Advances in Digitization: The Dickens Journals Online Project, 2012

On February 7, 2012, the Dickens Journals Online project (DJO) was launched, digitizing almost thirty-thousand pages of mid-Victorian journalism from Household Words, Household Narrative, and All the Year Round (www.djo.org.uk). The potential contribution of the DJO to scholarship on the mid-Victorian press was captured in an earlier article for VPR (Fall 2011) by the project's director, John Drew, and his colleague, Hugh Craig, entitled "Did Dickens write 'Temperate Temperance'?" The article sought to use computational stylistics in conjunction with internal clues in order to identify authorship of an anonymous article in All the Year Round, suggesting a method of attribution which, if successful, could be extended to consider the work of a host of other authors, including Wilkie Collins and John Hollingshead, among others. As a follow-up to Drew's article, I would like to examine the DJO site itself in more detail, identifying its key features and the model the project provides for future digital initiatives seeking to elucidate the structure and organisation of the mid-Victorian press. It will close with a review of the bicentennial Dickens conference held at the University of Buckingham, March 28-31, 2012, the official launch of the project.

The DJO project arose from Drew's efforts to compile a table of contents for All the Year Round, correcting the "dirty" OCR of earlier digital projects, such as the Joint Information Systems Committee's 1999 Internet Library of Early Journals collection. Started in 2006, the project was always intended to be interactive. The size and scale of what could be achieved was only fully realised, though, from 2009 with a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and from 2011 with a Leverhulme Research Project Grant. Ben Winyard and Hazel Mackenzie were subsequently appointed to complete the project team, and the future potential for the site now seems endless. The DJO provides full facsimile access to Household Words, Household Narrative, Household Words Almanac, and All the Year Round. All pages and issues are fully searchable, and the site provides a host of innovative, interactive features. Adopting Library of Congress subject headings to organise their metadata, the team continues to interact with their users to ascertain the effectiveness of these headings, and users are encouraged to suggest alternative headings and amendments from their experience of using the site.

This interactive approach—which encourages community moderation and correction—is the most innovative aspect of the site. In 2009, an intern at the University of Buckingham began correcting the dirty OCR arising from digitizing Dickens's magazines. The effectiveness of this method and approach inspired Drew to launch a call for volunteer text correctors at the 2010 Dickens Day. Though this generated a healthy response, the real turning point came in August 2011 when the Guardian printed a letter calling for support of the project. The interest that was generated from the wider community of Dickens fans, rather than just scholars, resulted in a series of features being run in the Guardian followed by a lecture on Dickens delivered by Drew for BBC Radio 4. The project advanced significantly from this point, with over 900 volunteer correctors working on the facsimiles, leaving the project team to continue working on supporting materials for the site.

The homepage of the site has four main tabs for each magazine as well as facsimile covers for each publication. Clicking on each tab or facsimile provides access to an index for each volume and a link to an overview of the characteristics of each publication, including publishing dates. There is also the option to search by author, with 444 identified, including full author profiles, many taken from Anne Lohrli's authoritative table of contents and list of contributors (University of Toronto Press, 1973). Searches can also be initiated by article (classified by genre and subject) or by page. This site is aimed at established Dickens scholars and novices alike, as the short twenty-minute video Charles Dickens: London Journalist demonstrates. Filmed by Drew on location in Buckingham and London, the video provides a socio-cultural context for Dickens's journalism. Whilst it...