Abstract

This essay contends that the methodological questions raised by recent scholarship on digital archives and databases require reframing the selection of materials as a process of data creation. Using the physical archives of nineteenth-century American amateur newspapers, it treats the process of data creation as a heuristic for understanding the relationship between an archive or a set of archives and the textual field that they were assembled to represent. After theorizing archival research in relation to the digital humanities and quantitative book history, it uses the interarchive (a large geographically distributed archive composed of several individual collections that sample the same materials) of amateur newspapers to understand the changing size and shape of the public amateur journalists called “Amateurdom” between 1870 and 1890. Then, using the 1880 US Census and a sample of amateur papers from 1879, it shows that lower-middle-class amateurs participated in the hobby to gain a more secure foothold in the middle class.

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