“Always Keep Turning the Page”
Starting Out in Periodicals Research: Part 2
This is Part 2 of our three-part inaugural Interview Series, continuing a conversation between GRIPS representative Matthew Stephens and past RSVP president and long-time supporter of all things periodicals, Patrick Leary. You can read Part 1 and Part 3 here.
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
From Wellesley to Curran: The Vital Role of Attribution Scholarship
Matthew Stephens: Could you name three key innovations or resources that have been of substantial benefit in periodicals research?
Patrick Leary: The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824 to 1900, published in five volumes between 1966 and 1989 and now available online through ProQuest’s C19, deserves pride of place in any list of innovative and influential resources for periodicals research. It remains one of the monumental accomplishments of collaborative humanities research.
RSVP itself grew out of the community of scholars involved in its decades-long quest to pierce the veil of anonymity that hid from view the identities of contributors to the Victorian periodical press. That veil remains in place for a great many nineteenth-century magazines and almost all newspapers of the period, but the Wellesley was a brave beginning.
Today’s Curran Index continues the work of attribution, which remains a little-heralded but vital area of research that has immeasurably enriched our understanding of the men and women who created the world’s first industrialized mass press.
On Digitizing Periodicals
Gale’s ambitious Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals collection was the first major digitised, full-text searchable collection of a large sample of the period’s magazines, and in putting it together beginning in 2004 Gale consulted with a number of scholars, many of them associated with RSVP. The collection, which has expanded in various directions since, remains indispensable to many varieties of periodical research.
The British Newspaper Archive, the latest iteration of a digitised collection based at the British Library, has opened up a wide and increasing variety of the daily and weekly newspaper press of the nineteenth-century to scholarly study.
Let me [also] recommend the page I put together not long ago for RSVP’s Research Resources section of the website. With independent scholars like myself in mind, I was careful to indicate, for each of these, which ones are open access and which are either available by individual subscription (like the British Newspaper Archive) or only accessible through a research library’s institutional subscription.
These and other online resources have radically transformed our ability to explore the almost inconceivably vast and various reaches of the nineteenth-century press. Never in history has so much of that press been this accessible to scholarly scrutiny, marking the beginning of an enormously exciting era of discovery. We all have much to learn.
Getting to Grips with the Archives
MS: Is there any other advice you would want to offer to anyone starting out as a periodicals researcher today?
PL: The first advice I would give is an injunction borrowed from what I heard my old friend, veteran periodical researcher Kitty Ledbetter, tell a group of students: “Turn the page.” By this, as she went on to explain, she meant that you should get your hands on the real thing and start browsing from front to back, making note of what you see, including the feel of the paper, the “make up” of the pages, and the position and meanings of images (if any) in relation to the text.
If you can, find and buy sample copies of periodicals that interest you. Be on the lookout for individual numbers of a periodical – that is, unbound copies with their original covers, the form in which most of the magazine’s original readers would have encountered it at bookstalls or by subscription. These can be hard to find, but can potentially tell you a lot about the periodical and its readers, starting with the advertisements that are typically missing from the bound versions.
One of the ironies of periodicals research is that the emergence of “book history” approaches, turning scholarly attention to the materiality of books and periodicals as commodities, has coincided with the radical dematerialization of those objects, most of which are rarely encountered in any other form than as
“There truly is no substitute for physically turning the pages of the periodicals you are studying.”
thoroughly remediated digital facsimiles. And yet there truly is no substitute for physically turning the pages of the periodicals you are studying.
Early-career periodical scholars will already know a great deal about online resources, some of which have already been mentioned, so they’ll need little advice about them from the likes of me. No research project can proceed far without recourse to a whole range of these resources, and gaining access to some of them may well require a great deal of wrangling and expense. The effort is worth it – you will make discoveries that you cannot have made in any other way.
Approaching Digitized Collections
But in regard to the major digitised text collections in particular I would venture one bit of general guidance, and that is to cultivate, in all of your explorations, a keen awareness of absence—of what is missing. The sheer abundance of titles, the acres of text, the innumerable “hits,” all conspire to suppress that awareness, and conversely to give rise to two very dangerous illusions: the illusion of completeness and the illusion of accuracy. Yet no collection of periodical texts is, or ever can be, complete, and no OCR of those periodicals is, or ever can be, entirely accurate.
“I would venture one bit of general guidance, and that is to cultivate, in all of your explorations, a keen awareness of absence — of what is missing.“
For this reason, you must take on board the specific history of each collection you are using in order to understand its limitations. Some titles will not have been included for any number of reasons – there was no microfilm available to scan from, or the rights could not be obtained, or they didn’t fit one or more criteria for inclusion, or goodness-knows-what
– while even within the seemingly complete run of a title certain individual issues may be missing […].
Similarly, minimizing the impact on your project of the inherent inaccuracy of text-string searches requires a certain ingenuity and willingness to experiment. To recall only one notorious case: when David Latané was reconstructing the career of William Maginn, he discovered that searching for “Fraser’s” was not enough — an additional search for “Eraser’s” yielded a number of references to the magazine that he would otherwise have missed. (“Fuzzy” searching, where available, may help, but your own specific fuzz will probably help more.)
Another good way to improve results is to steep yourself in the conventional language of nineteenth-century journalism and government reporting on the topics relevant to your project so as to use variations of those terms in your searches. Browsing Poole’s index to periodicals and, especially, Palmer’s subject index to the Times of London can help a lot with this immersion, including but by no means limited to medical and legal terms of art.
Of course, the best preparation is your own reading of contemporary magazine and newspaper journalism; as your project progresses, it can be a good idea to keep a list of words and phrases that keep popping up in your early results, making them potentially useful parts of future searches. As Kitty likes to say, keep turning the page.
Continue to Part 3
Read Part 1 of this interview.
