“Time’s Turbulence”: Mapping Journalism Networks

This article treats the study of journalism networks as a research problem in itself. The origin of the piece lies in the unexpected range of connections that I noted in and across entries for serial titles and journalist entries while editing the DNCJ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism) with Marysa Demoor. That is, in the DNCJ journalists typically were associated with a number of diverse and telling titles, often in varied capacities; journal entries likewise named a plethora of journalists; and publisher entries revealed an unexpected diversity of titles. Entries of all types flagged affiliations that did not surface elsewhere in the DNCJ, with the result that vistas of affiliation yawned as one read, prompting curiosity about a ghostly dynamic of interlocking structures, referenced but otherwise invisible. For example, Joseph Bennett was the “chief music critic” of the Daily Telegraph, 1870–1906, but earlier he had worked on the Sunday Times, the Graphic, and the Pall Mall Gazette.¹ He also founded two titles, Concordia and Lute, and was an assistant editor and then acting editor of the Musical World, while he was working on the Telegraph. Flora Shaw began writing for Aunt Judy’s Magazine, became foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the Pall Mall Gazette, and ended working for the Times in that role, without the proprietor initially being told that his new staff member was female.² John Murray’s list of journals, other than his brief proprietorship of the Quarterly Review, includes the Journal of Science and the Arts; a daily (the Representative), which Disraeli edited; the monthly Murray’s Magazine; and the annual Admiralty List.³ Punch’s list of contributors and editors over its long life included a high proportion of well-known names, both writers and artists who between them were affiliated with a breadth of other print titles, publishers, and genres radiating out from Punch and its table.⁴

I became interested in exploring alternatives to an individual, biographical route to networks partly in response to the opportunities that the digitisation of archives might offer but also in support of my conviction that working from individual cases “outward” in the face of so many instances would proceed too slowly to be productive of the matrix I was envisaging. In this quandary, the writing of Friedrich Kittler, a German critic (b. 1943), proved suggestive. Author of many books, Kittler has four that have been translated into English—Discourse Networks (1990), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (1997), and Optical Media (2010). In Discourse Networks Kittler looks at the networks of discourse as a notation system, “a material deployment that is prior to questions of meaning.”⁵ He identifies his work as post post-structuralist, and thus post-hermeneutics, whose assumption of internally embedded universal meaning extracted through interpretation he challenges.⁶ Crucially Kittler’s is a materialist and historically specific analysis, which is external and prior to discourse, and like Foucault, nonanthropological, that is, without “man” at its centre.

In Kittler’s 1985 account, networks are a structure, the technic whereby cultural exchange takes place, and they are subject to the historically specific media of transmission at any given period. Examples of material technology of the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century are, for example, the typewriter and paper, about which Gary Hall has recently written in Digitize this Book!: “The digital document is not merely a ‘prosthetic extension’ of print,” nor is paper merely a passive “medium of circulation: it has structured content and signalled authority. When length is undetermined [as by a sub-editor], an article can lose its autonomy. When the text is no longer fixed, authors start to lose their authority.”⁷ In a like manner for Kittler, material networks precede meaning, which they help to determine, delimit, and define, according to the technic available at any given historical period in a specific location: “Mediality is the general condition within which, under specific circumstances, something like ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’ can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies.”⁸ For him, “media” is...