Cohering knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: form, genre and periodical studies

This paper argues that as we reimagine nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers as digital objects we should pay particular attention to how we model their forms. As something that is repeated with each issue, form is both a key component of a particular publication’s identity and the mechanism through which it accommodates the events that it reports. Through a reading of John Tyndall’s “Discourse on the Scientific Use of the Imagination,” I argue that form is the means through which scientists imagined what they did not know, substituting system and structure for the unordered abundance of the natural world. Journalism, oriented towards an equally complex and changing world, similarly attempts to represent it as ordered and knowable. The orientation of titles towards particularly newsworthy institutions acts as a filter, identifying certain types of information at the expense of countless others, and the organization of publications into sections allocates space for events to be reported even before they occur. In this way the forms of the press operate in a similar fashion to the scientific imagination, displacing the new with the familiar, the unknown with the yet-to-be-known, and chaos with system

Digital culture, materiality and Nineteenth-Century studies

The rhetoric of the virtual stubbornly clings to digital culture, even though our experience of working within it is of a resisting medium that only behaves in certain ways. The persistence of the virtual demands attention: why do we cling to such a description even while we quite willingly recognise the interpenetration of the world beyond the monitor and that represented on it? In education we’re encouraged to use Virtual Learning Environments, as if somehow these spaces are not as real as classrooms; we participate (or read about others participating) in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, places that imitate the real world, providing access to fantasies that are underpinned by very real economics; and we exploit the World Wide Web, believing in its textual metaphors (pages, hypertext) while ignoring its presence as a medium. In my contribution to this forum I want to suggest that our insistence on the immateriality of digital culture enforces an ontological distinction that overdetermines the materiality of the world beyond the monitor while misrecognizing the new things that are displayed upon it. Rather than continue to use the virtual as a category, I would like to argue using an alternative term, the apparition.1 Unlike the virtual, which foregrounds its effect of the real with reality itself present only as absence, apparition has two meanings: the first is an immaterial appearance, a ghostly presence that, like the virtual, can signal an absent materiality; the second is simply the appearance of something, specifically the emergence of something into history. It is this latter meaning, I suggest, that permits materiality to re-enter digital discourse

Introduction

When W. T. Stead died on the Titanic he was the most famous Englishman on board. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. In this introduction, we consider Stead as a ‘mass of contradictions’ and offer a few ways in which his prodigious output and activity might be understood.\u