Why they kill : criminal etiologies in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, R.L. Stevenson's Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Oscar Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises

Being Googleable as an academic: it can be about sharing instead of branding

Originally posted on 'The outside academia blog' (https://outsideacademia.hcommons.org/.).Over the years, there have been loads of articles on how to “manage your digital identity” or to “brand yourself” to maximize your hireability. It makes it sound like very distasteful work, vain self-promotion geared at making capitalism happy. If you’re a student who’s looking into alt-ac career or an independent researcher, these might not seem pertinent. But that’s not just what being Googleable is useful for! It can help people find you and sustain the scholarly friendships ignited by conferences, readings, past collaborations. These human relations are also the stuff research is made of! This paper is the first in a series of blog posts on how to share your research online while keeping it open access and how to make it easier for people to find you

A Portrait of the Monster as Criminal, or the Criminal as Outcast: Opposing Aetiologies of Crime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This article offers a criminological reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein based on the 1831 edition. It discusses the opposition between Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s physiognomic prejudice and the creature’s discourse designating social exclusion as the cause of its mischief. Frankenstein’s accusations rely mostly on its creation’s appearance, borrowing from Johann Kaspar Lavater’s principles. The monstrous creature counteracts its maker’s presumptions by interpreting its own criminal behaviour similarly to Christian Wolf’s self-analysis in Schiller’s short story “Der Verbrecher aus Verlorene Ehre.” A close reading of the circumstances of each of the monster’s four crimes demonstrates how deeply its criminality is interlocked with social rejection caused by its own external deformity. Both perspectives adapt tropes that can be found in criminal biographies still reprinted in the 1810s. Though both positions are credible, I argue that the storyline supports the creature’s view that the criminal might be a monster, but created by those it vengefully hurts. Throughout, I indicate when changes to Shelley’s 1816-1817 draft were made to arrive to the 1831 wording, paying also attention to who effected them

Wikidata, la solution à tous mes problèmes

Wikidata, c'est une base de données secondaire, c'est-à-dire qu'en plus de contenir des données, elle est conçue pour enregistrer aussi la source desdites données. On encourage ainsi la vérifiabilité des données. Comme tous les projets de Wikimedia, tout le monde peut modifier les informations contenues, avec les avantages et inconvénients que ça implique. Identification de chaque élément du modèle de données de Wikidata sur une représentation de son interface en français La structure de Wik..

La gestion de projet, façon humanités numériques

Je me suis lancée hier à temps plein dans la mise à jour de mon site Price One Penny pour laquelle j’ai reçu une subvention de recherche, la Field Development Grant, gracieuseté de la Research Society for Victorian Periodicals et de la vénérable Eileen Curran. Son legs à la société savante à laquelle elle a dédié plusieurs décennies finance une panoplie de prix et subventions accessibles aux chercheuses et chercheurs indépendants comme moi. Comment me suis-je retrouvée ici? Mon site Web, créé..

Migrer de PHP 5 à PHP 7.4 quand on utilise une base de données MySQL

Au mois de juin, je me suis attaquée à un problème qui traînait depuis plusieurs années. Je ne pouvais plus développer mon site Web sur mon ordinateur parce que la nouvelle version de l'environnement de serveur local MAMP que j'avais installée ne me permettait plus d'afficher les pages de mon site sur l'hôte local (localhost:8888/). J'ai vérifié mon code dans PHP Code Checker pour sa conformité avec la syntaxe de PHP 7.3. Elles étaient listées là, les coupables, des fonctions PHP obsolètes: ..

Sustainability and independent scholarship

When I spoke to Leslie Howsam on August 25, she urged me to connect with institutions to ensure the sustainability of Price One Penny. I'm sceptical because I haven't seen institutional backing ensure sustainability. The Victorian Plays Project has moved from the University of Worcester to the National University of Ireland, Galway. However, there's not redirect, so I've had to go through Google to find that it hadn't completely disappeared. Tragically, the University of East London's Ea..

Data visualization during Election Week

I've been spending the week, like most of the world, seeped in the U.S. elections held on Tuesday. I'm finding myself more detached than I would have expected, but still. I have also received much stimulation from two lovely online conferences: Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Papers for the People: A Symposium on the Dime Novel. My brain has also been buzzing from the questions asked after my "Nightmare Before Christmas" talk last week at the Five College Book History Semi..

Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860

Price One Penny is a helpful database filled with bibliographic information on penny bloods published between 1836 and 1860, when penny dreadfuls dominated the market. Although these are not the same thing as chapbooks, they are the cheap literature which followed, and therefore can provide an interesting comparison for chapbook scholars

Keeping up with Google Books and new front-end possibilities

Last week, I started working on my work plan without settling on a useful way of visualizing it. However, I did manage to extract three issues for which I need to choose a way forward because I don't yet know how I will execute the desired feature. I think I might have found the solution to my third conundrum as I was working on this blog post, so I'll address it in another. For now, I will put my first two quandries out in the world to get the ball rolling on finding solutions: How to bal..