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

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.