Retrieving a world of fiction: building an index – and an archive – of serialized novels in Australian newspapers, 1850–1914

Abstract

Two and a half decades ago in this journal Elizabeth Morrison made an impassioned and persuasive case for creating an index to serial fiction in Australian (or Australasian) newspapers. 1 Such an index, she argued, would reveal much about the connections between British, Australian, American and New Zealand literary cultures, and specifically, the influence of these other national literary cultures on Australia's. Indexes of fiction in specific Australian newspapers and magazines had been created prior to Morrison's article, as she acknowledged, and others have been published since, all making important contributions to our understanding of literary and print culture. 2 While this large number of projectsover more than four decades-indicates the desirability of Morrison's agenda, their history and current state foregrounds what have been major obstacles to achieving this aim. The most obvious of these-demonstrated by the two methods Morrison employed to sketch out the index's parameters-is the formidable scale of the task. To understand its breadth, Morrison performed a "cross-sectional check" to explore which of Victoria's one hundred or so newspapers, "issued on or about 31 August 1889, contained instalments of novels." This method uncovered twenty-eight separate novels-some published multiple times-as well as a pattern of independent publication in metropolitan dailies and weeklies, and syndicated publication in suburban and country newspapers. The second method, to explore the index's depth, involved "a diachronic study of serials in the Age from April 1872 (when it began to serialise fiction) until the end of the century," and

Inaugural KS Inglis address: making Australian media history

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Submerged Below the Codex Line: New Zealand's Neglected Nineteenth Century Serial Novels

“…The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project based at the University of New South Wales in Canberra has made some impressive progress. An ambitious project to use automatic methods to search Trove's digitized newspaper database to create a comprehensive bibliographic index and a textual archive of serialized fiction in Australian newspapers from 1850 to 1914 has just been described in a recent issue of Script and Print 22 and it would seem that similar techniques could be used to analyze Papers Past for fiction in New Zealand newspapers.…”