Tweeting the Victorians

I can still remember the moment when I discovered the work of Patrick Leary. I was kneeling in the dimly-lit stacks of my university library, browsing through copies of the Journal of Victorian Culture in the hope of finding reading material for an undergraduate essay. Paper between my fingers, dust in the air, and library carpet scratching against my knees—this was a curiously analogue way to encounter the future of digital research. I suspect that few of you are reading this article in a similar place. As Leary predicted, academic scholarship has now moved decisively from a world of print to one of pixels. A paper copy of this journal will sit on a shelf in my office, but it will function more as a trophy than a text, something to be seen rather than read. Instead, most scholars will digest it via its “digital surrogate”—a term that seems increasingly anachronistic now that digital tools have become the primary means by which we produce, consume, and discuss our scholarship. Rather than browse through library stacks, readers will find their way here via a range of bibliographical databases, online publishing platforms, electronic citations, and search engines. These channels of discovery were already falling into place when Leary took stock of the digital landscape back in 2005. However, I suspect that many readers will also have navigated to this article via a newer set of pathways—ones that lead from the world of social media.

The potential of social media looms large in Leary’s article. He recognises that the true power of the internet was in “connecting people, not merely with information, but with one another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.”¹ In Leary’s examples, these networks are built via email and the “fortuitous electronic connections” made possible by search engines such as Google.² Such technologies continue to be important; Leary’s own Victoria listserv, for example, has been a valuable forum for discussing Victorian studies for twenty years and continues to thrive despite its reliance on what now feels like ancient technology. However, since the publication of Leary’s article, a range of important new social media platforms have emerged and become firmly entrenched within scholarly discourse. WordPress, the open-access blogging platform, emerged in 2003 and has now become one of the backbones of the internet alongside longer-running services such as Google’s Blogger. Facebook was launched in 2004, followed a year later by YouTube. Twitter, a hybrid social-network and micro-blogging platform, arrived in 2006 and has become an equally ubiquitous part of the digital landscape.³ These titans of social media have been joined by social news communities such as Digg (2004) and Reddit (2005); image-based social networks such as Flickr (2004), Tumblr (2007), and Pinterest (2010); and, for history enthusiasts, the expansion of social-networking features on genealogical websites. All of these platforms are, to a greater or lesser extent, now being used for scholarly purposes.

It is easy to see why. While web design once seemed like a complex, expensive, and technically intimidating craft, it is now possible for anybody with a computer to set up an attractive and fully functional website for free in a matter of hours. This has led to a proliferation of academic blogs, including many devoted to the field of Victorian studies.⁴ These blogs initially emerged as a marginalised supplement to more conventional forms of academic writing. I started my own relatively modest offering in December 2011 in order to review digital archives, discuss ongoing research projects, and share my thoughts on topics that were not suited to a weighty, peer-reviewed academic journal.⁵ However, the lines between blogging and academic publishing are becoming increasingly blurred. Many of the footnotes for this article lead to blog posts rather than journal articles, largely because this is where many of the most interesting discussions about the future of humanities research are now taking place. The Journal of Victorian Culture has a successful open-access companion blog built using WordPress which ably supports the work of the main journal.⁶ All...