainly should not be used as a pretext for its disposal.
  • 23: Two sets of methodologies were produced over the course of the [NCSE] project, and they were intrinsically connected. The first was a way of conceiving newspapers and periodical s as works to be represented; the second was how to represent these works using digital technologies.
  • 24: Given that digital media provide the means of understanding not only the past but also, increasingly, the present, digital literacy can make for better scholarship and better scholars.
  • The first two chapters engage closely with the forms of C19 newspapers and periodicals from the perspective of the digital present.... Ch 1 accounts for my focus on these particular print genres, describing their significance in the period and the challenges this body of material represents for us today.
  • By attending to when and where an article was published and what it looked like on the printed page, we reconnect it to the mechanisms that enabled it to enter into and circulate within C19 culture.
  • Ch 2: visual material -- [25] Without the visual, we reduce newspapers and periodicals to a sequence of articles containing only linguistic information.... When newspapers and periodicals are digitized, it is usually through the production of scanned facsimile pages and textual transcripts. Although this method reproduces many of the visual codes from the page, it writes a visual/verbal binary into the final resource.
  • Ch 3 Newspapers and periodicals are rarely considered material for editorial treatment...NCSE was an attempt to do just this, and we provide an account of how the scope of the project changed in response to the demands of the source material. What was initially conceived of as an edition turned out as an archive, but one that was still predicated on the application of scholarly care.
  • 26: Ch 4 - We can now easily teach the period through its press, returning these important documents to the centre of C19 culture. In this chapter, I outline the skills required to interrogate this material, both in print and in digital form.

RSVP Lecture Notes

"Too Much to Read: Victorian Periodicals, Bibliographical Utopianism, and the Bad Indexer" RSVP 2016, Kansas City (video)

  • l/u Bibliographer - Cornelius Walford, "The Outline of a Scheme for a Dictionary of Periodical Literature," Bibliographer, 1883, p. 121
  • how periodicals behave like archives but are also subject to archival control
    • entanglement of materials in institutions
  • dreams of bibliographical order [a longterm dream that Chartier 1994 charts from at least the C16]
  • l/u Frank Campbell - Theory of National and International Bibliography (London: Library Bureau, 1896)
  • unwilling to accept bibliographical indexing only 1 representation (?)
  • "periodicals imagine readers coming back" through paratext indexing
  • preservation
    • "selective memory" of institutions (by necessity)
    • Panizzi believed in collecting newspapers at the BM (separate from main collection 1840)
    • "uneasy truce between bibliographic control and the exuberance of the print" - running out of space for newspapers at the BM
  • l/u Henry Wheatley, How to Make an Index (London: Elliot Stock, 1902)
  • paratextual nature of bibliographic control: it has its own rules
  • l/u Eliza Hetherington, indexer
  • clipping agencies
  • David McKitterick, Palmer's index - l/u
    • "organizing knowledge in print"
  • distant reading as indical learning built on the indexes themselves, something that comes into being by trying to imagine it
  • we should try to save everything - we will fail, but hopefully well
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