Workflow

This editorial introduces a series of short papers dedicated to issues of workflow in digital humanities research. Paper contributors include Melodee Beals (Loughborough University), Adam Crymble and Katrina Navikas (University of Hertfordshire), and Seth Cayley (Director of Research Publishing at Gale)

Digital Heritage

This short article introduces a new instalment of the Digital Forum adopts a curatorial focus in order to consider the roles played by digital resources in the creation and management of collections of relevance for the study of the Victorian age. Featuring contributions from Douglas Dodds (of the V&A), Peter Findlay (of JISC) and Jenny Mitcham (of the Borthwick Institute), this instalment of the DF explores issues ranging from the digitisation of historical artefacts to the storage and presentation of those artefacts as ‘surrogates’ in a digital environment

Something Ill in the Air:Ruskin's 'Storm Cloud' and Nicholson's 'Windscale'

Article about Nicholson and Ruskin and the environment for society periodica

'The Travelling Carriage in Old Times':John Ruskin and the Lakes Tour in the Age of William IV

This article focuses on John Ruskin’s early writings about the English Lake District, and it considers the way these writings portray both his family’s tours of the region and the conditions of Lakeland tourism in the age of William IV. Building on these considerations, the article then examines the relation of these coaching holidays to Ruskin’s advocacy of coach travel as a more morally and aesthetically sound mode of transportation than the railway. Ruskin’s thinking in these matters, the article contends, was informed by much more than sentimentalism. Rather, his thinking was guided by his association of coach travel with specific aesthetic and moral virtues: with the ability to perceive the beauty of natural forms and the freedom to cultivate that ability through the unhurried study and admiration of the natural world. In highlighting Ruskin’s promotion of these virtues, the article demonstrates how they contribute to an ethics of travel that underpins the reflections on travelling found throughout his works. The article appears as part of volume focussed on Writing in the Age of William IV, edited by Maureen McCue, Rebecca Butler and Anne-Marie Millim

'Tom Mole, "What the Victorians Made of Romantics: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception" (Princeton, 2017) xii + 317pp.'

A review of Tom Mole's 'What the Victorians Made of the Romantics'

Implementing corpus analysis and GIS to examine historical accounts of the English Lake District

This paper reports on interdisciplinary research into the automated geographical analysis of historical text corpora. It provides an introduction to this research, which is being completed by two interrelated projects: the European Research Council-funded Spatial Humanities project and the Leverhulme Trust-funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project. In addition to contextualising the work of these projects, the paper introduces a case study that applies collocation analysis, automated geo-parsing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The focus of this study is a 1.5 million-word corpus of writing about the English Lake District. This corpus comprises 80 works written between the years 1622 and 1900. In investigating this corpus, we demonstrate how a hybrid geographical and corpus-based methodology can be used to study the application of specific aesthetic terminology in historical writing about the Lakeland region