The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media

Series Editors: Dr Bill Bell (Centre for the History of the Book, University of
Edinburgh), Dr Chandrika Kaul (Department of Modern History, University of
St Andrews), Professor Kenneth Osgood (Department of History, Florida Atlantic
University), Dr Alexander S. Wilkinson (Centre for the History of the Media,
University College Dublin)
Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media publishes original, high-quality
research into the cultures of communication from the middle ages to the present
day. The series explores the variety of subjects and disciplinary approaches that
characterize this vibrant field of enquiry. The series will help shape current inter-
pretations not only of the media, in all its forms, but also of the powerful
relationship between the media and politics, society and the economy.
Advisory Board: Professor Carlos Barrera (University of Navarra, Spain), Pro-
fessor Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Professor Denis Cryle
(Central Queensland University, Australia), Professor David Culbert (Louisiana
State University, Baton Rouge), Professor Nicholas Cull (Center on Public Diplo-
macy, University of Southern California), Professor Tom O’Malley (Centre for
Media History, University of Wales Aberystwyth), Professor Chester Pach (Ohio
University)

Titles include:

Michael A. Krysko
AMERICAN RADIO IN CHINA
International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–41
Christoph Hendrik Müller
WEST GERMANS AGAINST THE WEST
Anti-Americanism in Media and Public Opinion in the Federal
Republic of Germany, 1949–68
James Mussell
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Joel Wiener
THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE BRITISH PRESS, 1830s–1914
Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism

Forthcoming titles:

Martin Conboy and John Steel

THE LANGUAGE OF NEWSPAPERS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Commercializing the Popular
The Nineteenth-Century
Press in the Digital Age
James Mussell
Department of English, University of Birmingham, UK

Palgrave
macmillan
© James Mussell 2012
Chapter 3 © James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-23553-3
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-31392-1 ISBN 978-0-230-36546-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230365469
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
To Laurel Brake
Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface x

Acknowledgements xv

List of Abbreviations xvii

Introduction: From Front Page to Home Page 1

Digitization, print culture and textual scholarship 6
Readers and users 15
Print objects, digital objects, digital resources 19
The nineteenth-century press in the digital age 22

1 From the Margins and for the Margins: Studying the

Nineteenth-Century Press Today 28
Newspapers and periodicals in the nineteenth
century 32
The study of the press in the digital age 56
Conclusion: remembering the margins 67

2 Bibliographic Codes and Visual Modes: The Role of the

Visual on Page and Screen 69
Text and image in the nineteenth-century press 73
Text and image in the digital age 95
Conclusion: bibliographic codes as
visual modes 112

3 Editions and Archives 114

James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor
Can we edit journalism? The importance
of form 117
Editions and archives 123
The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) 134
Conclusion: archives as editions; editions as
archives 144

vii
viii Contents

4 Newspapers and Periodicals in Class 149

Reading the past through the press 152
Reading (the) paper on the screen 159
Conclusions: teaching, digital literacy and research 189

Conclusion: We Have Always Been Users 192

Bibliography 203

Index 223
List of Illustrations

2.1 Front page of the Northern Star, 6, 4 November 1843. From

the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 84
2.2 Front page of the Northern Star, 2, 5 January 1839. From
the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 86
2.3 Front page of the Northern Star, 2, 12 January 1839. From
the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 87
2.4 Front pages from the Northern Star, 15, 13 March 1852;
Star, 15, 20 March 1852; Star of Freedom, 15, 24 April
1852; Star of Freedom, 1, 14 August 1852; Leader, 3,
14 August 1852. From the Nineteenth-Century Serials
Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 89
2.5 Front page of the first edition of the Northern Star, 5,
20 August 1842. From the Nineteenth-Century Serials
Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 92
2.6 Front page of the second edition of the Northern Star, 5,
20 August 1842. From the Nineteenth-Century Serials
Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 93
2.7 The large cut from Tomahawk, 19 October 1867,
unpaginated [pp. 242–3]. From the microfilm prepared for
the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 105
2.8 The large cut from Tomahawk, 19 October 1867,
unpaginated [pp. 242–3]. From the microfilm prepared for
the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 106
2.9 The large cut from Tomahawk, 19 October 1867,
unpaginated [pp. 242–3]. From the hard copy for the
Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 107
3.1 Diagram to show metadata and metadata inheritance in
the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition <www.ncse.ac.uk> 139

ix
Preface

This is a book about the nineteenth-century press but it is also a book

about digital culture. Like many scholars in the humanities, I was rarely
exposed to digital scholarship over the course of my training. I might
have increasingly relied on email over the course of my undergradu-
ate and postgraduate studies, accessed a number of journals online and,
for my doctoral research, used a range of digital indices to search for
and locate material, but my knowledge of the digital remained cursory
and functional. I am from a generation that grew up with comput-
ers. The first in my household was the popular Apple II, a model that
was launched the year I was born. I am, I suppose, a digital native
and have witnessed the growth of personal computing first hand. Yet
it was not until my position as postdoctoral research assistant on a digi-
tal project, the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse), that I really
engaged with the digital as a field of study in its own right. I was
fortunate to be able to work closely with colleagues at the Centre for
Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London and able to
attend two NINES summer workshops, one hosted by the University
of Virginia in the early days of ncse in 2005 and another at Miami
University, Ohio, after the edition had been published in 2008. The
practical experience of using digital technology to model nineteenth-
century newspapers and periodicals made me recognize the affordances
of this new medium while teaching me new things about the older print
media that I thought I knew so well.
There is something timely about writing a book about digital resources
of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. Both the academic
monograph and the newspaper are embattled forms today, struggling for
survival in a changing marketplace and among competing technologies.
At a recent conference hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book
at the University of Edinburgh called ‘Material Cultures’ in 2010, many
delegates acknowledged that the resurgence of interest in the material
forms of the book was prompted by the radical way these properties are
transformed through digitization. Digital media might raise questions
about what constitutes the book but, so far, the book industry remains
in rude health. The various ereaders available from Amazon and Sony
have helped nurture the ebook and Apple’s tablet computer, the iPad,

x
 Preface xi

provides further marketing possibilities for this form. What is remark-

able is that the book has made the transition into digital form, even
though it operates as something else entirely.
The scholarly monograph, however, has not been so fortunate. In the
conclusion to this book, I endorse the arguments of the many scholars
who have recognized that the monograph no longer serves the profes-
sional needs of the academy. Although the many announcements of
the death of this form might be a little premature, it has long been in
crisis and looks like it will continue to be so in the future. For some
time, the publication of monographs has been trapped in a spiral of
declining demand driving higher prices that in turn further diminish
demand (Anonymous [British Academy], 2005, p. 70). Yet our institu-
tions and professional bodies remain wedded to this declining form,
using it as the basis for recruitment, promotion and the allocation of
esteem. This means that scholars are under pressure to produce mono-
graphs that publishers find increasingly difficult to sell and libraries to
afford. The monograph is an important scholarly technology, allowing
an author to develop a substantive argument at some length. There
are also well-established systems for review and preservation, ensuring
books are noted on publication and made available for readers in the
future. Yet the reason for its continued fetishization within the pro-
fession is largely to do with an entrenched conservatism that relates
intellectual quality with the form of the bound volume.
So why publish a book about the digital? Well, as a sustained argu-
ment, my subject is suited to exposition over the course of a volume.
There are other ways I could have published, of course: I might have
published my arguments over a series of journal articles or as a whole
within a peer-reviewed digital environment. Publishing online, espe-
cially within an open-access resource, would certainly have attracted
more readers. The (gradual) development of institutional repositories
provides somewhere where this kind of work can be curated, ensur-
ing that it – or at least the data that underpins it – can be preserved
into the future. My reasons for publishing a book are largely prag-
matic. There is still a dearth of printed scholarship on the history of
the media. As I outline in Chapter 1, there is a growing body of work
about nineteenth-century periodicals, yet coverage of newspapers – let
alone any of the other print forms produced by the press – is much
more patchy. I am pleased to be able to contribute to Palgrave’s Studies
in the History of the Media. Their marketing department will endeav-
our to get the book into libraries and bring it to the attention of the
various readerships to which they think it will appeal. As it is a book,
xii Preface

libraries, if they can be convinced to buy it, know what to do with it

once it is in their possession. Lastly, publishing in an institutionalized
format such as the monograph will do my career no harm. However,
I am under no illusions as to the limitations of this print genre. It will
appear in a very small run and only one person will be able to read
a copy at once. It will be expensive, so very few people will buy it to
read. It will be out of print almost immediately upon publication. There
are advantages to this print genre, but it is in decline nevertheless. The
future of scholarship is digital.
In the conclusion to the book, I discuss the advantages of digital
scholarship at more length. One of the results of the hegemony of the
monograph is that the scholarship it contains becomes monographic.
As I argue throughout the book, the digital has entirely different prop-
erties to print and so enables different types of scholarship. It is also a
medium that is adept at simulation, hence the easy translation of the
book into digital form. The digital does not threaten the future of the
monograph but does constitute a much more effective way of carrying
out and publishing scholarship. The digital has, however, had a pro-
found and deleterious effect on print media, especially the newspaper.
Whereas the cultural status of the book has ensured its survival as an
exchangeable commodity, allowing publishers to exploit the potential
for online commerce, the digital has displaced the printed newspaper as
a medium for news. The printed paper was never really the best medium
for news but, until the emergence of the web, it did an adequate job,
surviving the advent of various broadcast media such as television and
radio. Despite the often vocal claims of journalists, what made the news-
paper valuable was not the informational content of news – this could
often be obtained more quickly elsewhere – but the way it was pack-
aged as part of the printed object. Newspapers, as Marilyn Deegan and
Kathryn Sutherland remind us, are ‘the threshold for our adult rela-
tionship to print, the basic tool of our literacy that we all aspire to:
people who never read anything else will read newspapers’ (Deegan and
Sutherland, 2009b, p. 31). Throughout its existence, the newspaper has
been the preferred print object through which readers mediated their
lived experience. The news, as ostensibly current unmediated factual
information, played an important part in verifying this experience, link-
ing the representation of the page to the wider world beyond it. The
newspaper, therefore, linked news to other textual genres, associating it
with a ritualized act of consumption that helped structure the reader’s
stance towards the things of which they read, while helping them to
establish their own cultural identity and signal it to others.
 Preface xiii

The newspaper market has been affected by digitization in two ways:

firstly, news has become decoupled from the newspaper as media; and
secondly, the market for digital advertising is currently less remuner-
ative than that in print. Although newspapers have always depended
upon advertising revenue to be sustainable, it is the first of these that
threatens the newspaper as genre. Digital media are perfectly suited to
the distribution and consumption of news as information, and publish-
ers, editors and journalists are still coming to terms with the decoupling
of news from the newspaper. What the digital does well is collate and
distribute information, bypassing the gatekeeping functions tradition-
ally played by journalists and their editors. Not only are there a number
of independent and grassroots producers of the news that take advan-
tage of digital publication, but applications and technologies like Google
News, RSS and Twitter liberate news from the outlets that publish it,
allowing users to reconfigure it according to their own interests. Edi-
tors and proprietors of newspapers like to present themselves as in the
business of selling news; however, what they really sell is a composite
object, predicated in part on the way in which the news is told, pack-
aged in a particular way to attract readers, whose attention can then be
sold on to advertisers. Journalism – finding stories and, crucially, telling
them effectively – remains important, but it has proved increasingly dif-
ficult to get readers to pay for the platform through which the news is
published.
Publishers of newspapers are still trying to establish a way to make
digital media pay. At the moment, most publications rely on some com-
bination of free content (to sell advertising), specialist applications for
various platforms (a way of monetizing delivery) and paywalls and sub-
scriptions (charging for content). Yet the same medium that threatens
the sustainability of both the printed newspaper and the way it is cur-
rently manifested in digital form provides the means through which
we can discover the print media of the past. The printed products of
the nineteenth-century press constitute an archive that is too large to
navigate, contains too much material to read, and survives in a form
difficult to access and navigate. The digitization of this print archive
solves many of the bibliographic challenges that it presents and does so
in a way that retains the look of the page. It has never been so easy to
consult the nineteenth-century press (or at least, those parts that have
been digitized) and we are now surrounded by images of nineteenth-
century print. The nineteenth-century press, particularly newspapers
and periodicals, were the central documents of the period. They were the
way most readers learned of the world around them and realized their
xiv Preface

own place within it. As objects, they circulated between – and allowed
information to circulate between – groups of readers, consolidating their
identities. As commodities, they were desirable and provided spaces of
escape and fantasy, as well as providing the medium for political orga-
nization and unrest. Given the high price of books, these print forms
were the only way many readers could access new writing. In this book
I argue that the digitization of the press allows us to understand the
nineteenth century in new ways. However, to do so we need to be able
to do two things: firstly, we must be able to read the press through the
forms in which it survives and situate these within their historical con-
text; secondly, we need to understand how these forms change through
digitization. The digital offers the means through which we can interro-
gate the media of the past, but this is only possible if we can interrogate
the digital media of the present.
Acknowledgements

This book was conceived over the course of the Nineteenth-Century

Serials Edition (ncse) (2005–8), but written during my first three years
at the University of Birmingham (2007–10). ncse was a collaboration
between Birkbeck College, the British Library, King’s College London
and Olive Software. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council and the resource, Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse), was
published in May 2008 <http://www.ncse.ac.uk>. The book originated
in discussions between myself and members of what was known as the
research team: Isobel Armstrong, Laurel Brake, Suzanne Paylor and Mark
Turner. Initially, the book was to be co-written between myself and
Suzanne Paylor, who was, like me, employed as a postdoctoral research
assistant on the project. Suzanne contributed extensively to the early
stages of the book, helping to map out its contents and draft proposals
to publishers. The book builds on co-authored papers produced with
Suzanne during the project and she has contributed to a number of
the chapters. Suzanne is the co-author of Chapter 3, but her ideas and
influence are throughout.
Other members of the ncse project team also contributed to the devel-
opment of the book. Working closely with Ed King (British Library),
Chezkie Kasnett (Olive Software) and the brilliant scholars at the Centre
for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London – Gerhard
Brey, Arianna Ciula, Marilyn Deegan, Tamara Lopez, Eleonora Picozzi,
Harold Short, Paul Spence, Simon Tanner, Paul Vetch – shaped the book
in many different ways. Working with ncse also allowed me to attend
two NINES Summer Workshops. The first, at the University of Virginia in
2005, occurred during the early stages of the project and was crucial for
grounding me in the broader context of the digital humanities. The sec-
ond, at Miami University, occurred in the summer after the publication
of ncse in 2008. At both workshops I learned a great deal from both del-
egates and representatives of the host institutions. At each, I was struck
by the intellectual generosity of all involved.
The book was written during my first three years at the University
of Birmingham. The university has proved a welcoming environment
and a stimulating place in which to work. I have enjoyed many
fascinating discussions with colleagues interested in nineteenth- and

xv
xvi Acknowledgements

twentieth-century literature, including Clare Barker, Jan Campbell, Steve

Ellis, Andrzej Gaziorek, Dave Gunning, Deborah Longworth, Ian Small
and Marion Thain. An early version of Chapter 3 was presented at the
Text and Cultural Construction Seminar at Birmingham, hosted jointly
by the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (IAA) and the Institute for
Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE).
Parts of this book have been presented to various audiences in Britain
and the United States. A record of presentations on behalf of ncse can
be found on the ncse website. Some of my thoughts about copyright
and digital materiality were first drafted in a presentation to Deloitte
in 2008. At the NINES workshop later that year I had the opportunity
of reflecting on ncse as a published edition in a paper about digitizing
journalism. My attendance at this workshop was made possible by a
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant, for which I am very grate-
ful. Shortly after my return I presented a paper on seriality and genre
at the annual meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
(RSVP) in Roehampton. A draft of Chapter 2 formed the basis of a paper
presented at a symposium organized by the Centre for Textual Scholar-
ship at De Montfort University in 2009 and part of the Introduction was
presented for that year’s meeting of RSVP in Minneapolis. In 2010, I pre-
sented portions of the book to ‘Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality
and Transmission’ at the University of Edinburgh and ‘Digitized His-
tory: Newspapers and their Impact in Research into Eighteenth and
Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the British Library. A seminar paper at
the inaugural meeting of the Periodicals Research Cluster at Salford Uni-
versity in April 2011 allowed me to present key arguments from the
book while I was in the process of revising the manuscript. I thank the
organizers of all these events for the opportunity to present work and
the various audiences, present and on Twitter, for their useful comments
and questions.
I would like to thank Nicola Gauld for her constant love and support.
My parents, Daphne and Dick, and my brother, Ian, have always helped
in any way they can. My friends have been more than willing to provide
welcome distractions when necessary.
Throughout the preparation of this book Laurel Brake has been a val-
ued colleague and friend. Laurel is both an expert in nineteenth-century
print and a keen advocate for the digital. This book is dedicated to her.
56 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

dividing rules, all determined the way in which an article was made
meaningful. These aspects also determined the relationship between
an article and those around it. A particular type used in the title, for
instance, might label the article as a major component of the issue, or a
particular type of dividing line might signal that it is a piece of filler,
included to fill white space at the bottom of a column and perhaps
derived from another publication. Crucially, however, to understand
these generic features, seriality and miscellaneity, the critical reader
must engage with other issues of the title. Without these, the single
issue becomes divorced from the virtual forms that link it with the rest
of the run.
The interaction between miscellaneity and seriality means that indi-
vidual issues cannot function metonymically as representatives of the
whole. When published, each issue existed in a complex relation-
ship with both its predecessors and the market, positing continuous
forms through repetition while also tantalizing the readership with the
promise of something new. The single issue was, of course, meaning-
ful within nineteenth-century culture. A glance at its pages is probably
enough to reveal important things about its target readership and how
its editors and publishers understood its position in the market. But
without placing it in sequence, it is impossible to understand the
dynamic between familiarity and novelty that was both characteristic
of serial publication and that gave each particular publication its own
distinct identity. The recurring features of a serial were what set the con-
ditions for its variation; they allowed readers to make sense of what was
new and were the basis on which they decided whether to come back
for more.

The study of the press in the digital age

Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland have observed that the same
properties that make newspapers and periodicals such a valuable
resource ‘also makes them so difficult to manage: material fragility, size,
variety, volume’ (2009b, p. 49). Digitization effectively addresses many
of these difficulties, exerting bibliographic control over this difficult
archive by republishing it in a new medium. The dominant mode of dig-
itizing large amounts of print is to produce digital page images, either
from microfilm or from hard copy, and then run OCR software upon
them to generate approximate transcripts of their textual content. These
transcripts then form the basis of a searchable index, organizing the
page images and providing access to their textual content. As users are
 From the Margins and for the Margins 57

searching for verbal information, they tend to be interested in articles

rather than whole pages. Consequently, both transcript and page image
are divided up so that the fragment of the image that corresponds to
the article is delivered to the user as a reading text. This image allows
the reader to see how the article looked when published and usefully
obscures any errors in the OCR-generated transcript. As users need to
know what it is they are looking at, metadata is provided so that articles
can be situated within the resource.
Pioneering projects from the academic library sector such as Mak-
ing of America (1995) and the Internet Library of Early Journals
(1999) demonstrated how this methodology could be used to digi-
tize nineteenth-century periodicals and provide access to them over
the web. Various publishers explored the commercial possibility for
such resources. In 1992 ProQuest launched Periodicals Contents Index
on CD-ROM, publishing it online in 1997. In 2001 they developed the
resource, rebranding it as PCI Full Text (2001). In 1999 Heritage Micro-
film launched the newspaperARCHIVE <http://www.newspaperarchive.
com/>, which they now claim is the largest digital newspaper archive
in the world. However, the commercial case was fully demonstrated
by Gale’s Times Digital Archive in 2002. Although it did little more
in terms of its technical implementation than many of its predeces-
sors, the status of its content and the existing problems of getting
access to its historical archive ensured its success. Shortly afterwards
followed the Scotsman (2004) and the Guardian (2007), now included
as part of ProQuest’s well-established and expanding ProQuest Historical
Newspapers (2001–). The year 2007 also marked the publication of the
large archives of British nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals:
the British Library’s British Newspapers 1800–1900 (published by Gale
Cengage and also known as 19th Century British Library Newspapers); 19th
Century UK Periodicals (also published by Gale); and ProQuest’s British
Periodicals. This predominantly commercial activity continued along-
side important publicly funded projects. In 2001 the National Library
of New Zealand launched Papers Past <http://paperspast.natlib.govt.
nz>, providing free access to 63 publications. In the United States the
Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) launched Chronicling America: His-
toric American Newspapers (2007) <http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/>,
providing free access to 457 titles. In the following year, the National
Library of Australia launched their Australian Newspapers <http://trove.
nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home>, with free access to 130 publications. Google
News Archive (2006–) <http://news.google.com/newspapers>, a com-
mercial resource that does not charge for access, is also based on this
58 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

methodology, offering free access to around 2500 newspapers from

around the world.
All of these resources offer a technical solution to the bibliographic
and methodological problems posed by the surviving print archive.
Digitization can reunite fragmented runs distributed in archives within
their digital space. OCR transcripts, even though generated from com-
putational methods, open up their textual content and allow it to be
searched. The metadata, both produced through the digitization pro-
cess and added subsequently, constitutes an additional valuable index.
As digitization creates processable data, content and metadata from
different publications can be cross-searched and compared. Unlike hold-
ings in print archives, digital resources can be accessed by many people
at the same time, from wherever they are (technology and Internet
connection permitting) and whenever they want.
Digital resources that allow cross-searching across a number of pub-
lications have the potential to transform the study of the nineteenth
century. Content hidden within an abundance of print is recoverable
and, with a simple search, it is possible to track a subject across multi-
ple publications. Searchable transcripts allow us to understand how the
press fed upon itself, deriving copy from rival publications and often
publishing it without acknowledgement. If, as argued above, the most
important questions to ask of material published in newspapers and
periodicals are where and when was it published and what does it look
like on the page, then we are well served by these resources. It has
never been so easy to see what the pages of the nineteenth-century
press looked like: the uneasy compromise that results from providing
page images to conceal the errors in a machine-generated transcript
can be seen as a real asset, allowing users to read articles in a form
that reproduces their appearance in print. This is so significant for the
way in which we approach this material that I discuss it at length in
the following chapter. Here, I will focus on the questions of where
and when.
The way these resources provide access to material is through the cre-
ation of a segmented textual transcript. Results, when provided, are to a
single article that is presented in isolation. Metadata identifies the pub-
lication it is from and, usually, assigns it a date. Most resources also
include the option of viewing the article on the whole page or brows-
ing through the issue. But it is the article that is foregrounded and
this is understood as identical to the partial verbal transcript through
which it is retrieved. As argued above, the article is simply one textual
component among others. Readers were certainly attracted by particular
 From the Margins and for the Margins 59

contributions (or, particular contributors), but they were also drawn to

the publication as a whole: the intangible identity built up through the
repetition of miscellaneous content, whatever it might be. Not only
are issues irreducible to the articles they contain (there are all sorts of
other content within them too), but it is the combination of textual
components and their repetition in each issue that creates the context
in which any article is presented and, ultimately, interpreted. The user
needs to be able to see where an article is on the page and where that
page is in the issue. But he or she also needs to be able to establish the
significance of these features and this can only be achieved with refer-
ence to other articles in other issues. These references should be to the
same publication, of course, but also to other publications in order to
establish the position of the article in ongoing debates as well as the
market more broadly. Most of the current crop of digital resources are
organized around information retrieval, understood in purely linguistic
terms, but do not furnish the means to place this information in con-
text. Metadata has a role to play here, labelling content and describing
its relationship with other aspects of the publication, but it must be con-
ceived in functional as well as descriptive terms. A user needs to be able
to situate content in a particular publication at a particular moment,
but also to compare it to similar content elsewhere. Metadata schema
tend to be object-oriented, but such schema must be extended to cover
the role content plays in a particular publication, and then to permit
comparisons with articles fulfilling similar roles in other publications.
Nevertheless, descriptive metadata has an important role to play. The
importance of the textual transcript as an index for the page images
means that search is the principal gateway to content for most digi-
tal resources of newspapers or periodicals. Descriptive metadata allows
users to construct sophisticated queries, qualifying their search terms
and delimiting the body of material that is searched. Given the size of
these digital resources, it is likely that there will be too many results
to read. Many resources order hits in terms of something called ‘rele-
vance’, but do not define how this is calculated. Descriptive metadata
allows users to sort results by other means (date is particularly useful)
or refine them further. It is also the only means through which users
can discriminate between hits other than opening them up and reading
each in turn.
As users of digital resources are already familiar with Google, many
resources adopt a similar type of interface for their content. At the time
of writing, for instance, ProQuest are implementing a single interface
for all of their digital resources that simply consists of a search bar, with
60 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

almost no contextual information at all. Familiarity with Google means

that users are comfortable entering terms into a search bar despite not
knowing what it is they are searching for. In a Google search, the corpus
is not delimited and Google’s reputation is based on ranking results so
that the most relevant tops a list so numerous that it cannot be checked
in its entirety. The user’s satisfaction does not rest on knowing that they
have the best result (they have no way of judging this), merely that
it is adequate for their needs. Given the size of most digital resources
based on newspapers and periodicals, it is likely that the user will have
a similar experience, eventually stumbling across something relevant.
However, in this instance the user is not searching contemporary mate-
rial and so, as Patrick Leary has argued, he or she must possess a degree
of historical knowledge in order to identify suitable search terms (Leary,
2005, pp. 80–2). For research purposes, users will also require knowl-
edge of the contents of a resource, which aspects are being searched
and how this search is executed. The large digital resources of newspa-
pers and periodicals compete with each other on exhaustiveness and so
do not make their contents explicit. They are usually listed somewhere,
but this documentation is peripheral to the business of finding content.
The search, too, is presented as exhaustive and, because transcripts are
routinely concealed from the user, there is no way to evaluate (and so
compensate for) any inaccuracies introduced by the OCR software. Gale
Cengage’s interfaces are a notable exception to this trend, as they offer
the reader the option to increase the fuzziness of a search in order to
take into account errors in the transcript. There is, of course, still no
way of knowing how successful this is – there is always an element of
the unknown in these searches – but at least it serves to educate the user
as to how the search operates.
Digital technologies offer radically different ways of representing text
(however conceived), and it is this difference that must be utilized
in order to expose aspects of print culture. It is possible to republish
newspapers and periodicals in print, usually in the form of a series of
volumes. For instance, in 2006 Pickering and Chatto published an edi-
tion of Blackwood’s Magazine. Given the length of its run (Blackwood’s
was published from 1817 to 1980), principles of selection are required
and this edition, edited by Nicholas Mason, selects content from its first
eight years on the basis of literary merit. The limits of this print edition
are clear: some content is privileged over others; material is presented
out of context; and the look of the page is only retained in the volumes
dedicated to a particular series of articles, the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’
(Mason, 2006b, p. xxi). Although the linearity of the codex is often
 From the Margins and for the Margins 61

overstated – indices and tables of contents encourage different routes

through the book, and the reader, in any case, is free to flick through
the pages in any way he or she chooses – the form still imposes certain
conditions upon the text (Deegan and Sutherland, 2009b, p. 22). In the
Pickering and Chatto edition, these limits endorse a certain interpreta-
tion of Blackwood’s, that is, that it contains work of literary merit worthy
of being preserved as a (very expensive) printed book. However, this is
not the only way in which the bound volumes of Blackwood’s in the
archive can be interpreted. The bound volumes contain a much broader
range of material than is represented in this edition and, perhaps more
importantly, they also contain evidence of its publication history: the
form of the issue, its miscellaneity and seriality, its connection with the
present. It may be possible to present some aspects of this occluded his-
tory in a print edition, but the form of the book makes its absence easier
to forget.
Digital technologies overcome many of the restrictions of print, but
impose conditions of their own. Many of the digital resources of news-
papers and periodicals, for instance, overcome problems of scale and
access through mass digitization and the use of the OCR-generated tran-
scripts as indices. However, the use of the index as organizing logic and
point of access presents a particular interpretation of the printed mate-
rial: as the article is the principal unit delivered to users, the bound
volume (as well as other constitutive units such as the page, section,
issue or run) is effaced by the system architecture. The centrality of the
OCR-generated transcript in these resources prevents them from acting
like digital books. Instead, they operate as reference works, indexing the
period covered by their run. This was precisely Google’s legal defence
when charged with infringing copyright in 2005. By claiming that dig-
itization was a pretext to produce textual transcripts for searching –
in effect a card catalogue for every word – they could plead fair use
and avoid the paradigm of publishing (Wojcicki, 2005). However, the
printed objects in the archive are not just vehicles for the preserva-
tion of text, but are the media for its production. The various digital
resources republishing newspapers and periodicals (and, for that mat-
ter, Google Books) reduce content to the linguistic information encoded
in the writing on the page. Perhaps it is in this respect that the book
haunts the digital resource, its familiar form allowing the text to emerge
as if independent of the material in which it is encoded. Yet there is no
reason that digital technologies cannot be used to engage more thor-
oughly with surviving print objects. Jerome McGann has argued that
translating print-based texts into electronic media ‘entirely alters one’s
62 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

view of the original materials’ (McGann, 2001, p. 82). The digital has
different properties from print, but it can also reproduce the appear-
ance and behaviour of printed objects with remarkable facility. McGann
insisted we take these digital properties as the basis through which to
imagine the critical edition:

The critical possibilities of digital environments require that we

revisit what we know, or what we think we know, about the formal
and material properties of the codex. We shall see that the advent of
digital tools promotes this kind of critical reflection and leads to a
view of books and of language itself that breaks with many common
and widely held ideas.
(pp. 12–13)

This is not to argue that digital editions can somehow set texts free of
the constraints imposed by print, but rather that working in this new
media forces us to pay attention to these constraints and model them
accordingly.
A number of scholars of nineteenth-century newspapers and
periodicals have argued that a theoretical engagement with this mate-
rial is necessary to delimit its textual properties and situate it within
culture, both as product and as agent (Pykett, 1990; Beetham, 1990;
Turner, 2000; King, 2004; Mussell, 2007; Brake, 2009). Deegan and
Sutherland have warned against reading post-structural notions of
textuality as ‘evidence of print dissatisfaction and electronic longings’,
but what such theoretical interventions establish is a notion of text that
extends beyond the linguistic codes printed on the page (2009b, p. 22).
As Deegan and Sutherland go on to argue, post-structural notions of
textuality are steeped in print culture (p. 23); however, this does not
mean that they cannot expose aspects of textuality that are better repre-
sented through digital media. Digital resources do not offer a resolution
to the tension between ‘the theoretical enquiry into the book as a prin-
ciple and locus of comprehensiveness’ and ‘writing as its resistance’, but
a different way in which this tension can be modelled (p. 23). As news-
papers and periodicals present particularly readerly texts, articulated in
opposition to (but in dialogue with) the codex, then it seems appropri-
ate to embrace the properties of digital media to model those of these
print genres. By changing the way we interact with the contents of
nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, we can draw attention
to properties, particularly the formal ones created in the relationship
between issues that might otherwise be overlooked.
 From the Margins and for the Margins 63

As a process, digitization always takes place in an economy of loss and

gain. It is impossible to model print in all its complexity: instead, those
who produce resources must decide what features to encode and how
best to represent them in digital form. As Suzanne Paylor and I argue
in Chapter 3, this places a considerable burden on the producers of
resources but, because digitization is an editorial project, it is a bur-
den that cannot be avoided. The considerable cost of producing large
resources means that they tend to be inherently conservative in their
design, restricting innovation to selected areas so that they can compete
for users. The logic behind the design of many user interfaces is that of
the culture of web design more broadly: point and click, with naviga-
tion made as simple as possible; or, as the title of Steve Krug’s influential
book has it, Don’t Make Me Think! (Krug, 2000; 2006). Such simple design
is deceptively difficult, and designers are skilled practitioners who take
into account detailed user studies. The result is well-designed resources
that do not need a great deal of expertise to use but might have more
advanced features tucked away within them. Although often extremely
powerful, these projects rarely apply rigorous scholarly care to the mate-
rial that they contain and do not risk alienating the majority of their
prospective users by presenting content in a way that demands we ask
new questions about it.
It is important to recognize that it is possible to make these criticisms
at all. Other than film-based media such as microfilm and microfiche,
digital media are the only practical way we have of republishing signif-
icant amounts of historical newspapers and periodicals. Microfilm, in
particular, remains the preferred storage medium for material in print in
many institutions as it is a trusted technology. However, there are con-
cerns about its longevity, and its limitations in terms of access are well
recognized (Deegan and Sutherland, 2009b, p. 49; Brown et al., 2011).
The current generation of digital resources genuinely break new ground
in what they enable us to do with nineteenth-century newspapers and
periodicals and so will change the way we understand the period as a
whole. Yet we should not be satisfied with the extant provision. Edit-
ing is always about the transmission of works through time and the
crumbling condition of the newspaper and periodical archive means
that conservation is a pressing concern for this material (Shillingsburg,
2006, p. 12).
Digital resources are published works in their own right, produced
at specific moments to present a particular interpretation of whatever
they republish. However, these resources are often used as a pretext
for the disposal of printed material held within libraries and archives.
64 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

Newspapers and periodicals, because they can occupy a great deal of

space, are particularly at risk of disposal. Despite the furore caused in
2000 by Nicholson Baker’s allegations that libraries misrepresented the
condition of their paper holdings as a pretext for their removal, the
provision of access to digital resources continues to be offered as a jus-
tification for disposing of runs of printed serials (Baker, 2000; Baker,
2002; Deegan and Sutherland, 2009b, pp. 49–50). For instance, the UK
Research Reserve <http://www.ukrr.ac.uk> – a government-funded col-
laboration between university libraries and the British Library – allows
libraries to dispose of their holdings of periodicals if at least three copies
exist somewhere else. Access is restricted to these print copies, or to a
digital facsimile provided, for a price, by the British Library. As digital
resources cannot reproduce print objects, just aspects of them, decisions
to dispose of print on the basis of a digital version, especially if these
holdings are for research purposes, are always to the detriment of the
collection.
The scale of the archive coupled with the textual complexity of news-
papers and periodicals means that republication in print is prohibitively
expensive. Microfilm offers a way of preserving this material, but at the
cost of comfortable access and a very partial representation of content.
In digital media we have a better opportunity to engage with the com-
plexity of this print genre and republish it in a way that represents its
central role in nineteenth-century culture. Digitization, though, does
not come cheap. As most nineteenth-century material is out of copy-
right, it is ripe for commercial exploitation and, as the success of the
Times Digital Archive makes clear, there are profits to be made. With-
out the political will to put public money into digitization projects
it is difficult to see how libraries, unless they can draw upon their
own endowments, can produce such resources independently of private
finance. A good example of this is the British Library’s British Newspa-
pers, 1800–1900. This resource was funded by the British government
through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and published
by Gale Cengage. The use of public money enabled the Library to meet
certain access requirements and so Gale provide free access for further
and higher education institutions and some public libraries in the UK.
Members of the public, however, are required to pay a fee for access, pro-
ducing a revenue stream that can offset some of the costs of digitization
and generate profit for the commercial partner. This arrangement suits
all the institutional stakeholders: JISC can target public money towards
an important national asset while exploring how such projects might
be executed; Gale Cengage get exclusive access to unique, but public
 From the Margins and for the Margins 65

domain material; and the British Library can claim that it is making its
holdings much more available among its users (wherever they may be
in the world) and to have done so at little cost to the British taxpayer.
The group who lose out, of course, are the public, both in Britain and
beyond, on whose behalf the Library is entrusted to hold this material
in the first place.
The tensions inherent in such partnerships are made explicit around
the issue of access. Digital content enters an information economy that
can only be monetized by the imposition of barriers to access. The result
is an uneasy negotiation between the commitments to education and
heritage that motivate most content-holding institutions and funding
bodies and the commercial partner’s need to recoup costs and generate
profit. Commercial publishers have always profited from material out
of copyright, whether this was in response to the 1774 copyright win-
dow or the production of cheap editions of classics today. However, such
partnerships bring content-holding institutions perilously close to act-
ing like publishers, erecting barriers in order to benefit from publication
in ways that contradict both their stated aims and the public interest.
The model presented by Google seems to offer an alternative way of
financing digitization that does not impede access for users. The con-
tent of Google Books is based upon the holdings of 20 university libraries
and offers free access to any content out of copyright. As copyright
varies from country to country, the material available can vary accord-
ing to the ip address of the user. Google are in the business of amassing
information: initially, the project was intended to enrich the index that
underpins their search engine; however, with the growth of the ebook
market due to the development of popular reading devices, Google have
also entered publishing with Google Edition. Collaboration with Google
is attractive as contributing libraries receive copies of the digital images
produced as a result of the scanning process: Google enriches its index,
while libraries can use the images to complement their holdings in print.
Google Books saw off a rival project by Microsoft in 2008, suggesting (per-
haps unsurprisingly) that there was not scope for competition in the
market for a universal library (Nadella, 2008). The British Library was
part of the Microsoft project and, had it been successful, would have
found itself committed to providing access through Microsoft’s search
products alone. Projects like Google Books and the aborted enterprise by
Microsoft have the potential to transform the way we access our printed
heritage by making the contents of hitherto inaccessible or overlooked
texts searchable while providing access to millions of facsimile page
images. However, they are underpinned by a tawdry deal in which the
66 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

custodians of the culture of the Western world hold the material with
which they are entrusted to ransom (for the period of a licence) so that
their partners can sell advertising (Mussell, 2008a, p. 95).
In the introduction of The Victorian Periodical Press, Shattock and Wolff
wrote that:

The sheer bulk and range of the Victorian press seem to make it
so unwieldy as to defy systematic and general study. Given the
inadequacy of most existing reference works, the uncertainties of cat-
aloguing, and that vague but all-too-familiar feeling that there are
literally millions of serial articles out there whose allure we dare not
admit, we can barely grasp the dimensions of the subject, let alone
come to grips with its content.
(Shattock and Wolff, 1982a, xiii)

Digitization represents one of the most significant contributions to the

study of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals to date. Our
digital resources have meant that access to content has never been so
convenient. It is possible to search across an unprecedented amount
of material with remarkable facility and speed. Yet it is tempting to
mistake such technical achievement with bibliographic control. The ‘all-
too-familiar feeling’ described by Shattock and Wolff plays an important
methodological role, reminding us of the limits of our research strate-
gies and the masses of print that remain inaccessible because it has
been lost. Patrick Leary has written about what he calls the ‘offline
penumbra’, that body of material that remains undigitized and so is
increasingly invisible to all but the most determined researcher (Leary,
2005, pp. 82–3). If, as Shattock and Wolff argue, the nineteenth-century
press was the medium of popular culture – ‘the ordinary’ – then so too
is the digital for us today. The ease with which we use resources and the
way they blend in with the rest of the digital landscape mean that we are
easily seduced by their claim to comprehensiveness and completeness.
Not only does an unknown amount of material haunt these resources
from the world of print, but their contents too are often made opaque
by slick interfaces and overwhelming numbers of search results. Our dig-
ital resources allow us to manage the ‘bulk and range’ of the Victorian
press, yet there is a risk that the way in which this material is presented
in these resources will reproduce the marginality that has condemned
their print versions to the stacks. For the first time, we have a way of
searching across large tracts of nineteenth-century print and can navi-
gate among volumes, issues and articles with unprecedented ease. But
 From the Margins and for the Margins 67

as long as newspapers and periodicals are conceived as archives of con-

tent, rich sources of undifferentiated background, then we will never be
able to undertake ‘systematic and general study’ and so understand the
central role they played in nineteenth-century culture.

Conclusion: remembering the margins

For those entrusted with archiving digital page facsimiles derived from
printed newspapers and periodicals, the margins at the edges of the
printed page represent a waste. As opposed to the printed block, the
margin represents undifferentiated white space, negligible in informa-
tional terms, that takes up valuable storage. As the margin recurs on
every page, the memory that can be saved by cropping it is substan-
tial. However, removing the margin from the text radically changes the
representation of the source object. The amount of white space tells us
whether publishers and editors believed their readers valued readability
over content; it also reveals the size of the printing block. The mar-
gin, too, was the place where readers contributed to the text, marking
it as a particular printed object complete with its own history. Excising
these spaces, and the information they contain, suggests that the text is
merely what is printed, not what it is printed on, and that it is the same
regardless of which particular copy one is looking at.
It is impossible to evaluate the significance of any material from a
periodical or newspaper without an engagement with form. These print
genres were predicated upon miscellaneity and seriality: each issue con-
tains a range of content – articles, images, advertisements, mastheads,
whatever – and the configuration of this content, but not the content
itself, was repeated issue to issue. As I have argued over the course of
the chapter, anybody coming to this material needs to establish when
and where it was published and how it looked on the page. In the
next chapter I focus on one aspect of these requirements. The com-
puter display permits us to reproduce more of the bibliographic codes
that constitute a printed text than is possible in print. The visual, as the
principal mechanism through which we read, is an important category
for all printed objects but especially so for the visually rich texts of news-
papers and periodicals. In the next chapter, I examine the visual in terms
of both the images printed within the press and the other textual fea-
tures such as typography, layout, and the various icons and symbols that
adorned the page and made it navigable. The importance of the screen
for digital media means that the visual has an important role to play
in the representation of these printed objects in digital form too. The
68 The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age

chapter concludes by considering how the visual aspects of nineteenth-

century serials can be represented in the very different visual economy
of the digital.
The significance of newspapers and periodicals lies in more than
what is written upon them. These complex objects were agents in
nineteenth-century culture. They had physical, emotional and sym-
bolic presence in the lives of their readers. They moved through society,
from press to bookseller to reader and, probably, to other readers. They
also moved ideas, images and representations, providing the material
through which readers could imagine the world and reconcile this with
their lived experience. All this was made possible by the intrinsic forms
that structured these texts. Predicated upon changing content, form
gave publications their identity, allowing them to have an existence
that transcended the single article, issue or volume. Form structured the
reader’s relationship with content, allowing them to interpret what was
in front of them while imagining what was to come. Without form,
we cannot understand newspapers and periodicals as print genres and
so their connection to the market, their readers, or nineteenth-century
culture more broadly.