Indexing, Checking, and Encoding in the Periodical Poetry Index

This cluster of essays originates from a panel at the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada joint conference in July 2018. On this panel we explored some of the different scholarly activities that compose the Periodical Poetry Index, discussing the theoretical underpinnings and methodological commitments of our work that would interest both scholars in periodical studies and the digital humanities more broadly. The breadth of bibliographic information now presented by the Periodical Poetry Index comes from our discoveries made while indexing, checking, and encoding the bibliographic data from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1900), the Cornhill (1860–1900), Dark Blue (1871–73), and Macmillan's Monthly Magazine (1859–1900).¹

There is a long tradition of collaborative bibliographic scholarship in periodical studies. Most notably The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, published in five volumes from 1966 to 1988, has served as the foundation for modern research in Victorian periodicals. The idea for The Wellesley Index originated in correspondence between Walter Houghton and Richard Altick as they shared their knowledge of periodical contributors writing unsigned articles.² Houghton saw the tremendous resources available to scholars in Victorian periodicals and sought to make them more accessible by creating a research tool that reproduced the tables of contents and identified the authors of a large number of unsigned pieces.

Like the Wellesley team, we benefit from scholarly collaboration that spans geographic location, and we have the added benefits of digital tools that support our communication and research. Sharing our work digitally frees us from the physical and financial constraints that often burdened Houghton and his team, who had to persuade the University of Toronto Press to continue publishing an ever-expanding scholarly resource. Houghton recalled, "In my correspondence with the University of Toronto Press, I had agreed to two volumes and not over 100,000 items in Part A—fewer if possible," but his initial agreements with the press would be greatly surpassed as the project continued.³ The scale of Victorian periodical publishing was much greater than even Houghton had initially imagined.

As work on The Wellesley Index proceeded, the editors not only covered additional periodical titles but also incorporated updates and corrections in later volumes. Eileen Curran's updates to the Wellesley information, published in regular intervals in Victorian Periodicals Review and later as The Curran Index, continued this iterative process of discovery and correction. Because we are working with digital surrogates created by the Google Books project, we can conduct most of our research without traveling to libraries with large periodical holdings. As we make corrections or alterations to the data collected for our project, we can update the database and the web display of its information.

Our project was inspired by Linda K. Hughes's essay "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies," which vividly demonstrates the scholarly lacunae created by Houghton's decision to omit poetry from the indexes produced by his team. Because The Wellesley Index made Victorian periodicals more accessible to scholars, poetry's "omission skews our understanding of both Victorian poetry and periodicals, which were interrelated in highly complex terms."⁴ Although aesthetic considerations undoubtedly played a part in this decision, so did the Wellesley's focus on identifying unsigned contributors: Houghton suggests that "to include 7000 or so poems, in many cases anonymous or pseudonymous, and if signed, by obscure versifiers, would cost far too much space, labor, and funding."⁵ He greatly underestimated the sheer quantity of poems published in the pages of Victorian periodicals. Our research in five titles alone has uncovered almost 5,000 poems, and we fully expect to index thousands more in the years to come.

In the first phase of our project, we are indexing poems published in the forty-five periodicals covered in The Wellesley Index. We know that approximately half of these titles contain significant quantities of verse, but the exact details of poetry's distribution will only be evident once we have collected data for each of the titles. Because The...