digitalvictorianist.com

A few months ago I reviewed Leah Price’s latest monograph for the European Review of History. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain explores nineteenth-century representations and perceptions of books and other printed objects such as newspapers and religious pamphlets. It’s an interesting study and well worth a look for  anybody who works on Victorian print culture. A hardback copy with 350 pages will set you back £15.56 on Amazon – not dirt cheap, but more reasonable than a lot of academic monographs. Still, if you’d prefer to read my review before handing over your hard earned cash then you’ll soon be able to find it on the Taylor and Francis website.  If your institution already has a subscription to the European Review of History then you’ll be able to digest my wise words for free, but if not then please don’t despair – you’ll have the option to buy a copy of my review for the perfectly reasonable price of £23.50.  It’s 1,114 words long – that’s about four sides of A4 paper – and will be sent to you in the form of a handsomely presented PDF. How could you resist?

It’s moments like this – when a 4 page pdf of a book review costs more than the 350 page hard-back book that it’s reviewing – that should remind us that academic publishing is broken. The numbers just don’t add up. Open access initially seemed to provide a solution to this problem, but the ‘Gold’ model currently supported by the UK government replaces one set of skewed numbers with another. If you haven’t been following this debate – or, like me, you keep forgetting which colour of open access is which – then all you need to know is that the ‘Gold’  model requires authors (or their institutions) to pay for the costs of publication. At first glance, this seems like it could be viable, until you realise that the ‘costs’ of publishing are massively inflated. This week I received an email from Taylor and Francis informing me that I had the option to publish my book review as Open Access for the modest fee of $2,950. This, incidentally, is about $2,920 more than I was paid to write it (they gave me a free copy of the book). I’d happily pay £20 to make my review open access – it seems like a fair price to pay to make a small piece of my work accessible to a broader audience – but spending months of my salary is pushing things a bit too far. After all, I need that money to buy more old newspapers on ebay.

Unfortunately, the bizarre costs associated with the Gold model have soured a lot of people’s opinions about open access. This is a great shame, for the basic principle of free access to academic research presents great benefits for researchers. A couple of months ago the Journal of Victorian Culture temporarily lifted the paywall on one of my articles and made it completely open access. Before this happened, the article had been viewed less than a hundred times. As of today, it currently has 507 views and is fourth on the journal’s list of most read articles. Over the last few months it has been passed around on twitter, first by me but subsequently by other readers. I also posted a link on Reddit’s brilliant r/AskHistorians forum, which generated an enormous amount of traffic from history enthusiasts who wouldn’t have had access to my article when it was locked behind a paywall. Buoyed by this success, I subsequently uploaded my PhD thesis to this blog and made it open access too. As of today, its been downloaded 132 times – rather more than that five or six people who were forced to read the printed version. I’ve had some great feedback from readers who would never have encountered my work through other channels – several of whom gave me great ideas and encouragement for the process of turning it into my first proper monograph. One reader claims to be using it as bedtime reading, but perhaps they just need something to make them sleepy.

In this case, the numbers do add up to what we’d expect. Open Access publications are read by more people than those stuck behind a paywall. They reach audiences from a greater variety of backgrounds and are much easier to promote and disseminate using social media. Open Access is, in other words, a fundamentally good thing for anybody who wants their work to be read.

We just need to get the system right. A much better model of ‘diamond’ Open Access has been outlined in a great article by Tim Hitchcock and Jason M’ Kelly. If you haven’t read it already, please take a look. I won’t go into any more detail here, save to say that I support their conclusions unreservedly and hope that the Open Scholarship Project fulfils its promise.

In the meantime, grab a copy of my open access article while you still can! It tracks the journey of a terrible nineteenth-century joke about undertakers as it moves around Britain and America. It’s available free until the end of June.

I’m hooked. Back in December I wrote a blog post about the pleasures of handling the original copies of old newspapers. This week, I managed to get my hands on a few more. I’ve been researching the history of The Times in advance of a guest appearance on Great British Railway Journeys – the popular BBC2 history series presented by Michael Portillo. It was all rather exciting (I even got my hair cut) until my contribution was squeezed out of the tight filming schedule. TV superstardom will have to wait. On the plus side, I ended up ordering a selection of old newspapers and periodicals to use in the shoot that have since consoled me in my time of disappointment.

Once again, the good people at Historic Newspapers (who I’m starting to think of as my ‘dealer’) ventured into their archive and dug out two copies of The Times from the middle of the nineteenth century. The first comes from 18 October 1845. I ordered it because it contains an editorial on ‘Railway Mania’ – a financial frenzy of the mid 1840s when thousands of Victorians invested their savings in railway companies, many of which were fraudulent or mismanaged. The Times condemned this craze for speculation and “[contemplated] with pity the enormous amount of individual misery which must inevitably… fall upon thousands who have madly entered within the clutches of the iron Mammon.” This concern rings a bit hollow when you turn the page and find that the rest of the paper (including a dedicated four page supplement) was packed with advertisements for railway shares.

The content of the paper is fascinating, but I’d already made these discoveries using the Times Digital Archive. The printed version of the paper offers pleasures of a different kind. There’s something rather magical about holding a 168 year old newspaper in your hands. After all, such ephemeral texts were never really meant to survive beyond the day they were published. Other copies of the paper published that morning – the brothers and sisters of my text – were, according to Leah Price, probably used as cheese wrappers and toilet paper before eventually crumbling to dust. My copy, on the other hand, has aged remarkably well. Aside from a rather musty smell, the paper is still in very good condition and can be read as easily as on the day it was born.

It’s hard to say why this particular copy of the paper led such a charmed life. Whenever I come into the possession of an old book or newspaper, my instinctive reaction is to start day-dreaming about the life it led before we found each other. Whose hands have turned its pages? What places has it seen? What kind of adventures has it been on? Normally, this is little more than an idle fancy – tracking the history of such unremarkable objects is usually an impossible task. However, this copy of The Times provided me with a tantalizing clue. On the top right corner of the front page was a name:

Thomas Saunt Esq.
Market Harborough
Leicestershire

I immediately logged into ancestry.co.uk and entered these details into the 1841 census. Within a matter of seconds I had him!

Thomas Saunt, aged around 35, was recorded as living in the first house on the High Street with his mother Joanna, his two sisters (Jane and another Joanna), and four servants. His profession is listed as a grazier – a name given to gentlemen farmers who reared large numbers of cattle or sheep. Whilst Thomas was the only adult male in the family, his mother was listed as the head of the household. This initially struck me as unusual (EDIT: though I’ve since been reliably informed that it isn’t!). I wondered if his father was somewhere else on the night of the census. I called my Dad (who’s far more practiced at this kind of research than me) and together we began to piece together a picture of the family. Thanks to the Mormon Church’s morally dubious (but incredibly productive) attempts to retrospectively baptize people into their faith, the databases on familysearch.org soon revealed that Thomas’ father, Lewis Saunt, died just before the census took place. Another quick search on the National Archives website uncovered his will – an extraordinarily detailed, 8-page document in which Lewis meticulously portioned out his extensive wealth and property between his wife and children. Thomas received thousands of pounds along with control of his father’s grazing business.

I spent the rest of the morning looking for traces of Thomas. I found him again in the 1851 and 1861 censuses. However, he had now begun to go by his more distinguished sounding full name: Thomas Barfoot Saunt. The word ‘grazier’ was also crossed out in the 1851 census and replaced by the more aspirational title of ‘Landed Proprietor’, along with a note saying that he employed five labourers. His sisters Jane and Joanna are recorded as living with him in both censuses, though Joanna appears to have married a clergyman named Frederick Roberts. Neither Jane, nor Thomas himself, ever appear to have married.

Finally, I turned my attention to the digital newspaper archives. Sadly he never appeared in The Times itself, but I found a few brief references to the family in local papers. In 1857, Thomas attended court in order to prosecute a railway labourer for stealing two of his lambs. In 1878, a notice informed his creditors that Thomas had passed away. Two years later, the Northampton Mercury reported that an annual donation of £11 18s had been left to the town’s aged and infirm by Joanna Saunt in her brother’s name. A quiet life.

There’s something rather magical about all this. I’ve been doing this kind of archival research for the best part of a decade now, but the act of tracking down sources and gradually piecing together a story is still as thrilling as ever. The case of Thomas is a testament to the power of digital research; there’s no way I could have connected all of these pieces of information (never mind doing it over a cup of coffee in my office) without the use of multiple online archives. But it’s also a reminder about the value of printed materials and the unique fragments of marginalia they sometimes contain. Thousands of copies of The Times were printed on the 18 October 1845, but this is Thomas’ copy. It’s a uniquely personal piece of print. I can’t be sure that the paper ever reached Thomas’ hands – it’s possible, after all, that it was never delivered. Still, the romantic in me likes to think that it really did make it to Market Harborough and onto the breakfast table of the first house on the High Street. Flushed with the recently inherited wealth of his late father’s estate, I wonder whether Thomas Saunt Esq. was tempted by a spot of railway mania.

Update:

As Paul Fyfe reminded me in the comments below this article, individual newspapers aren’t necessarily as ephemeral as we might think. Whilst many were converted into fly paper and loo role, others were bound together in formats designed to be preserved and re-read. At first glace, Thomas Saunt’s copy of The Times doesn’t seem fit comfortably into either of these categories. It’s far too well preserved to have been used as scrap paper, but nor has it been converted into the more durable format of a bound volume. Or at least that’s what I thought. Curious about the provenance of the paper, I got in touch with the archivist in charge of Historic Newspapers‘ holdings. Here’s what he had to say:

The newspaper was part of a large run of bound volumes of the Times we received from a library in Leicester- I think  this was the reference library in Bishop’s Street which I think is now called Leicester Central Library following the closure of the Central Lending Library in Belvoir Street a couple of years ago and its merger with the reference library in Bishop’s Street . Not 100% sure of building details, but it is possible they either  wanted to offload their collection of Times bound volumes to create space due to the forthcoming merger or no longer wanted the Times bound volumes since they would have them on microfiche or something anyway- many newspapers have similarly disposed of their bound volumes which is where we have received a lot of our archive newspapers from.

The newspapers were clearly read and then folded & stored for a long while before going into bound volumes because there is age related staining on the folds of a number of the papers. Thus at some point the collection must have been donated and obtained by a library service in Leicester, which would have bound the newspapers for reference purposes.

So, it looks like Thomas’ copy of The Times was put into storage for many years before it was eventually bound together by a library in Leicester. These bound volumes have since been sold off and carefully dismantled, returning the papers to their original format. It’s a useful reminder that processes of remediation can sometimes flow in two directions; that texts and objects can, in some cases, be returned to their previous state. Of course, it’s worth noting that the destructive nature of remediation often makes this impossible. We’ll never be able to transform this digitised copy of Tit-Bits  back into its original format – too much material, such as the magazine’s distinctive green cover,  has been lost in its journey from single issue, to bound volume, archival microfilm, and eventually to its current digital state. Thomas’ issue of The Times is an unusual (if not unique) exception to the rule.

This tantalizing piece of new information about the life of Thomas’ Times raises more questions than it answers. Who folded up the paper and put it into storage? Did Thomas keep his copies of The Times in a personal archive? Did he donate them (perhaps to a library or perhaps a local reading room)? Was the paper ever actually delivered to him, or could it have been passed on to somebody else (or even archived) by his newsagent? I fear I’ll never know. I’m keen to find out whether other copies of The Times sourced from Leicester library bear his name in their upper-right corner, but I fear they’ve been separated and sold off. His name is sadly missing from an 1865 copy of the paper that I bought from the same place, which rather puts a dent in the image I was building up of Thomas as a man who never married but kept a lifetime’s worth of newspapers in neatly folded stacks. if anybody can shed any further light on these mysteries, I’d love to hear from you.

To celebrate the anniversary of finishing my PhD thesis I’ve decided to make it available online! A substantially updated version should materialize in the form of a monograph sometime in the next year or two, but hopefully this will do until then. If you enjoy the thesis, reference it in your work, or have any comments at all, I’d love to hear from you (unless you spot any typos).

‘Looming Large: America and the Victorian Press, 1865-1902′

Widespread popular fascination with America, and an appreciation of American culture, was not introduced by Hollywood cinema during the early decades of the 20th century, but emerged during the late-Victorian period and was driven by the popular press. By the 1880s, newspaper audiences throughout the country were consuming fragments of American life and culture on an almost daily basis. Under the impulses of the so-called ‘new journalism’, representations of America appeared regularly within an eclectic range of journalistic genres, including serialised fiction, news reports, editorials, humour columns, tit-bits, and travelogues. Forms of American popular culture – such as newspaper gags – circulated throughout Britain and enjoyed a sustained presence in bestselling papers. These imported texts also acted as vessels for the importation of other elements of American culture such as the country’s distinctive slang and dialects.

This thesis argues that the late-Victorian popular press acted as the first major ‘contact zone’ between America and the British public. Chapter One tracks the growing presence of America in the Victorian press. In particular, it highlights how the expansion of the popular press, the widespread adoption of ‘scissors-and-paste’ journalism, the development of transatlantic communications networks and technologies, and a growing curiosity about life in America combined to facilitate new forms of Anglo-American cultural exchange. Chapter Two explores how the press shaped British encounters with American modernity and created a pervasive sense of a coming ‘American future’. Chapter Three focuses on the importation, circulation, and reception of American newspaper humour. Finally, Chapter Four unpacks the role played by the press in the importation, circulation, and assimilation of American slang.

It makes an original contribution to a number of academic disciplines and debates. Firstly, it challenges the established chronology of Anglo-American history; America gained a significant foothold in British popular culture long before the twentieth century. Moreover, this was not a result of a forcible American ‘invasion’ but a form of voluntary transatlantic exchange driven by the tastes and desires of British newspaper readers. Secondly, it argues that America’s presence in late-Victorian popular culture has been underestimated by historians who have focused instead on domestically produced culture, engagements with Western Europe, and the cultural dimensions of Empire. Whilst the full extent of America’s significance cannot be mapped out in one study, this thesis establishes the extent of America’s cultural presence and makes the case for its insertion into future Victorian Studies scholarship. Thirdly, this thesis contributes to the growing field of press history. It maps out connections between British and American newspapers, exploring how the press served to move information between the old world and the new. Finally, this project acts as an early example of born-digital scholarship; a study conceived in response to the development of digital archives. As such, it contributes to discussions on digital methodologies and debates within the field of Digital Humanities. In particular, it demonstrates that digitisation allows researchers to research and write do new kinds of history; to ask new questions, make new connections, and develop new projects – to do things that we couldn’t do before.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Historians have a new toy to play with. The National Library of Wales has just launched Welsh Newspapers Online - a new digital archive that will eventually provide access to more than 1 million pages of Welsh newspapers.

If, like me, you missed the big launch event on Wednesday you can catch up with the twitter stream (#papur) or read a copy of Jim Mussell’s brilliant seminar paper. It’s a bit too early to give the archive a full review. The site is still in beta  (advanced search features and the ability to download articles have not yet been implemented)  but it already promises to shake up the landscape of digital newspaper research.

Open Access

At first glance, the arrival of yet another digital archive might not seem like such a momentous occasion. After all, we’ve become rather accustomed to these resources in recent years – the 19th Century British Library Newspaper Archive and the British Newspaper Archive already provide access to hundreds of British newspapers and have quickly become embedded within our everyday research practices. However, Welsh Newspapers Online has an important new string to its bow – it’s completely free to access.

Whilst the British Library has been forced to work with commercial partners to fund its digitization program, the Welsh Assembly has opted (with a bit of help from the EU) to digitize the country’s newspaper collections using public money. Similar projects have been developed elsewhere in the world – the United States has Chronicling America, New Zealand has Papers Past, and Australia has Trove – but this is the first major, open-access newspaper archive to arrive in the UK.

Why is this important? Firstly, it’s great to see the Welsh Assembly recognize the cultural value of newspaper archives and embrace this opportunity to open up their country’s history to the world. The price of a year’s subscription to the BNA (£80) has never been too prohibitive for dedicated researchers, but many more casual users will now enjoy the chance to explore historical newspapers without the encumbrance of a paywall. In particular, the archive will be usable in classrooms of all ages. Given Michael Gove’s commendable belief in the importance of history teaching, it’s surprising that his government hasn’t supported the development of a similarly accessible way to explore the whole of our ‘Island Story’™.

Open access also creates exciting new opportunities for academic research.  The methodological possibilities of an archive are defined by the parameters of its interface: the searches we construct, the ways we filter data, and the forms in which results are displayed all shape the questions we can ask of an archive. By developing new interfaces we can ask new questions. Google’s ngram viewer, for example, allows us to explore data from the existing Google Books archive in a radically new way by graphing the frequency of words and phrases over time. Rather than use keyword searches to zoom in on specific fragments of text, it encourages us to ‘read’ the archive from a distance and measure trends across thousands of books and hundreds of years. Same data; new perspectives.

These new ventures are only possible if archive developers allow their data to be accessed and re-purposed. The Old Bailey Online is a brilliant example of how an open platform encourages new kinds of research: it links to the spatially-focused Locating London’s Past, communicates with the people-centered Connected Histories, and allows its API to connect with text analysis tools like Voyant. If we want to develop even more new tools to explore this archive, we need only secure the funding and expertise to do so. The Datamining With Criminal Intent project, for example, is currently combining three open-access research tools (The Old Bailey, Zotero, and TAPoR) as a part of a project funded by the Digging into Data initiative. This kind of openness and connectability is vital to developing new digital humanities research tools.

Unfortunately, the paywalls that currently sit in front of most British newspaper archives have limited the development of new interfaces. Projects like Mining the Dispatch have shown how digital humanities tools can be used to explore open-access newspaper archives in fascinating new ways, but applying these techniques to commercial archives is, at best, laborious. I remain hopeful that commercial publishers like Gale and Brightsolid might be persuaded to open their data to this kind of research (provided it was done in a way that protected their commercial interests), but these kind of negotiations, and the compromises they require, naturally restrict the viability, scale, and accessibility of new projects.

Welsh Newspapers Online promises to change all of this. In its own words, it is “committed to sharing the data behind [the project]” and has promised to provide access to the website’s APIs soon. This is to be commended in the strongest possible terms. It’s hard to predict what new tools we’ll build to explore the WNO, but its commitment to openness is an invitation to our imaginations; a chance to start thinking about how we might explore press archives in innovative new ways.

Content

The archive will eventually contain a wide range of Welsh newspapers: dailies and weeklies, conservative and liberal, English-language and Welsh-language. Each region will have several titles, inviting the possibility of some interesting comparative studies, and investigations into the relationships between rival papers. By the summer of 2013 more than 100 titles will be available, spanning the period 1804-1910. Some of these are relatively short runs (the Rhos Herald, for example, will be covered between 1909 and 1910), but others stretch across several decades (the Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald runs between 1836 and 1910). The decision to extend the archive beyond the customary ‘digital divide’ of 1900 will be welcomed by historians of the Edwardian period, but those interested in the rest of the 20th century remain thwarted by copyright. Interestingly, the archive also contains multiple editions of some of the papers. Here, for example, we see the same story appearing in the 1st,  3rd, ‘special’, ‘extra special’, and 5th edition of the Evening Express: 

This is a refreshing approach to digitization (which has hitherto privileged one edition over all others) and promises to open up some interesting avenues of research. However, it does clutter-up the search results page a bit. A ‘show multiple editions’ toggle would be a welcome addition to the interface.

It’s uncertain yet how many gaps will be present in these runs. The small-print warns us that “the digital collection reflects the physical holdings of the National Library of Wales and not all newspaper issues for the years specified will be available.” The extent of these gaps will go a long way towards determining the usefulness of the archive, so let’s hope that they’re not too extensive.

Interface

It’s too early to pass a definitive judgement on the quality of the archive’s interface. Key features have yet to be implemented and it always takes a few days of usage for the problems with an interface to become apparent. The early signs are fairly good. Hit-term highlighting is in place already. Raw OCR data (which looks pretty clean to me) is displayed by default and can be copied and pasted easily by the user. Pages are viewed in a similar fashion to the British Newspaper Archive - a smooth, dynamic interface that lets you zoom and in out of a page and pan across it with ease. The downside of these modern interfaces is that users can’t download or copy images directly from the site. A PDF downloading feature will be added in the future, but these systems (which have always been rather clunky in the past) are never as easy to use as a simple right-click+copy. I’ll be sticking to my snipping tool. The interface also has a handy button that extends the viewer across the width of your browser without going into a full-screen mode that prevents you from accessing other programs. It lacks some of the tools available using Gale’s feature-heavy NewsVault, but its simplicity and speed place it among the best newspaper-viewing interfaces I’ve used.

What’s more, the open-access philosophy embraced by the archive makes it easy to share content. So, I can link you directly to a hit-term highlighted article featuring another version of the ‘You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest’ joke that I’ve already tracked around the world.

 Conclusions

It’s too early to reach any final conclusions about Welsh Newspapers Online. The archive is incomplete and the interface is still missing key features like an advanced search option. We’ll learn much more about the project’s strengths and weaknesses over the coming months. However, its commitment to openness already marks it out as a welcome new player in the world of digital newspaper archives. The Welsh Assembly and the National Library of Wales should be congratulated on making this happen. Researchers, teachers, academics, and history enthusiasts from around the world will now come to Visit Wales in a new way; historical tourists, wandering happily through open valleys of print.

We’ve just announced some exciting new PhD studentships at Edge Hill University. Each award includes a full waiver of postgraduate tuition fees as well as free  accommodation on campus (or a cash equivalent in lieu). Winners will be expected to teach for up to six hours per week. An annual stipend in the region of £7,380 will be paid at monthly intervals. Research proposals are invited in the areas below:

• African American History
• Crime and punishment history in modern Britain
• The portrayal of slavery/the slave trade in museums and the heritage industry with particular reference to Britain and the United States.
• The Digital Humanities: Nineteenth-Century Journalism History or Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Cultural History

If you’d like to work with me then the fourth bullet point is the one to aim for. The deadline is Monday 18 March.

The History team at Edge Hill is a highly rated and dynamic group. Our research and teaching are focused on Modern History, from the end of the 18^th to the end of the 20^th centuries, in Britain, Europe, North America and the Middle East. All full-time members of staff were entered for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2008 and 30% of their published research was judged to be world-leading or internationally excellent. The submission to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) will also be strong. The History Group contribute to interdisciplinary taught Masters programmes in History and Culture and Popular Culture and also to the Masters by Research History programme. The subject area has a longstanding and highly successful record of PhD supervision.

For more information, take a look at our website. If you’re interested please get in touch!

My article on the transatlantic circulation of a nineteenth-century newspaper joke is currently free to access until June 30th 2013. Get it while you can!

A couple of days ago I received an e-mail informing me that one of my articles on digitisation was about to be published in Media History. I still feel pleasantly surprised whenever my work materializes in print, but this news was particularly unexpected – by the time it finally appeared I’d almost forgotten about writing it.

Looking back through my files, it seems that the first draft of the article was finished on 8 October 2010. The piece was accepted by the guest editors of a special issue of conference proceedings and, in March 2011, I submitted the finished version to the journal. 10 months later, the piece was peer reviewed and I submitted some minor revisions. It was officially accepted on the 18 of June 2012, and finally appeared online in January 2013.

More than two years have passed since I first wrote the article. A lot of things have happened to me in that time: I completed my PhD, wrote four other articles, worked at three different universities, moved house three times, crossed the Atlantic twice, learned to drive, and started this blog. The article, on the other hand, is largely the same as it was in October 2010. The editors, peer reviewers, and proofreaders that I worked with during this time all did a great job and I’m grateful to them for their help – the problem lies with the time it takes for the academic publishing system to process our work.

This isn’t an unusual situation. Most of us who submit our work to journals and edited collections endure a similarly lengthy wait. I’m fed up with it. Not because I’m inpatient, but because these delays diminish the value of our work and impede the free flow of academic conversation. My article was hardly at the cutting edge of digital humanities research back in in 2010, but in 2013 it’s definitely starting to look a little dusty. The ‘digital turn’ that I predicted is now well underway. Jim Mussell’s brilliant study of the Nineteenth Century Press in the Digital Age, a landmark text which came out in the intervening years, isn’t mentioned. Will anybody want to read an article that was outdated before it was even published? I suppose I’ll know in 2 years time when references to my work begin (or, more likely, don’t begin) to appear in the footnotes of subsequent articles.

Back in the mid-nineteenth century, conversations between Britain and America suffered from a similarly debilitating lag:

On Saturday 15 April 1865, Americans awoke to find their country in crisis. The previous evening, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated in a Washington theatre. Within hours of the President’s death, details of the “dark and bloody tragedy” had begun “trembling over the wires” of the country’s telegraph network. By 10am the following morning, flags in San Francisco were flying at half-mast. By midday, newspapers in the East and mid-West had begun to publish detailed eye-witness accounts of the assassination. The story continued to loom large in the American press throughout the following week; the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, the inauguration of Andrew Johnson, and a range of public and political responses to the “national calamity” all commanded extensive coverage. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, news of the assassination was nowhere to be seen. Entirely unaware of events in Washington, the foreign intelligence columns of the London press dissected the closing chapters of the American Civil War – events which had taken place more than a fortnight earlier. The Glasgow Herald even published an unfortunate ‘Address to President Lincoln’ in which a local anti-slavery association wished him health and success during the next phase of his presidency. A week later, the situation remained unchanged. As grief-stricken crowds poured into Washington to witness the departure of Lincoln’s funeral train, London’s Morning Post summarised the proceedings of an Irish cattle show, the Leeds Mercury weighed the threat of a Russian plague epidemic, and the Daily News reported on the Home Secretary’s visit to Newcastle. It was not until the 27th of April that a Canadian mail steamer finally delivered news of the assassination to Britain. By the time Victorian readers had the opportunity to engage with the story, the President had been dead for almost two weeks…

The limits of transatlantic communication made it impossible for the media to keep up with the pace of events. Academic publishing suffers from a similar problem; it can’t keep up with the pace of our ideas.

Back in the nineteenth century, technology provided the answer:

Sixteen years later, when President Garfield was shot by a deranged office-seeker, the relationship between America and the British press had changed beyond recognition. This time, news of the attempted assassination reached Britain within hours. As Garfield’s life hung in the balance, hourly updates on his pulse, temperature, and respiration were telegraphed to British newspaper offices via the new Atlantic Cable. These updates were printed alongside the latest accounts of the shooting, descriptions of the assassin, reactions from the American press, responses of world markets, and messages of sympathy from international leaders. A President’s death, whilst generating a predictable surge of interest, was only part of a wider journalistic phenomenon. Each morning, the latest news stories from ‘across the pond’ appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Accounts of a political speech in Washington, a devastating fire in Nevada, a gruesome murder in Chicago, a gunfight in Indiana, and the closing prices at the New York stock exchange were printed by British provincial and metropolitan newspapers hours after being published in America.

Bob Nicholson, ‘Looming Large: America and the Late-Victorian Press, 1865-1901′, PhD Thesis, University of Manchester (2012), pp. 7-8.

Our version of the ‘Atlantic Cable’ is already in place. We live in an age of instantaneous global exchange, driven by the internet and realized most prominently through Twitter, blogging, and other forms of social media. Researchers are already using these platforms to communicate their ideas more rapidly. However, our professional careers remain frustratingly dependent on an antiquated system of academic publishing that only serves to impede the flow of conversation and restrict access to ideas.

The Open Access movement promises to provide some solutions to these problems. However, as Lucinda Matthews-Jones recently pointed out, the new financial models proposed by the Finch Report (which promises to transfer the cost of publishing to researchers and/or their institutions) are worrying. Under these proposals, the average cost of publishing an article is estimated to be somewhere in the region of £1700. Even if this amount is halved for humanities articles, it’s hard to account for such a large sum. The key labour (writing the article, peer review, editing) is all done for free by academics, which just leaves the cost of hosting the articles online. It costs me about £50 to run this blog for a year – in that time I’ve transmitted 15,000 words and received 12,000 hits. To put these numbers into context, no 7,000 word article I’ve written for an online journal has been viewed by more than 100 people. The numbers don’t add up.

Back in April, The Guardian described the open access movement as an ‘academic spring’ – just like protesters in Egypt, we need to make sure that our own revolution doesn’t end up back in the wrong hands. The solution is painfully obvious: cut out the publisher. All we need to do is develop a simple online publishing platform (something like JSTOR), charge UK universities a small fee to meet the hosting costs, and then publish everything on there with complete open access. We can still have journals with distinctive identities, issues, editorial teams, and peer review. We already do this stuff for free. Nor, for that matter, is there any logical reason why these journals should be any less prestigious than those offered by commercial publishers. We are the producers and the consumers. It’s time to put our foot down.

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In the meantime, if you’d like to take a look at my article (I know I’ve done such a good job selling it to you) then here’s a link and an abstract:

The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives

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

It’s been a record breaking year for British sport. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, Andy Murray triumphed at the U.S. Open, our Olympians earned an impressive stack of gold medals, and ex-footballer Gary Linekar celebrated his 18th year as the face of Walkers crisps. It’s a remarkable achievement. Speaking to Digital Spy back in March, the former England striker confidently proclaimed that he was responsible for spearheading “quite comfortably the longest-running celebrity-endorsed campaign” in advertising history.

He’s not even close. An advert has recently been doing the rounds in which Sherlock Holmes endorses the miraculous healing powers of Beechams Pills:

It’s not the great detective’s finest hour. Shorn of his deductive powers by a troublesome head cold, Holmes only regains his crime-solving abilities thanks to a timely dose of Beechams Ultra All In One. Conan Doyle must be spinning in his grave.

Holmes is rather vulnerable to this sort of treatment. The copyright on his adventures expired in 1980, leaving him open to all imaginable abuses and adaptations. However, it turns out that Beechams’ relationship with Sherlock pre-dates this landmark by quite some distance. Way back in 1893, the following advert began to appear in British papers:

Watson loses a ‘priceless’ box of medication and telegraphs his friend for help. Holmes turns up and, after demonstrating his trademark skills of deduction, solves the problem by giving Watson some of his Beecham’s Pills. “I always carry them with me”, he testifies, “and to their head clearing qualities I owe much of my success – in fact it is part of my SYSTEM to use them in my SYSTEM.”

This wasn’t a one-off affair. A few months later, as readers struggled to come to terms with the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, Beecham’s published ‘The Last Letter from Sherlock Holmes.’

A desperate-seeming Holmes has lost his ‘indispensable’ supply of Beecham’s Pills and writes to Watson in the hope that he will forward a large box to him with great urgency. Apparently the pills didn’t arrive in time to save him from Moriarty. A few years later, the same advert was used with a slightly different title (‘A Letter from Sherlock Holmes’) in order to suggest that the detective was still alive and had chosen to break his cover in order to obtain some more pills.

In May 1894 Beecham’s called upon Holmes’ celebrity once again:

This time the pills themselves become detectives. “Have you a clue? Do you miss anything? Is anything wrong? … Do not procrastinate. The detectives should at once be called in to play their part. Now, the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in cases of this kind is Beecham’s Pills: no fear of them getting on the wrong scent… These private inquiry agents will… have a full report to make before they have done with you.” I’m almost tempted to try some myself.

It’d be fascinating to know whether the people behind Beecham’s current campaign are aware of these earlier adverts, or whether the whole thing is just a remarkable coincidence. Either way, Holmes’ 120 year association with the brand (voluntary or not) looks like a tricky total to beat. Until Linekar’s reanimated corpse is used to flog Space Quavers to the unfortunate people of the 22nd century, I reckon the record belongs to the man in the Deerstalker.

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Full credit to Ryan Easterbrook (@RyanEasterbrook), one of my old Swansea students, for spotting the new advert!

Something’s wrong with me. As a self-styled Digital Victorianist I’m supposed to prefer pixels over print. I get my news online, my books on an e-reader, and for the last five years I’ve been preaching the gospel of digital history to anybody who’ll listen. I rarely put pen to paper (as anybody who’s received a barely legible Christmas card from me this year will attest). In fact, I can’t remember the last time I spent a whole day without looking at a computer. I am, in short, a dyed-in-the-wool screen junkie.

Or at least that’s what I thought. Lately I’ve been flirting with the dark side. A few weeks ago the good people at Historic Newspapers sent me a handsomely packaged selection of old periodicals. The first paper to catch my eye was a reprint of the London edition of The National Police Gazette from 26 May 1897. It’s a delightfully salacious paper filled with saucy illustrations of Victorian girls showing off their ankles, strapping boxers flexing their biceps, and the occasional portrait of a racehorse.

The most outrageous material appears in the adverts at the back of the paper. A notice for ‘Mrs Rose’s Famous Female Mixture’ offers to send female readers a discretely packaged bottle of medication designed to remove the most ‘OBSTINATE OBSTRUCTIONS’ in twelve hours. “Failure”, it claims, “is impossible”. Another advert promises to send readers photographs of ‘Footlight Favourites’ – glamorous young actresses “in Tights, Costume and Showing Bust”. Another promises an ‘Illustrated and Descriptive” catalog of ‘Rubber Specialities’. Most remarkably, a series of ‘booksellers’ advertise the sale of ‘spicy books & cards’ with such intriguing titles as ‘Revelations of Girlhood’, ‘Awful Disclosures in a Nunnery’, ’16 positions of matrimony’, ‘Confessions of a Gay Young Footman’ and, rather incongruously, the ‘Complete Works of Aristotle’(an infamous contraception manual). If these don’t do the trick, male readers suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ are encouraged to write to a Mr J. Murray in return for details of a ‘scientific cure’. It’s like walking into a Soho phone box.

You’ll be surprised to learn that The National Police Gazette isn’t available online yet. Its particular brand of late-Victorian sport and low-brow sleaze hasn’t propelled it to the top of the British Library’s digitisation list, though personally I can’t think why. Even if it was accessible through digital archives, the experience of reading it online wouldn’t have been anything like as pleasurable as perusing it in print. It’s the kind of paper that begs to be creased, torn, and covered in dirt. It should be folded up, stuffed in a back pocket, and read at a bus stop. The collection of smutty adverts belongs on the back page of the paper – it’s a distinctive physical space that makes their thinly veiled innuendo seem all the more risque. If I’d arrived at them through a key-word search I’d have missed a vital part of their material identity; the screen just can’t capture their essential grubbiness.

There’s something powerful about seeing an old newspaper in the flesh. Next in my pack were two papers from the Edwardian period: a reprint of The Daily Mirror from April 1912 and an original copy of The Times from April 1911. They’re separated by less than a year but at first glance they seem centuries apart. The front page of the mirror is devoted to the memory of W. T. Stead (the pioneering journalist who died on the Titanic) and features several photographs along with a bold headline. It’s compact tabloid format makes it easy to pick up, manipulate, and carry around. The Times, on the other hand, is much weightier. The densely packed pages of print make it look heavy, but it’s only when you open it up and start to read it that the sheer size of the thing really hits you.

I was halfway through reading the first column before my arms started to ache. Maneuvering it into a more comfortable position is tricky – particularly for somebody more used to reading news on a smartphone than a broadsheet. It pins you down; chains you to your seat. Forget about carrying it around with you. If I tried to open it up during my commute home I’d take up half the train carriage. Whilst the Daily Mirror and the National Police Gazette would cheerfully fit in my jacket pocket, I’d have to carry The Times under my arm – a statement of old-fashioned Englishness that just begs to be accompanied by a black umbrella and a bowler hat. In material terms, it offers a completely different experience.

All of this stuff is pretty obvious – particularly to anybody who read broadsheet newspapers before the rise of the Berliner format – and yet there’s still something revelatory about picking up a Victorian newspaper and feeling its weight and texture in your hands. It’s a different experience to searching digital copies, spooling through microfilm, or even browsing leather-bound volumes. There’s something rather magical about it; a sense of communing more closely with the past.

Recognising the material life of our texts isn’t just pleasurable, it’s important. As Leah Price has recently reminded us, books and newspapers “mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.”

I showed the papers to some of my students and they were equally enthralled. I only intended to give them a minute or two of browsing whilst I set up my PowerPoint presentation, but we ended up spending the best part of half an hour pouring over them. Digital archives, for all of their wondrous qualities, just don’t have the same magnetic effect.

This isn’t a Damascene conversion. I’m still an unreserved enthusiast when it comes to digital archives – they allow us to do so many things that we couldn’t do before, and the mysterious possibility of the empty search box brings its own sense of excitement. But, for now at least, I’m enjoying a brief flirtation with the pleasures of print.

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If you’d like to get your hands on your own copies of some old newspapers, I heartily recommend www.historic-newspapers.co.uk. They’ve got a great selection of content and the papers come beautifully packaged. If you need a last minute gift for the Victorianist in your life, you can’t go wrong with a copy of the National Police Gazette!

Peter Jackson spent somewhere in the region of $150 million dollars on the first instalment of his Hobbit trilogy. My first foray into film making comes in slightly under his budget. Last weekend, I had a go at converting one of my favourite old conference papers to video. The aim was to enter one of the BBC’s recent academic talent competitions, but my finished entry stretched so far over the prescribed 2 minute limit that I’ve almost certainly disqualified myself.

I got a bit carried away. On Saturday morning I started with a webcam and a basic script; by Sunday evening my home office had been converted into a makeshift film studio. A sizeable chunk of Jackson’s cash was spent on high tech CGI facilities, but it turns out that similar effects can be achieved with some sheets of green paper, a roll of sellotape, and a pair of Primark trouser hangers. Who needs a tripod when you’ve got an unsteady pile of overdue library books? The biggest saving, of course, comes from casting somebody who already looks a bit like Gollum.

You can view the result below. A full-length, twenty minute, epic version of the Skedaddle story should hit YouTube sometime in the new year.