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Abstract
Advances in digital technology have made the recent past seem like a foreign country. Media historians did things very differently in 2002. In the last decade, hundreds of historical newspapers and periodicals have been digitised and made available to researchers via online archives. Whilst the emergence of these resources has generated contrasting responses from historians, an increasing number of researchers are now embracing the new methodological possibilities created by keyword-searchable digital archives. As the first examples of this scholarship begin to appear on the horizon, this paper considers whether media history is on the cusp of a ‘digital turn’. It outlines the existing responses to digital methodologies, deconstructs digital newspapers in order to explore how they differ from their paper originals and uses case studies drawn from my own research into the late-Victorian transatlantic press to demonstrate how new methodologies might be applied.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the AHRC and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for supporting this research.
Notes
1. For an extensive review of the Burney Collection, see Ashley Marshall and Robert D. Hume.
2. Digitised History: newspapers and their impact on research into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, British Library, 20 July 2010.
3. Exploring Digital Newspaper Archives, University of Sheffield, 14 January 2011. Papers from the conference are scheduled to appear in a forthcoming edition of Media History.
4. The potential of crowd-sourced digitisation has recently been demonstrated by the success of the Dickens Journals Online project, which has mobilised a team of volunteers to manually correct OCR errors in Household Words and All the Year Round. http://www.djo.org.uk/
6. For more discussion of Moretti, distant reading and the Victorian press, see Bob Nicholson ‘Counting Culture’.
7. A similar approach was used to track the transatlantic circulation of jokes. See Bob Nicholson, ‘You Kick the Bucket’.