Technologies of Serendipity

In reckoning with the digital restructuring of the scholarly discourse network circa 2004, Patrick Leary begins with a story. It is a story about how, thanks to web discovery and email contacts, scholarship on Letitia Elizabeth Landon took a major turn. This happened because of the “fortuitous electronic connections” of people and documents facilitated by the internet.¹ And making sense of this experience, rather than detailing specific resources for digital scholarship, becomes Leary’s abiding concern in “Googling the Victorians.” His essay ponders a “profound shift” towards casual discovery, “a serendipity of unexpected connections to both information and people that is becoming increasingly central to the progress of Victorian research.”² If, in the subtitle to their 1982 volume The Victorian Periodical Press, Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff nominate “Samplings and Soundings” as our only reasonable approach, Leary begins to clarify how such casual discoveries should not merely be viewed as symptoms of trying to find specifics amid superabundance, whether in terms of the Victorian archive or networked digital information.³ Instead, that characteristic research experience has been absorbed into the technological routines of how we work now. In other words, chance discovery is not a bug; it is a feature. It is the very condition of “Googling the Victorians,” as Leary calls it. A decade later, we find ourselves deeper in the networked experience of such unexpected connections, with more perspective that allows us to acknowledge, critique, and perhaps even credit serendipity as scholarly technique.

“Googling the Victorians” also reveals the scholar’s reflex to enfold fortuitous discoveries within descriptive explanation. The essay shows a consistent dynamic between the item of scholarly interest, serendipitously found, and the narrative in which the researcher governs the unexpected. In drawing this connection, Leary makes a crucial distinction between serendipity and randomness. If we all have random encounters all the time, serendipity requires recognizing such an encounter for its meaning, requiring an interpretive context to place the unexpected within an explanatory framework.⁴ Digital materials have proliferated since “Googling the Victorians” but so too have the contexts in which we encounter them, including the very tools and platforms which circumscribe the digital objects they serve.⁵ Such is the lament of many teachers: students privilege quick access (“Googling”) over research methods contextualized by institutional structures (in other words, libraries), which have served print scholarship for decades and longer. As Leary noted, such is the boon of many researchers, now awash in volumes of materials at scales unseen since the nineteenth century’s own profusion of printed objects, periodicals especially. Contexts—or how to reconcile new information within a horizon of knowledge or questioning—have become as crucial for digital scholarship as access to digital objects themselves (if not more so). What we need to teach now and what researchers themselves need to cultivate is the “curatorial intelligence” to assess and recontextualize digital objects discovered through techniques now including—even privileging—serendipity.⁶

The remainder of this short essay will sketch out how, since Leary’s article, serendipity has been “operationalized,” or built into, the research platforms which reflexively shape our methods and become part of the ordinariness of scholarly practice.⁷ While many early sites on the web featured random discovery, only lately have serendipitous machines been purpose-built for academic work.⁸ Certain scholarly sites now spotlight random access as a valid entry point to their contents, such as the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Lost for Words” feature, previously subtitled “Get a Random Entry.” Apparently there are fans of randomness at Oxford University Press, as the Dictionary of National Biography—Leary’s own ultimate example in 2004—now also offers a “Get a Life at Random” feature, or “Get a Life” for short.⁹ The information science and library community has also driven these developments. For example, the Trove project of the National Library of Australia offers a “discovery experience” that includes random sampling of its digital collections. Built by Tim Sherratt, the TroveNewsBot program pulls random content from digitized Australian newspapers from 1803 to the mid-1950s, posting headlines to Twitter and illustrations to an associated Tumblr account. Sherratt has also...