Introduction: Moments of Challenge and Change

We are having a “moment” in the study of the Victorian press as we labour to come to terms with the remediation and proliferation of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals enabled by contemporary digital technologies. In his recent essay in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016), Jim Mussell reminds us that “it is difficult to overstate the impact of digitization on the study of nineteenth-century periodicals.”¹ Indeed, the editors of the Handbook in which Mussell’s essay appears note that their collection is indebted to and modelled on the pioneering indexes, directories, and dictionaries that have come before but aims to contribute to the ongoing assessment of the digital afterlives of our objects of study.²

In this “moment,” as we seek to come to terms with what digital remediation means for our scholarly endeavors, we construct and deconstruct different stories about these “new” media, including digital archives and other digital repositories, optical character recognition, metadata, markup, social media, and application programming interfaces. These discourses are wide-ranging and occur across registers: the formal and the informal, the scholarly and the popular, the intra-disciplinary and the interdisciplinary. They respond to Bob Nicholson’s arguments about the startling potential of digital tools and objects to help answer research questions, as well as to Patrick Leary’s warning that the “digital research experience … can subtly work against our fullest understanding of what we discover, even as [it] yields an ever greater quantity and diversity of information,” due to an overwhelming abundance of digital material and a lack of context.³ The conversation circulates in established contexts, such as in the Journal of Victorian Culture’s “Digital Forum” (2008–present) and in alternative contexts—from conference coffee-break effusions about the multifaceted search capabilities of the latest digital repositories, to Twitter posts such as Ryan Cordell’s comment that “we haven’t really reached the point of nostalgia for microfilm [but] [s]urely it’s coming.”⁴ The discourses of our moment—the stuff of our current scholarship and collegiality—echo those of earlier time periods. Whether today or a century ago, the arrival of new technologies provoked excitement, wonder, caution, and suspicion. Like a nineteenth-century reader encountering an illustration in the pages of a periodical, we are in the middle of what Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree have termed a “new media moment”—that time “before the material means and the conceptual modes of … media have become fixed, when such media are not yet accepted as natural, when their own meanings are in flux.”⁵

The roots of this special issue lie in work done by media archaeologists and historians who have investigated nineteenth-century new media moments. These interdisciplinary explorations draw on perspectives from history, literary studies, the digital humanities, media studies, book history, and gender studies. Scholars such as Carolyn Marvin, Friedrich Kittler, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch have sought to tell stories of how the nineteenth century came to terms with the domestication of communication technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone, the installation of electric light, the advent of recorded sound, the development of the rail network, and the invention of various kinds of steam-powered and electric machines used in both industry and domestic life.⁶ As Jussi Parikka explains, such scholarly approaches single out the “nineteenth century as a foundation stone of modernity in terms of science, technology, and the birth of media capitalism,” and in doing so they excavate the “past in order to understand the present and the future.”⁷

At such moments of newness, technologies and the myriad contextual modulations that accompany them contravene critical invisibility. In telling the stories of media transitions from the new to the obsolete, scholars encourage us to resist interpreting such histories as being strictly linear, evolutionary accounts of development, where one moment of progress inevitably leads to the next. Technological failures, minor modifications, and unprofitable digressions are, in many ways, as interesting and important as successes, innovations, and marketplace dominators. Of course, the concept of technology can be expanded beyond machines...