THE PASSING OF PRINT

Abstract

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialisation of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies—scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them—and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive.

Keywords:

• print
• ephemera
• Victorian
• uncanny
• newspapers
• archives

Notes

1. See for instance Luckhurst; Ronell; Sconce.

2. For ‘affordance’ see Gibson; Sellen and Harper 16–18; Harré 23–33.

3. See, for instance, Ginsburg 175–95 and Scoggin 99–125.

4. There is a growing body of work examining the development of the nineteenth-century information economy. See, for instance, Higgs; Headrick and Toni Weller, The Victorians and Information. A good summary of the field is Toni Weller, ‘An Information History Decade’, 83–97.

5. For the full account of the Monthly Repository's shifts of title, see Mussell and Paylor 140–2.

6. See for instance Melanson and Donadio.

7. See Cohen ‘Google Fingers’, ‘Is Google Good for History?’, Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog, 26 June 2006 and 7 Jan 2010 <http://www.dancohen.org/blog/posts/google_fingers> and <http://www.dancohen.org/2010/01/07/is-google-good-for-history/>.

8. See for instance Marshall and Beagrie 3–16.