An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

Abstract

As Robert Darnton sees it, we are living amidst the most recent of "four fundamental changes in information technology" that have patterned human history. 1 Coming just before our age of digital transition, he claims, was the Victorian epoch, which was transformed by a dramatic expansion of texts and readers. Darnton's sketch is at once debatable and elegant, offering an attractive homology to nineteenth-century scholars who would connect these moments of change, past and present. 2 In the forms of digitized historical resources and computational research methods, the connections between media shifts then and now can not only be theorized but also operationalized, with the nineteenth century's prolific sources serving as the materials for twenty-first century digital humanities research. This essay results from just such an initiative-a content-mining project focused on the digital collection British Nineteenth-Century Newspapers from the commercial publisher Gale Cengage. Yet my goal is not to explain the contemporary challenges of computational approaches, the scale of digital materials, or a culture of proliferating information that connects us to the Victorians. Instead, this essay calls attention to the gaps in that story: the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now. It argues that our justifiable enthusiasm for linking past and present has effectively erased the interval between-the twentieth-century transmission histories that established the parameters for scholarly resources in digital forms. New media is always in the process of constituting itself as new, erasing the legacies of its entanglements and the continuous work of its propagation. 3 This essay follows the lead of several scholars in media studies and critical bibliography to outline-and then pursue-a method for investigating these material histories, an "archaeology" of data, to better grasp the historiography of our research objects, which are expressed, for the moment, in digital form. Such an approach enables us not only to understand the mediated

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