Digital History seminar

Institute of Historical Research

Remixing Digital Archives: The Victorian Meme Machine

Bob Nicholson

(Edge Hill University)

History has not been kind to Victorian jokes. While the great works of nineteenth-century art and literature have been preserved and celebrated by successive generations, even the period’s most popular gags have largely been forgotten. In the popular imagination, the Victorians have long been regarded as terminally humourless; a straitlaced society who, in the words of their queen, were famously “not amused” And yet, millions of jokes were written during the nineteenth century. They were printed in books and newspapers, performed in theatres and music halls, and re-told in pubs, offices, taxicabs, schoolrooms and kitchens throughout the land. Like many other forms of ephemeral popular culture, the majority of these jokes were never recorded and have now been forgotten.

But all is not lost. Millions of puns, gags, and comic sketches have been preserved – often by accident – in archives of nineteenth-century print culture. Some appear in dedicated joke books and comic periodicals, but most have survived as stowaways in the margins of other texts. They are scattered throughout thousands of Victorian books, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. While some were organised into clearly demarcated collections, others were used more haphazardly as column fillers or sprinkled randomly among other tit-bits of news and entertainment. Until recently, the only way to locate these scattered fragments amidst the ‘vast terra incognita’ of Victorian print culture was to identify a promising host-text and then browse through it manually. The digitisation of Victorian print culture has opened up new possibilities for this kind of research. However, as this talk will argue, the structure of digital archives means that jokes are still buried among millions of pages of other content. In order to make these, and other marginalised texts, more visible, we need to rethink the organisation of our digital collections and open up their contents to creative forms of archival ‘remixing’.

In 2014, Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University) teamed up with the British Library Labs on a project that aims to find and revive thousands of forgotten Victorian jokes. Their ‘Victorian Meme Machine’ automatically converts old jokes into images and posts them on social media using a ‘Mechanical Comedian’ (@VictorianHumour). In this presentation, Bob will report on the progress of the project and outline his plans for a new transcription platform designed around the principles of ‘meaningful gamifaction’.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Boutique Big Data: Reintegrating Close and Distant Reading of 19th-Century Newspapers

Dr Melodee Beals

(Loughborough University)

From their earliest incarnations in the seventeenth-century, through their Georgian expansion into provincial and colonial markets and culminating in their late-Victorian transformation into New Journalism, British newspapers have relied upon scissors-and-paste journalism to meet consumer demands for the latest political intelligence and diverting content. Although this practice, wherein one newspaper extracted or wholly duplicated content from another, is well known to scholars of the periodical press, in-depth analysis of the process is hindered by the lack of formal records relating to the reprinting process. Although anecdotes abound, attributions were rarely and inconsistently given and, with no legal requirement to recompense the original author, formal records of where material was obtained were unnecessary. Even if they had existed, the number of titles that relied upon reprinted material makes systematic analysis impossible; for many periodicals, only a few issues, let alone business records, survive.

However, mass digitisation of these periodicals, in both photographic and machine-readable form, offers historians a new opportunity to rediscover the mechanics of nineteenth-century reprinting. By undertaking multi-modal and multi-scale analyses of digitised periodicals, we can begin to reconstruct the precise journeys these texts took from their first appearance to their multiple ends. Moreover, by repurposing individual ‘boutique’ research outputs within large-scale textual analyses, we can greatly enhance the resolution of our computer-aided conclusions and bridge the gaps between commercial, state and private databases.

This paper will explore the possibilities of large-scale reprint identification, using out-of-the-box and project-specific software, within and across digitised collections. Second, it will demonstrate the means by which reprint directionality and branching can be achieved and the relative precision of manual and computer-aided techniques. Finally, it will explore the nature of multi-scale analysis and how we might best reintegrate ‘boutique’ periodical research into large-scale text-mining projects.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Boutique Big Data: Reintegrating Close and Distant Reading of 19th-Century Newspapers

Dr Melodee Beals

(Loughborough University)

From their earliest incarnations in the seventeenth-century, through their Georgian expansion into provincial and colonial markets and culminating in their late-Victorian transformation into New Journalism, British newspapers have relied upon scissors-and-paste journalism to meet consumer demands for the latest political intelligence and diverting content. Although this practice, wherein one newspaper extracted or wholly duplicated content from another, is well known to scholars of the periodical press, in-depth analysis of the process is hindered by the lack of formal records relating to the reprinting process. Although anecdotes abound, attributions were rarely and inconsistently given and, with no legal requirement to recompense the original author, formal records of where material was obtained were unnecessary. Even if they had existed, the number of titles that relied upon reprinted material makes systematic analysis impossible; for many periodicals, only a few issues, let alone business records, survive.

However, mass digitisation of these periodicals, in both photographic and machine-readable form, offers historians a new opportunity to rediscover the mechanics of nineteenth-century reprinting. By undertaking multi-modal and multi-scale analyses of digitised periodicals, we can begin to reconstruct the precise journeys these texts took from their first appearance to their multiple ends. Moreover, by repurposing individual ‘boutique’ research outputs within large-scale textual analyses, we can greatly enhance the resolution of our computer-aided conclusions and bridge the gaps between commercial, state and private databases.

This paper will explore the possibilities of large-scale reprint identification, using out-of-the-box and project-specific software, within and across digitised collections. Second, it will demonstrate the means by which reprint directionality and branching can be achieved and the relative precision of manual and computer-aided techniques. Finally, it will explore the nature of multi-scale analysis and how we might best reintegrate ‘boutique’ periodical research into large-scale text-mining projects.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Virtual Rome: a digital reconstruction of the ancient city

Dr Matthew Nicholls

(University of Reading)

Dr Matthew Nicholls of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading has made a detailed digital reconstruction of the city of Rome as it appeared c.AD315. In this talk he will introduce the model and discuss some of the tools and methodology involved in its creation, including questions about date, level of detail, and conjecture. He will then talk about the pedagogical uses of digital modelling and the digital Rome model's potential as a research tool; current work includes investigation of illumination at specific time of day and year, and sightlines within the ancient city to, from, and between major monuments.

all images (c) Matthew Nicholls, University of Reading, 2015; all rights reserved

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Virtual Rome: a digital reconstruction of the ancient city

Dr Matthew Nicholls

(University of Reading)

Dr Matthew Nicholls of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading has made a detailed digital reconstruction of the city of Rome as it appeared c.AD315. In this talk he will introduce the model and discuss some of the tools and methodology involved in its creation, including questions about date, level of detail, and conjecture. He will then talk about the pedagogical uses of digital modelling and the digital Rome model's potential as a research tool; current work includes investigation of illumination at specific time of day and year, and sightlines within the ancient city to, from, and between major monuments.

all images (c) Matthew Nicholls, University of Reading, 2015; all rights reserved

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Virtual Rome: a digital reconstruction of the ancient city

Dr Matthew Nicholls

(Reading)

Dr Matthew Nicholls of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading has made a detailed digital reconstruction of the city of Rome as it appeared c.AD315. In this talk he will introduce the model and discuss some of the tools and methodology involved in its creation, including questions about date, level of detail, and conjecture. He will then talk about the paedagogical uses of digital modelling and the digital Rome model's potential as a research tool: current work includes investigation of illumination at specific times of day and year, and sightlines within the ancient city to, from, and between major monuments.

all images (c) Matthew Nicholls, University of Reading, 2015; all rights reserved

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Text Mining the History of Medicine

Sophia Ananiadou

(Manchester University)

I will present the results of a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester, demonstrating the capabilities of innovative text mining tools to allow the automatic extraction of information from two historical archives: the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (1840-present) and the London-area Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports (1848-1972). NaCTeM's text mining tools have enriched these historical archives with semantic metadata automatically by extracting terms, named entities and events. The development of a semantic search system focused on the understanding of historical changes in lung diseases since 1840.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Text Mining the History of Medicine

Sophia Ananiadou

(Manchester University)

I will present the results of a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester, demonstrating the capabilities of innovative text mining tools to allow the automatic extraction of information from two historical archives: the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (1840-present) and the London-area Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports (1848-1972). NaCTeM's text mining tools have enriched these historical archives with semantic metadata automatically by extracting terms, named entities and events. The development of a semantic search system focused on the understanding of historical changes in lung diseases since 1840.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Text Mining the History of Medicine

Sophia Ananiadou

(Manchester University)

I will present the results of a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester, demonstrating the capabilities of innovative text mining tools to allow the automatic extraction of information from two historical archives: the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (1840-present) and the London-area Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports (1848-1972). NaCTeM's text mining tools have enriched these historical archives with semantic metadata automatically by extracting terms, named entities and events. The development of a semantic search system focused on the understanding of historical changes in lung diseases since 1840.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books

Julia Thomas, Nicky Lloyd and Ian Harvey

(Cardiff)

Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible. As an aesthetic form, illustration is conventionally positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy that places painting and sculpture at the top. The hybridity or bimediality of illustration is also problematic, the genre having fallen between the cracks of literary studies and art history. In a digital context, illustration has fared no better: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it.

This paper focuses on the challenges and the implications of an AHRC-funded Big Data project that will make searchable online over a million book illustrations from the British Library's collections. The images span the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, cover a variety of reproductive techniques (including etching, wood engraving, lithography and photography), and are taken from around 68,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy.

The paper identifies issues relating to the improvement of bibliographic metadata and the analysis of the iconographic features of the images, which impact on our understanding of 'the image' in Digital Humanities and the negotiation of Big Data more generally. The work undertaken as part of the Lost Visions project allows for the future development of Illustration Studies, repositioning visual culture in the largely text-based process of digitisation and problematising modes of textual production.

Digital History seminar series