![Sample our Museum and Heritage Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5945/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Museum-Heritage-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly (1899–1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Notes
1. ‘About the Site’, Peel’s Prairie Provinces, available at <http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/aboutsite.html>, accessed 3 March 2014.
2. Wild Geese was serialised simultaneously in Pictorial Review, a New York-based magazine.
3. Stovel Company, Historical Outline of the House of Stovel: A Short Historical Sketch Together with Illustrations and Descriptions of the Growth of the Company, Stovel, Winnipeg, 1931, p. 11.
4. ‘Maple Leaf Magazines’, Time, 26 September 1932, available at <Time.com>, accessed 27 January 2014.
5. Stovel Company describes the purchase of the ‘first job linotype … in Western Canada’ and of specialty engraving and lithographing plates ‘direct from Lumiere Freres, Paris, France’ that allowed them to produce ‘the first three-color process plates in Western Canada, if not in all Canada’. See Stovel, pp. 10–11.
6. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA, vol. 121, no. 2, 2006, p. 529.
7. The expansion of periodical studies as a field in the past decade has owed much to the development of digital archives such as The Modernist Journals Project that increase access to hard-to-find magazines. Other examples include the Modernist Magazines Project, The Yellow Nineties Online and the recent digitisation of Partisan Review by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
8. Nick Seaver, ‘On Reverse Engineering: Looking for the Cultural Work of Engineers’, Medium, 30 January 2014, available at <https://medium.com/anthropology-and-algorithms/d9f5bae87812>, accessed 3 March 2014.
9. Alexis C Madrigal, ‘How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood’, The Atlantic, 2 January 2014, available at <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/>, accessed 3 March 2014.
10. Stephen Ramsay, ‘Who’s in and Who’s out’, available at <http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out/>, accessed 7 March 2014.
11. Manushag N Powell, ‘Afterword: We Other Periodicalists, Or, Why Periodical Studies?’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 30, no. 2, 2011, p. 441.
12. ibid., p. 446.
13. Papers from this roundtable are available at <http://www.ru.nl/esprit/resources/what-journal-towards/>, accessed 15 July 2014.
14. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2010, p. 144.
15. The development of just such a database, titled ‘The Modernist Periodicals Database’, is currently underway.
16. James Mussell, ‘The Matter with Media’, What is a Journal? Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies, MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384, available at <http://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/674401/mussell_mla_2013.pdf>, accessed 21 December 2012, p. 1.
17. ibid., p. 1.
18. ibid., p. 5.
19. ibid., p. 3.
20. Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013, p. 29.
21. Sandra Gabriele, ‘Transfiguring the Newspaper: From Paper to Microfilm to Database’, Amodern, vol. 2, 2014, available at <http://amodern.net/article/transfiguring-the-newspaper/>, accessed 20 February 2014.
22. In describing magazines as a form of media I am indebted to Sean Latham’s contribution to the 2013 MLA roundtable, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New Media’. The question of how to read magazines through a media studies framework, and the unique methodological challenges that result, will be discussed at the forthcoming workshop ‘Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies’, to be held at the University of Alberta in August 2014.
23. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 21.
24. ibid., p. 19.
25. Mussell, p. 5.
26. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008, p. 6.
27. Gabriele.
28. Sean Latham, ‘New Age Scholarship: The Work of Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, New Literary History, vol. 35, 2004, pp. 418–19.
29. Mussell, p. 6.
30. ibid., p. 7.
31. Ann Ardis, ‘Editor’s Introduction. Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(s)’, Modernism/modernity, vol. 19, no. 3, 2012, pp. v–vi.
32. David M Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, Ashgate, Farnham, 2009, p. 3.
33. Gitelman, p. 7.
34. Ed Folsom, ‘Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives’, PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, p. 1575.
35. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 218–19.
36. Gabriele
37. Sean Latham, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New Media’, What is a Journal? Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies, MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384, available at <http://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/674401/latham_mla_2013.pdf>, accessed 21 December 2012, pp. 3–4.
38. Marlene Manoff, ‘The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives’, portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, p. 313.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hannah McGregor
Hannah McGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her project, ‘Martha Ostenso, Middlebrow Magazines, and Digital Remediation’, examines the early twentieth-century middlebrow magazine through the lens of the simultaneous 1925 serialisation of Martha Ostenso’s classic of Canadian prairie realism, Wild Geese, in Pictorial Review and The Western Home Monthly. Nested within the EMiC UA Collaboratory, this project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative undertaking that bridges the areas of periodical studies, middlebrow studies, Canadian literature and digital humanities. Hannah completed her PhD at TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph in 2013, where her research focused on contemporary white Canadian women’s representations of distant suffering. Her work has been published in English Studies in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Literature and the International Journal of Canadian Studies.