i have been interested for some time in the kinds of evidence literary scholars use to support arguments for the representative or unique qualities of historical texts. as humanists, we tend to make broad arguments based on a limited number of specific examples. the large-scale digitization of nineteenth-century books and periodicals now makes possible a more comprehensive exploration of the cultural history of victorian texts and their interrelated bibliographic, visual, and linguistic codes. With this new quantity of textual evidence come new kinds of evidence as well, since the digital environment offers us not only new access but also new modes of analysis.
Evidence at New Scaleover the last several years, the digitization of nineteenthcentury printed materials has dramatically increased our access to the range and diversity of victorian print culture. the ease with which one can now search for and within digitized texts can obscure the scale of the work behind that search interface. the scope of the Google Books library Project (now at over twenty million books) and other library digitization efforts echoes the scale of nineteenth-century publishing, which vastly exceeded that of all previous periods.as individual readers, we have few opportunities to truly engage with that kind of scale. as specialized, professional readers, we have each read hundreds, perhaps thousands of books-but we contend with AbstrAct: the large-scale digitization of nineteenth-century books and periodicals now makes possible a more comprehensive exploration of the cultural history of victorian texts and their interrelated bibliographic, visual, and linguistic codes. this essay argues that computational analysis can help us move beyond human limitations of vision, memory, and attention in examining this new archive. digital reading can help us to discover texts we do not already know and to resituate those we think we already know, thus producing new research questions and new kinds of evidence.
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