Genre: “Distant Reading” and the Goals of Periodicals Research

Abstract

The Victorian marketplace for periodical articles was largely structured by genre, which made working knowledge of genre conventions essential for both editors and writers. Because an understanding of genre is generally tacit rather than declarative, however, acquiring this knowledge presented challenges to contributors and would-be contributors—challenges that persist in a different form today. How can modern periodicals scholars reconstruct patterns and conventions of a discourse that even most of the original practitioners could not have explained? A “distant reading” case study on the newspaper leading article shows how quantitative tools may complement traditional research methods to illuminate the nature and development of historical genre forms.

Victorian roots and branches: “The statistical century” as foundation to the digital humanities

“…Dallas Liddle () also works with the periodical press. His interest in quantitative methodologies stems from the difficulties posed for mapping genre through traditional humanistic methodologies: “Genre theories of all kinds, from the literary to the anthropological, are notoriously impressionistic and imprecise” (p. 385).…”

Noticing the Dead: The Biographical Sketch in Victorian Periodicals

“…Dallas Liddle has referred to the importance of analysing the "characteristics and functions" of periodical genres for understanding the "expert system of codes and assumptions that reporters, contributors, editors, and even many readers shared." 33 His efforts to piece these systems together, both in Dynamics of Genre (2009) and more recently through the notion of "distant reading," provide a valuable method for approaching the functions of periodical genres. Here, however, I am taking a slightly different approach by arguing that the post-mortem biographical sketch, as a genre, marked a key moment in which the field of biographical writing was being constructed and defined.…”