digitalvictorianist.com

It’s been nearly ten years since the launch of Eighteenth Century Collections Online [ECCO]. This ambitious project aimed to digitise “every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the  eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.” The definition of a ‘significant’ text remains open to interpretation, but the contents of the archive are undeniably impressive – in its present form it contains more than 180,000 titles. The unparalleled breadth of its coverage – along with the number of university libraries that took up subscriptions – quickly established it as a key focal point for the researching and teaching of eighteenth-century history.In other words, it’s a tough act to follow.

Enter Nineteenth Century Collections Online [NCCO]. This recently launched project follows in the footsteps of its eighteenth-century predecessor and, in the words of its publisher Gale Cengage, aims to be “the most ambitious scholarly digitisation and publication program ever undertaken.” The archive will contain millions of pages of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, government records, pamphlets, and maps. More interestingly, it promises researchers the opportunity to subject these sources to some interesting new forms of qualitative and quantitative analysis. I’ve spent the last few days playing around with a trial version and, whilst it’s too soon to write a full review, I have a few preliminary thoughts on how it’s shaping up.

Content

NCCO contains such an eclectic range of sources that it’s difficult at first to get a handle on all of its contents. In fact, it makes more sense to think of NCCO as a customisable research platform that houses a series of themed archives. By the looks of things, it’ll be possible for libraries to select which archives they want to subscribe to.  At present, three  archives are available, each of which contains a series of sub-collections:

1. Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange
   British Foreign Office correspondence on Japan; dispatches and records from U.S. consuls in various Asian territories; missionary correspondence and journals; periodicals on Asian culture and society.
2. British Politics and Society
   British Cabinet Papers, 1880-1916; British Labour History Ephemera; British Trade Union History Collection; Civil Disturbance, Chartism and Riots in Nineteenth Century England; Colonial Defence Commission under Lord Carnarvon; Diaries of Sir Frederick Madden; Discontent and Authority, 1820-1840; Transactions of the Manchester Statistic Society I & II; Home Office papers, records, and correspondence; the Police Gazette, 1828-1845; Ordnance Survey Drawings, 1789-1840; Papers and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, 1749-1806; Papers of Sir Robert Peel; Working Class Autobiographies; papers relating to Radicalism, Anti-Radicalism and Reform, 1769-1861; ephemera relating to British social and working conditions, politics, and economics, 1770s-1850s; the papers of John Cam Hobhouse, 1809-1869; rare freethought militant 19th century books; rare radical and labour periodicals; letters relating to the Jack the Ripper killings; books, pamphlets, and periodicals relating to working-class politics.
3. European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection
   A  collection of rare English (3,250 works), French (3,658) and German (2,653) Romantic-era writing.

A fourth collection, ‘British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture’, will be released soon. It promises to contain a range of playbills, scripts, scores, and other pieces of theatrical ephemera. Presumably, if the product is successful, a steady stream of new archives will be announced over the coming years.

It’s hard to review such a disparate collection of items – historians of the period will each find different elements of the archives interesting. In general terms, the main thing to note is that these collections are more curated than many previous archives. Rather than digitise millions of pages of books and newspapers and then throw them together, the collections in NCCO are carefully compiled and well presented. There’s an impressive amount of background information provided for each archive, and brief summaries for most of the sub-collections too. Here’s what you’ll find if you access the Jack the Ripper letters from within the British Politics and Society collection:

There are pros and cons to using such a carefully curated archive. On the plus side, browsing through its contents is more user friendly – it’s much easier to casually meander through the archive when everything is clearly subdivided and signposted. The sub-collections should also make it easier for teachers to set more focused and manageable research tasks for undergraduate students. However, there are downsides to an archive in which all of the documents have been carefully picked out for their historical ‘significance’ and thematic relevance. Namely, the opportunity for new discoveries feels more limited. I’m sure that there are plenty of secrets still to be uncovered in NCCO‘s collections, but browsing through its contents isn’t quite as exciting as exploring the ‘vast terra incognita of print’ that has been opened up in recent years by large-scale newspaper digitisation projects. Each visit to the British Library Newspaper Archive [BLNA] brings with it the promise of exploring virgin territory; it’s likely that many of the articles you’ll encounter haven’t been read since the day they were published. By comparison, NCCO’s collections feel like well-trodden ground. Of course, the ability to search these documents by keyword should lead to new discoveries, connections, and perspectives that weren’t available using conventional archives.

Interface

The methodological possibilities of any digital archive are determined in large part by its interface. I’ve always been a fan of Gale’s work in this area – compared to their competitors, their interfaces and search tools are usually faster and more user friendly. The British Library Newspaper Archive isn’t without its design faults, but its interface is quicker than similar databases by ProQuest  and far more user-friendly than the disastrous efforts of UK Press Online. The BLNA, like the Times Digital Archive before it, was based on a relatively straightforward html interface which displayed its images as jpegs. This format allowed newspaper articles to load quickly and for users to save or copy them with a quick right-click of the mouse. It was simple, but it worked. In recent years, however, Gale has introduced a more high-tech, flash-based interface. Users of NewsVault and the Illustrated London News Digital Archive will already be familiar with the basic components of this new interface. Here’s how it looks:

It has some nifty new features – you can zoom in and out of an article more quickly (though not as smoothly as in the new British Newspaper Archive), alter brightness and contrast levels, rotate the image, view it in full-screen, and view separate sections of the source simultaneously by using the ‘split-screen’ feature. Newspaper articles are also displayed in their true context, with the rest of the page faded out slightly. The new interface lets you tag items (with both public and private keywords), create personal annotations and bookmarks, and export references to leading citation managers. The site is also compatible with Zotero – a welcome new feature that promises to make the organisation of primary research materials much easier. Unfortunately, the plugin just downloads the metadata for your chosen document and not the document itself.

Which leads us on to one of the problems with NCCO‘s new interface. It’s no longer possible to right click an image and save it as a jpeg. Instead, you have to use the archive’s own ‘download’ button – a feature that only allows you to save the document in pdf format. If you want to copy it over to a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll have to convert this pdf into an image file yourself or, alternatively, capture it as a screenshot. It’s perfectly possible, but it’s a nuisance and represents a regrettable step backwards in terms of speed and efficiency. Fortunately, the quality of the downloads is good – far better than the near-unreadable articles provided via the download feature of the British Newspaper Archive. It’s also possible to download the raw OCR data at a txt file. Gale’s decision to reveal this information is very welcome, but in this instance the BNA‘s solution is more elegant and its user-correction tool is more ambitious.

The other drawback of the flash interface is the space devoted to viewing documents. Put simply, the interface gets in the way. Here’s another screenshot. This time, I’ve shaded the interface red and left the area devoted to the document itself unshaded:

The first thing to note is the enormous amount of unused white space on either side of the archive’s main interface. I appreciate that not everybody has the luxury of using a 24″ widescreen monitor, but it’s a shame for this space to go unused when (as you can see) it’s not possible to see the entirety of the article in the small amount of space allotted to it. Contrast this interface with the old one used by the British Library Newspaper Archive:

Here, the whole screen is used and it’s possible (with a quick flick of my mouse’s scroll wheel) to view an entire newspaper page at once. The new interface certainly looks cleaner and more elegant, but this elegance comes at a cost. The most important thing about the database is the experience of browsing through its documents, but it currently feels like I’m looking at the world through a letterbox. This is particularly irritating when viewing newspapers. The full-screen feature provides a partial solution to this problem, but it’s a nuisance having to fire this up each time you want to view a document. For all of the powerful new search tools at our disposal, digital archives still require us to slog through hundreds (sometimes thousands) of potentially relevant sources before finding the ones that we need. In order to do this kind of research, it’s absolutely essentially to be able to examine and rule out irrelevant documents quickly. If you’ve got to enter full-screen, tweak the zoom level, and scroll around a bit before making these decisions it eats up time – an extra five seconds fiddling with each document soon mounts up over the course of a day’s research. Fortunately, the search interface includes a ‘Keywords in Context’ feature that allows you to preview the appearance of your search terms before loading an item in full – again, however, the BNA‘s solution of providing this contextual information by default (rather than after a mouse-click) is more elegant.

It’s hard to offer constructive solutions to these problems – flash interfaces provide us with some useful new tools, but I’ve yet to be convinced that the loss of speed and the cramped screen is worth it. A larger viewing area and a more fluid browsing experience would help to address some of the drawbacks.

Search Tools

NCCO’s search interface is typically powerful. As usual, it’s possible to select a number of different search types (Keyword, document title, entire document, etc) and limit searches by range of additional properties. Gale’s peculiar decision to draw a distinction between ‘keyword’ and ‘entire document’ searches remains a problem – I’ve lost count of the number of experienced researchers who mistakenly thought that they were searching the entire British Library Newspaper Database only for me to point out that they’d only been searching for ‘keywords’ (the title of the article plus the first few sentences). Gale are alone in this idiosyncratic use of the term ‘keyword’ and their decision to persist with it presents frustrating a obstacle to new users. Aside from this, however, the number of options available through the advanced search interface is excellent.

For digital humanities enthusiasts like me, perhaps the most exciting thing about NCCO is its two new search tools. First up is the Graphing Tool. Put simply, this new tools allows you to enter a keyword, specify a date range, and then track how often it appears in the archive using a line graph. A search for the term ‘America’ is displayed below:

An image like this should be familiar to fans of Google’s ngram viewer – a freely accessible search tool that lets you track the changing frequency of word usage in the Google Books archive. Tracking this kind of information is an imprecise way to map cultural change, but a carefully constructed search can identify broad trends and help researchers to view topics from a new perspective – I make occasional use of them in my PhD thesis and discuss their methodological potential in a forthcoming article for the Journal of Victorian Culture. So, I was undeniably excited when I learned that Gale was introducing a similar tool. Unfortunately, the results are disappointing. The tool is undermined by a fundamental methodological flaw. Put simply, it doesn’t take account of the fluctuating number of documents in the archive. If there are 1 million pages available for one year, but 10 million pages available for the next, it doesn’t take a genius to recognise that most graphs will have an upwards trajectory. Google solves this problem by measuring results as a percentage of the total number of words – that way, it doesn’t matter whether the archive expands or contracts. Unfortunately, NCCO’s graphing tool just displays the raw number of articles and makes no attempt to normalise the data.

Fluctuations in genre are also a problem. If coverage for the 1850s is mostly made up of newspapers, but the 1860s is dominated by political pamphlets, it’s impossible to make valid comparisons. The obvious solution to this problem is to allow users to select their own documents to search. Unfortunately, the graphing tool has been detached from the advanced search interface and has far less flexibility when it comes to constructing a query. It’s possible to restrict searches to four broad content types (manuscripts, maps, monographs, and newspapers), but this isn’t subtle enough to create methodologically sound searches. In sum, the tool is an interesting way to visualise search results but isn’t particularly useful for serious quantitative research. It’s a missed opportunity but, if it could be fixed, NCCO would represent an interesting step forward for digital research methodologies.

The second new feature is the Term Clusters tool. This text-mining tool identifies linguistic patterns and connections between documents. The graph below shows a search for the term ‘humour’:

The inner ring shows the terms that frequently appear within the first 100 words of each item in the search results – so, articles about humour frequently feature the words ‘novel’, ‘good’, and the term ‘Yankee Humour’. The outer ring performs the search again (this time on an inner-ring term) and reveals a new set of connections – so, articles featuring the term ‘Yankee Humour’ are also likely to include the words ‘miss’, ‘doctor’, and ‘heir’. Excerpts from these articles are displayed to the right. I confess that I was a bit confused by this tool at first, but the more I play with it the more impressed I’ve become. It’s a great way to identify previously unseen patterns and connections between material. I’d love to apply this tool (and a modified version of the graphing tool) to the British Library Newspaper Archive – with any luck, we’ll see them integrated into NewsVault sooner rather than later.

Conclusions

So, all in all, there’s some good news and bad news here. The contents of the archive are interesting, eclectic and well curated. There’s plenty here for researchers to get stuck into and the sub-collections will provide some interesting teaching opportunities. The interface has a lot of useful new features, but the move from html to flash continues to result in a clunky and cramped browsing experience. The core search interface is excellent and the introduction of innovative new search tools is exciting. Term clusters are a particularly intriguing new addition to our armoury, but the graphing tool needs a bit more work before its full potential is fulfilled. It’s too early to tell whether NCCO will have the same impact as its eighteenth-century predecessor. It’s entering a far more crowded market place (the sheer volume of nineteenth-century material available in digital archives is already staggering) and doing so at a time when library budgets are contracting. However, there’s enough here to suggest that NCCO may well become the next leading digital platform for nineteenth-century research – if they iron out a few of the problems this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

In Mary Shelley’s version of the story, Victor Frankenstein locks himself in a laboratory for two years in order to pursue his scientific research. He is driven by an insatiable appetite for discovery, but when he finally witnesses the results of his labours he is filled with an overpowering sense of dread:

“I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room…”

I was reminded of this passage a few weeks ago on the morning of my PhD viva. It had been more than a month since I had last read my thesis, but in preparation for the big event I plucked up the courage to have a final look. It was a mistake. Every page seemed to bring a fresh disaster; a grammatical error here, a missing footnote there, and so many sentences that I longed to rewrite. Three and a half years earlier I had set out to create something beautiful. Now, as I looked upon it with fresh eyes, I saw only a monster; a hideous mess of typos, disjointed ideas, gaping holes, and embarrassing errors. I wanted to destroy it; to hide my shame from family, friends and colleagues. But it was too late. I had already branded the monster with my name and released it into the world. Soon, I thought, the villagers would come with their pitchforks and torches and drive me out of academia for good.

As it turns out, things went a bit better than I expected. My examiners were extremely positive about the thesis and only identified a few minor typographical errors that needed to be fixed. We had some stimulating conversations about how the project might be developed into a monograph and, before I knew it, it was all over.  I polished off the corrections in a few hours and, last Tuesday, I submitted the final bound version of the thesis. I’m done. I’d ask you to call me Dr. Bob, but it makes me sound like a talk show host with a degree in ‘Relationship Science’  from an online university.

When I collected the final, hardbound version of the thesis from the printers, I had a more positive Frankenstein moment. This time, I felt more like Colin Clive’s demented scientist from the 1931 film who greets the success of his experiment in a slightly different fashion:

Swap the noise of crashing thunder for the sound of a laser printer, and you’ve pretty much got the scenario that was playing out in my head. Unfortunately, no friends were on hand to hold me back as I proclaimed myself a god, so I thanked the man behind the desk and quietly shuffled out.

The euphoria of that moment – of seeing my creation materialise – lasted for a few giddy days, but has now passed. It was all a useful lesson in the importance of perspective. I had spent hours agonising over tiny, insignificant defects, whilst remaining blind to the bigger picture. Like a lot of writers, I had a distorted image of my own work and found it difficult to see the positives without somebody else pointing them out. I still feel anxious about releasing my creation into the world, but now as I look upon it with less anxious eyes I suspect that it’s more likely to be met with indifference than abject horror.

If you want to test this theory yourself, copies of the thesis should be in Manchester University library and on EThOS soon. If you’d like to read a digital version, send me a tweet/email and I’ll forward a pdf. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, here’s the abstract:

 

Bob Nicholson, ‘Looming Large: America and the Victorian Press, 1865-1902′, (2012).

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.

Or, if you’d prefer, here it is in image form:

If you’d like to see what a Digital Victorianist looks like in the flesh (hint: pasty and out of shape) then you might like to come and see one of my forthcoming talks. Over the next 6 months I’ll be giving at least four conference papers:

• 17th March 2012 – “Goodbye, old fellow, I must skedaddle!”: Reading the American Voice in the Late-Victorian Press
  London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar, Institute of English Studies, 11:00-17:00. Free entry [details available here]

• 16th -17th April 2012 – Imagining America: W. T. Stead’s Vision of the New World
  W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary, British Library. Registration (until 31 January 2012): £70 (£60 postgraduates / over 65s); Day rate: £45 (no concessions). [details available here]

• 21st – 23rd June – “Goodbye, old fellow, I must skedaddle!”: American Slang and the Victorian Popular Press
  5th Annual British Scholar Conference, University of Edinburgh. [details available here]

• 5th July- 7th July – The Laughter of Good Fellowship? Negotiating the past, present, and future in Anglo-American humour, 1870-1900
  History and Humour – 1800 to Present, Freiburg University. [details available soon]

As of next week I’ll also be leaving Manchester to take up a temporary lecturing post at Swansea University. If you find yourself in South Wales (and have nothing better to do) then stop by and say hello!

Last night Jim Mussell posted an excellent review of the British Newspaper Archive on his blog. He makes a number of really important points that I skirted over in my own review. I recommend reading Jim’s post in its entirety. However, one of his arguments is particularly worth emphasizing:

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….

… 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.

I can’t even begin to stress how important this is.  The practical benefits of digitisation are well recognised. Improvements in speed, access, volume, and convenience are routinely celebrated. When asked to describe how digital archives have changed their lives, many historians highlight the fact that they no longer have to visit the British Library whenever they want to consult a newspaper. Others rejoice that their lives are no longer blighted by malfunctioning microfilm readers. Keyword search engines are widely recognised as a time saving device; a handy tool which helps researchers to find material quicker than by hand. So far, in other words, digitisation has largely been treated as a practical revolution – it has made research faster, easier, more convenient, and more productive.

These practical improvements are welcome, but digitisation is capable of so much more. It has the potential not just to change the day-to-day practice of research, but to fundamentally alter the kind of research that we are able do. Used creatively, it allows us to access and explore past cultures and societies in powerful new ways; to ask new questions, make new connections, construct new arguments, explore new topics, and re-examine old ones from new perspectives.  It allows us to imagine new kinds of research. 

In order to unlock these new methodological possibilities we need to be able to take full advantage of what Jim terms the “digital properties of digitized materials”. Researchers in the digital humanities have already started to do this with other archives of nineteenth-century print culture. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs have been text mining millions of titles of nineteenth-century books in order to explore changes in the Victorian frame of mind. A team of Harvard scientists have recently given this particular brand of the Digital Humanities the name of ‘culturomics’. In their study, they text-mined a corpus of 5 million digitised books and quantified the evolution of grammar, the speed at which society forgets its past, the adoption of new technologies, the effects of censorship, and the changing nature of fame. Best of all, this project inspired the creation of Google’s Ngram Viewer – a publicly accessible tool for plotting the frequency of words in the Google Books archive.

This research is still in its embryonic stage, but it hints at future possibilities. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to interrogate nineteenth-century newspaper archives with the same freedom and creativity. The raw materials are all in place – sources have been digitised and marked up with usable metadata – but the interfaces don’t allow us to ask the right questions. They’re designed for one, very basic form of digital research: keyword searches that lead to close reading.

If we want to do anything more ambitious, we need to design new interfaces. Recent projects like Connected Histories and Locating London’s Past are great examples of how this  can work. Both websites allow researchers to explore existing archives in new ways. It is now possible, for example, to plot cases from the Old Bailey Online archive onto an 18th century map of London.

This is where the key problem with the BNA arises. By giving control of the archive to Brightsolid and allowing them to put it behind a paywall, the British Library have prevented researchers from developing similarly innovative new ways of exploring its data. Without the freedom to develop new interfaces, we lose the power to frame new questions. Without the power to frame new questions, we won’t be able to find new answers. The potential of digitisation to reveal new insights into the past will be squandered.

The good news is that it’s not too late to fix these problems. The data is there to be reused, if its ‘owners’ will allow us. As Jim argues:

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.

 

This time last year I was trudging along a slushy pavement with a soggy copy of The Times in my hand. It was only Christmas Eve, but I’d been given an early present – an interview I did with one of the paper’s journalists had just been published. These were heady times. A few month’s earlier I’d given a paper at Yale University and written a well received article for The Guardian. I was beginning to fancy myself as a bit of a media don. This was more than a touch premature – I  haven’t got close to a newspaper, radio show, or TV documentary since. However, at the time, a glittering showbiz career was beckoning (if only in my own mind) and I was undeniably excited.

The whole process started a few weeks earlier. I met with Mike Addelman, the University of Manchester’s brilliant press officer, to talk about publicizing some of my research. I ran through a few possibilities, but when I mentioned my work on American jokes his eyes lit up. “This stuff will really sell”, he said. The only thing missing was a topical hook. It was at this point that I said something that  I’ve lived to regret: “American humour has had a huge influence on the development of British comedy”, I explained. “Everything from stand-up routines, to sitcoms, to Christmas cracker jokes owes a debt of gratitude to the first generation of Yankee jesters.” The reference to Christmas crackers was just an off-the-cuff remark (I needed a third genre of humour to finish my list), but it was like dropping a tinsel-wrapped hand-grenade into the conversation. It was December. Christmas was upon us. Here was our hook.

There was just one problem: it wasn’t strictly true. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that the labored puns in Christmas crackers have always been quintessentially British. Whilst some have undoubtedly drawn inspiration from the work of American humourists, this transatlantic influence is far less noticeable in cracker jokes than most other forms of British comedy. However, the wheels were now in motion and no amount of anxious hand wringing on my part seemed to slow things down. In retrospect, I should have just said: “Mike, I was wrong, we can’t run with the Christmas cracker angle.” Instead, we wrote a press release.

It’s still available online. As you can see from the headline, I really managed to downplay the festive angle: “Victorians went ‘crackers’ for American Jokes”. It’s cheesy, but I still rather like it. Other references to Christmas pop up regularly throughout the piece. Fortunately, I’d managed to find adverts describing American jokebooks as ideal Christmas presents. This put me on slightly more solid ground and, eventually, I was happy to send the press release out into the ether. However, before we gave it to the media, Mike contacted a friend at The Times and offered him exclusive rights to the story. To my surprise, they accepted and told me that they’d interview me over the phone later in the week.

I spent the next few days obsessively making sure that my mobile phone signal didn’t drop below two bars. When Russell Jenkins, the journalist from The Times, finally called me we spoke for about half an hour. It was an enjoyable interview. I spoke a bit too quickly, but managed to get most of my key points across in a clear fashion. I did my best to gloss over the cracker angle and play up the joke books. Later that day I sent a few more quotes over e-mail. Here’s what I wrote about Christmas:

These jests were particularly popular near Christmas – a time that was sometimes referred to by the Victorians as ‘joke-season’. Books of American humour were regularly advertised in the press as perfect Christmas presents. It isn’t hard to imagine some of these jests turning up in Christmas crackers.

Looking back, it was a weaselly piece of backtracking. STOP THE PRESSES: historian from Manchester discovers that it “isn’t hard to imagine” something interesting might have happened. Here’s the headline they actually went for…

When I first saw it my heart sank. It was everything I’d feared. Not only had they picked up the Christmas cracker angle, they’d decided to ramp things up to a whole new level. Rather than claim that America influenced the writing of British cracker jokes, I now seemed to be blaming the Yanks for the whole sorry genre. Two days later, they even hammered the point home in an editorial piece:

I don’t want to accuse a Murdoch paper of being economical with the truth – it’s Christmas, after all, and even Satan deserves a day off. Nor do I want to cast aspersions on Russell Jenkins – he’s a nice chap, a very good journalist, and he didn’t write anything that I didn’t feed to him. No, dear reader, the real villain of this story is me. In my rush to transform historical research into  news I allowed the story to slip out of my control. As a result, rather than feel pride at seeing my research in a major national newspaper, I felt like a dirty sellout; a media whore who dropped his academic integrity the moment fame came knocking. Merry Christmas to me.

Reading it again a year later I think it’s possible that I over reacted. It’s really not that bad. When you look beyond the headline, the rest of the article captures the spirit of my research fairly faithfully. Aside from a few cringe-worthy quotes (did I really say that “the Victorians enjoyed a laugh”?), there is little here to be embarrassed about. Nevertheless, the whole experience was a valuable crash course in dealing with the media. As academics, we exercise a great deal of control over the presentation of our ideas – our books, articles, conference papers, and even lectures are carefully scripted. However, the moment I started a conversation with a journalist, this control and security evaporated. Suddenly, I was thinking aloud – and doing it to a man with a notepad. It’s a dangerous situation. Who knows what idiotic, unsubstantiated, or career-ending statements I might have made if that phone call lasted another 20 minutes?

Enough self flagellation. It’s Christmas day, so let’s finish with an uplifting selection of festive Victorian jokes. Merry Christmas and thanks to all of you for supporting the blog in its first month. I’ll see you all in 2012…. if you survive these terrible gags.

Victorian Christmas Jokes

Mrs. Henry Peck (whose mother has been visiting them for over four months): “I don’t know what to buy mother for a Christmas present. Do you?
Mr. Henry Peck: “Yes! Buy her a travelling bag!

—-

“Thomas, spell weather,” said a schoolmaster to one of his pupils. “W-i-e-a-t-h-i-o-u-r, weather.” “Well, Thomas, you may sit down,” said the teacher. “I think this is the worst spell of weather we have had since last Christmas.”

—-

“What do you think of the woman with a past?”
“At Christmas she is likely to be won by the man with a present.”

—-

Bagley: “Susan, I intend to invite a few friends to our Christmas dinner. There is De Baggs, Ponsonby, Jupkins –eh?”
Mrs B. “Genial fellows, no doubt. Invite them, William, by all means, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will give Norah a holiday and roast the turkey myself.”
Bagley: “Oh, well, if you’re determined to spoil our enjoyment, I’ll dine at a hotel.”

—-

Jabbers: “Going to get married on the twenty-fifth? Well, you are a chump!”
Havers: “Why?”
“Because all your friends will make one gift do for both wedding and Christmas present.”
“Of course. But hereafter I can do the same with my anniversary and Christmas presents to my wife. See?”

—-

Bill the Burglar (on Christmas Eve): “Sure, Mike; I’m Sandy Claws. Lay down an’ cover up yer heads an go to sleep, or I’ll not leave a thing. See?”

—-

Rose: “I declare! I forgot to remove the prince mark from the Christmas present I sent to Mamie.”
Nellie: “Well, she would know the price, anyhow.”

—-

Mr Taddles: “What was in that package which was stolen from you on your way home?”
Mrs Taddles: “If I must tell, it was a box of cigars I had bought for your Christmas gift. Are you sorry?”
Mr Taddles: “Yes, dear – very sorry – for the thief!”

Two years ago I taught on an undergraduate course which gave 1st year students an introduction to Victorian Britain. In the opening seminar I divided my students into groups and asked them to define a ‘typical Victorian’. As I expected, they drew upon every cliche in the book: top hats, bonnets, monocles and waxed mustaches cropped up in every discussion. When I asked them to imagine their character’s surroundings, they immediately thought of gloomy workhouses, smoke-filled factories and crumbling Dickensian rookeries. Finally, I asked them to describe their character’s personality. All of them imagined the ‘typical Victorian’ as glum, joyless, or incapable of expressing any emotion at all. When I jokingly asked them to do their best impression of a Victorian they all stared back at me with expressions of disdainful indifference (which I decided not to interpret as genuine contempt).

These responses were not unexpected. For the best part of a century we’ve imagined the Victorians in these unflattering terms. Most people tend to think of them as old fashioned, stuffy, pompous, cripplingly respectable,  emotionally stunted, sexually repressed, and obsessive about manners and decorum. One of the most enduring (though probably apocryphal) images of the period is of Queen Victoria, dressed in black mourning clothes, stating, as if for the whole nation, that “we are not amused”. I’d always thought that I was above such generalizations. As a historian of nineteenth-century popular culture, I’ve made it my mission to prove that the Victorian’s were just like us – that they fell in love, laughed at each other’s jokes, enjoyed a good night out and didn’t spend their lives mired in perpetual gloom.

It turns out that I’m not as enlightened as I thought. A few days ago I stumbled across a remarkable flickr collection of 1,700 nineteenth-century photographs and carte de visites. I’d seen plenty of Victorian photos before, but these were different – the people in them were smiling. I was bowled over. Some of them looked just like old school friends. Others grinned like members of my family. For the first time, in all of the years I’ve been studying them, the Victorians looked like real people. It was a delightfully unsettling experience.  I realized that I was still carrying around all of the prejudices that I thought I’d cast off – the sight of a smiling Victorian still jarred with my deepest preconceptions about the period and its people.

It’s a powerful reminder of how our understanding of the past is mediated through the technologies, objects and texts that capture it. I’ve always pictured the 1920s in the flickering black and white of early cinema – I find it hard to imagine a scene from the period without jazz music playing in background and a flapper in the corner dancing the Charleston.  By the same token, our perceptions of the Victorian period are heavily influenced by its sepia-tinged photographs. For much of the twentieth century, these pictures would have acted as daily reminders of a half-forgotten world. Grim looking grandfathers would glare down disapprovingly from the mantelpiece. It’s hardly surprising that the Victorians are remembered as stilted and joyless. Of course, the source of their gloomy expressions may well have been technical rather than cultural. By the end of the century, photography still required lengthy exposure times and the only way to prevent blurring was to keep absolutely still. It’s possible that the conventions of portraiture led people to strike stern, distinguished poses on purpose – but the more I look at Victorian photographs the more inclined I am to imagine a hidden smile waiting to break out.

When the British Newspaper Archive was launched a few weeks back a lot of researchers were frustrated to discover that the ‘unlimited’ subscription package actually had a ‘fair use’ cap of 1000 page views per month. When I e-mailed the archive’s customer service team about it they informed me that the archive was intended for ‘personal use’ only and that the cap was non-negotiable. Fortunately, they seem to have had a slight change of heart. The ‘fair usage’ section of the archive’s terms & conditions has now been updated to read:

Why do we have a fair usage policy for subscribers? Well, it is certainly not a way to penalise or hold back our customers from conducting their personal research.

We have this in place purely for the (very rare) cases where people might abuse the service, and it is designed to keep the price of subscriptions as low as possible for our customers.

You are permitted to view an average of 1000 pages per month (calculated over a 3 month period). If you get close to the limit, we’ll send you an email to warn you. We always contact users to establish the reason for abnormally heavy use of the site and if they’re just doing their own personal research, we obviously don’t penalise them.

We constantly review the limit, based on average usage of the site by all users. We will continue to keep an eye on this and make adjustments as necessary.

Many services today (such as broadband packages) have similar fair usage policies and they work in the same way as ours i.e they are designed to catch those who use the service excessively (which would drive up the price or reduce the quality of service for the majority of users).

We hope this explains things – Please contact Customer Support if you have any further questions

This looks like good news. The three month average is definitely a welcome concession. It’s hard to interpret precisely what happens when you exceed the limit now – they seem to be suggesting that users will be contacted and exempted from the restrictions if they’re just using the archive for personal research. I’d still like to see how this works in practice before paying for an £80 subscription, but it looks like the problem has been resolved. Well done to all who complained about it and credit to the BNA for listening to our concerns.

If you clicked on any of the hotlinks in my review of the British Newspaper Archive you might have been taken to an address with “www1.” at the start. If you were also using IE or Firefox this might have resulted in your browser warning you about a security risk. It’s a false alarm; a minor glitch that stems from the addition of the “1″ after “www”. The BNA have assured us that their website is completely secure and that the problem has now been resolved. I’ve fixed the links in my own review – if you’ve linked to the archive on your own blog it would be worth double checking to make sure that the address is correct.

Thanks to Charles Robinson for alerting me to the problem.

In my recent review of The British Newspaper Archive I moaned about the fact that ‘hit-term highlighting‘ was mysteriously absent from its interface. Unlike every other archive on the market, the BNA doesn’t highlight your search term on the article image. Here’s how it works in other databases:

In this example, I performed a keyword search for the term ‘Victorian’. One of the articles it returned was this lengthy piece from the Liverpool Mercury. It’s 5616 words long. Fortunately, thanks to hit-term highlighting, I can just skip straight to the word shaded in green and read the part of the article that I’m interested in. A similar search on the BNA would require me to carefully read a column and a half of text in order to find the word I searched for. This really slows down the research process when you’ve got 500 articles to analyse.

With any luck, brightsolid will address this problem with an update to the BNAs interface. This might take a while – in the meantime, there’s a temporary solution to the problem that should save us all a bit of time:

Step 1: perform a normal keyword search.

Step 2: open up an article.

Step 3: Click the ‘Show Article Text’ button at the top of the left hand menu. This reveals the raw OCR text sitting beneath your chosen article.

Step 4: Open your web browser’s ‘find’ tool. The quickest way to do this is to press ‘ctrl+f”

Step 5: Type your keyword into the ‘find’ tool. This should highlight all instances of that word which appear on the page – including the place it appears in the raw OCR.

Step 6: Find and click your keyword in the raw OCR.

Step 7: This should place a thin black box around a line of the article image. Within this box, you’ll find your keyword.

Here’s a video of me searching an article for the term ‘sleeper’:

My first academic article will be published in the next issue of Media History. It’s all about ‘American Humour’ columns and their role in shaping transatlantic relations during the late nineteenth century. For those of you who can’t wait to read it in print (hello?… is anybody still here?), an advance copy is now available on the journal’s website. Unfortunately, a subscription to Media History is required to view it – unless you’re mad enough to pay £21 to buy your own copy (in which case send the money directly to me and I’ll throw in a signed photograph). It’s going to be published as part of a special issue on ephemeral print culture which will include fantastic articles by Jim Mussell, Laurel Brake, Adrian Bingham, Pam Epstein (author of the brilliant advertisingforlove.com), and Karl Christian Führer. A perfect Christmas gift for the discerning historian-about-town.

Abstract:
During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, columns of American jokes became a regular feature of numerous British newspapers. The Newcastle Weekly Currant, for example, had a weekly column of ‘Yankee Snacks’; The North Wales Chronicle had ‘American Humour’; the Hampshire Telegraph its ‘Jonathan’s Jokes’; and the Northern Weekly Gazette sported a ‘Stars and Stripes’ column. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper introduced a regular column of ‘American Jokes’ in 1896, the same year it achieved an unprecedented circulation of one million readers. Almost half a century before Hollywood, here was a distinctively American form of popular culture which took Britain by storm. It has, however, received little academic attention. This article explores the development of the American humour column, considers the way in which it was consumed by British readers, and argues that these seemingly ephemeral jokes played a key role in shaping Victorian encounters with America.