Digital Scholarly Resources for the Study of Victorian Literature and Culture

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to provide a categorical map to the landscape of digital resources available to enrich scholarship on Victorian literature and culture. But I also want to reflect for a moment on the general state of digital scholarly work within the larger institutional structures of our disciplines. For over a decade now, digital resources relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture have been proliferating, becoming part of the way we live now as scholars and teachers. Yet reviews of such resources in standard channels have thus far been rare. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, all related primarily to the fact that digital projects have developed outside the well-settled infrastructure that has supported the academic book. This infrastructure is familiar to us, involving a network of institutions that includes publishers, libraries, scholarly societies, humanities departments, and academic journals like Victorian Literature and Culture. The scene of production of digital scholarship is, by contrast, variable and dynamic, involving experimental platforms, emergent collaborations, competing standards, rapidly-evolving technologies, and unfamiliar genres. Perhaps most crucially, digital scholarly resources in our field have only recently (with the advent of NINES [http://www.nines.org] in 2005) begun to receive systematic peer-review, of which post-publication reviews in academic journals have been a part. Because digital projects are more process than finished product (i.e., they are never “done” in the way a book is), they have tended to elude the reviewers. As a result of this unsettled environment, digital scholarship still abides in the shadows of the printed monographs, articles, and editions by which we have long measured achievement in the field.

The curious identity of Michael Field and its implications for humanities research with the semantic web

“…Women writers present an even better test case for testing the ability of semantic web representations to handle complex relationships between names and identities. Virginia Woolf remarked in 1928, "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman" [50], [45], and considered it an indication of the extent to which writing has been fraught for women in Western European culture. Much inquiry into the gendering of the field of literary production and reception has focused on the extent of, the reasons underlying, and the impact of the adoption of anonymity and pseudonymity by female authors [18], [34], [16], [30].…”

BRANCHingout: Victorian studies and the digital humanities

“…In this article, I will illustrate how the digital humanities, as the field pertains to Victorian studies, have been evolving from an early, skeuomorphic approach to the Internet; how new technologies offer us a potential escape from the current constraints on our research and publishing, while offering new approaches to Victorian studies; and how institutional structures need to evolve to allow for effective change. There have been a number of articles on Victorian studies and the digital humanities of late . The usual tack is to provide a listing of the best sites or advice on how to use extant tools, with the goal of informing readers about what's out there.…”