Introduction Excerpt for Digital Victorians

INTRODUCTION

The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition.

—J. S. MILL, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)¹

New media are old; and old media are new.

—ALAN LIU, “Imagining the New Media Encounter” (2004)²

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY UNDERSTOOD ITSELF as a time of change. Even time itself seemed changing: J. S. Mill’s famous quotation spans an entire “age” and an intensified awareness of the “present.” Wandering between two worlds, caught between the best and worst of times, the Victorians perceived themselves in the middle of an epochal transition, including to the ways they depicted and communicated these changes. In 1842, a journalist identified only as “W.” captured the widely shared sense that communication technologies had inaugurated this new era: “The annihilation of space and time is beginning to be no fable. The broad Atlantic has been bridged by steam navigation. . . . The electric spark has been seized, and made to obey the impulse of the human will. Lightning is our news carrier—light is our portrait painter.”³ Seemingly from the realm of “fable,” something was beginning. W.’s metaphors quickly sketch the dramatic shifts that technology hath wrought: the collapse of space and time, the blurring of technology and agency, the reconfiguring of arts and information. They all signal how W. grapples with an emerging concept of media.⁴ Though it had yet to be named, it exemplified the transitions of the era, and everyone felt it was new.

The Victorian moment of new media is also our moment. The last few decades have brought a similar sense of living through an unprecedented age of digital transformation, for better and worse. “New media” became an industry and an experience of its platforms; the internet has bridged and divided our world; its material appetites and carbon outputs have split this epoch from the past and endangered its future. Ours is another era of a technologizing, intensifying present. Like wonder-struck Victorians, many of us have witnessed this “age of transition” in our own lifetimes. In my first proper job, I was an editorial assistant at a New York publishing company, which still produced its books in paper galleys. My tasks included photocopying line drawings to a certain scale for the compositor to glue onto cardboard. My second job, a few blocks away, was at an internet company featuring all the slogans, excess, and eventual layoffs of the dot com bubble. Then the planes hit the towers. I left to study British Victorian literature in graduate school, during which time “digital humanities” was invented. It was all happening. It was all strange and new.

Yet, as I learned, it was not new. Ironically, the self-declared uniqueness of this historical age makes it easier to recognize its ancestry. Media is always already new, as Lisa Gitelman suggests, but must forget its history to imagine and market itself as such.⁵ As John Durham Peters explains, “the history of new media is old.”⁶ The transitions of the nineteenth century convinced Mill and others that theirs was a unique era, but they also lead directly to how we imagine our present as something distinctive. Among the many contexts in which we can trace a nineteenth-century inheritance—the lasting schisms of empire, climate crisis, or even historical thinking as such—this book is especially interested in the contemporary legacy of Victorian new media. This is not simply because nineteenth-century inventions like the telegraph helped establish the technologies and infrastructure for the digital present—which, intriguingly, they did. Instead, the nineteenth century sets the conceptual terms we still use to understand new media and our relationships to it. Our very sense of technological newness has a Victorian history.

As Alan Liu suggests, this road runs both ways: “new media are old; and old media are new.” Looking backward from our present vantage, we can recognize aspects of the Victorian past that remained invisible at the time, and make them “new.” “Old media” have latent histories that may only appear in retrospect—in our case, during another age of intense media transition. Seeing the “Victorians in the rearview mirror,” as Simon Joyce put it, means not only to consider their afterlives but to project our own situation backward.⁷ This kind of anachronism or “presentism” can be controversial, yet it offers a powerful tool to make the past legible, and subsequently useful, for present purposes. If we recognize digital media in the Victorian past, that does not commit us to valorizing the present or excluding other forms of historical knowledge. Making the Victorians “digital” may actually help resist the narratives of historical uniqueness that “new media” enables, then as well as now. It gives us tools to know the past and ourselves differently.

In Digital Victorians, I make these arguments in tandem: looking back, the history of the digital present extends to nineteenth-century encounters with media in transition; looking forward, this history reframes our own contemporary relationships with the digital, especially in contexts of the materials, interpretive practices, and professional landscape of the humanities. Several critics have already argued for a prehistory of the digital age in the nineteenth century, its technologies, and/or its concept of information.⁸ But this book shifts from the generalized category of the “digital” to the emergence of “digital humanities” (DH) as a notably self-conscious discourse about what happens to text, writing, communication, culture, and work amid significant media shift—questions that had intensely preoccupied the Victorians as well. While DH has a longer history, prefixing “digital” to the humanities in the early 2000s announced something new, and simultaneously encouraged scrutiny about the relationship of its terms. As much as it delivered tools or methods, “digital humanities” prompted expansive reflections on the disciplines in an age of transition. To the Delphic riddle “what is DH,” I would hazard an answer that DH is a metadiscourse about changing knowledge practices in an era of media shift. Thus, this book approaches DH as defined less by specific technologies or scholarly methods than by historical self-awareness about what they expose or shift about the humanities’ purview. Put bluntly, DH made us digital Victorians, intensifying an awareness of transitions in the present age.

Like “new media,” DH has a longer and more complex history than typically gets acknowledged. This book finds an alternative one in nineteenth-century encounters with its new media. Sometimes, these historical examples directly relate to contemporary DH, as in late nineteenth-century experiments to count words and analyze literature quantitatively and at scale, a kind of distant reading avant la lettre.⁹ At others, they probe resonant questions about materiality, desocialization, memory, privacy, and machinic intelligence that we now see driving research in other fields, including media studies, communications, and science and technology studies (STS). One of the advantages of studying the Victorians is we can recognize genealogies of our own knowledge practices before their disciplinary enclosure and analyze how those divisions took hold from their “undisciplined culture” to ours.¹⁰ For this reason, this book takes a broad approach to what counts as DH—whose boundaries seem ever in question anyway—to encourage the interdisciplinary conversations among digital scholars that the Victorians remind us to have. Writers from Dickens and Eliot to du Maurier and Stevenson agonized about the ephemerality of industrializing print, the consequences of social hyperconnection, the remediation of their works, and the possibilities of automated writing. If the Victorians were already digital, they might help us envision a more encompassing field or alternative futures for digital scholarship now.

The characteristic self-consciousness of DH is also why this book studies Victorian writers and literature. Digital Victorians is not (quite) a media history, but a history of interpretive attitudes about media in transition, for which writing and literature—broadly construed—furnish such useful evidence. As scholars have suggested, nineteenth-century literature shows a remarkable awareness of its own changing communicative and material status because of the changing media landscape in which it manifests.¹¹ “The study of literary history is the study of media history,” argues Linda Hughes.¹² The reverse can also be true: as demonstrated by media historians, including Carolyn Marvin and others, nineteenth-century writers helped shape how new mediums were conceived, represented, and operated.¹³ In their medial self-awareness, these writers confronted the consequences of media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. As I will show, their legacy appears across a spectrum of reactions to digital media, from skeptical resistance to enthusiastic welcome of its possibilities.

Digital Victorians argues for the substantial explanatory power of Victorian literature for thinking about the digital age and reconfiguration of humanities practices within it. This book charts what Gitelman calls a “predigital history for the digital humanities,” finding its conceptual roots in nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals.¹⁴ More broadly, Victorian responses to their changing media landscape continue to influence how we understand new media. With its transhistorical correspondence, this book offers a capacious and interdisciplinary approach to studying new media, including attention to the materiality of transmission, the ethics of data, the historiography of digital materials and methods, and the origins of academic fields. Ultimately, Digital Victorians presents an alternative genealogy for the digital turn, entangling the present with its strange Victorian inheritance to deepen our understandings of, and our critical interventions in, the relations of technology and the humanities.

Victorian New Media

Perhaps there has never been an age without transition. Why distinguish one era as such when all of history is just one damn thing after another? As Geoffrey Nunberg cautions, “the past can come to seem an unbroken stream of proclamations that man is living an epochal moment.”¹⁵ Certainly other, earlier eras also developed historical self-consciousness about their sweeping shifts; for instance, Marshall McLuhan made famous an analogy between the Elizabethan’s unsettled print culture and the twentieth century’s juvenile computer age.¹⁶ Yet even Nunberg is among those scholars who credit the nineteenth century with some definitive shifts. Nunberg, James Gleick, and Toni Weller all locate the emergence of a modern concept of information at this time: “it was during the nineteenth century that the overt recognition and expectation of information that is characteristic of our own age first became evident.”¹⁷ Other scholars see related concepts taking shape concurrently. For James Carey and John Durham Peters, technologies for speaking and writing at a distance (e.g., tele-graph, tele-phone) changed “communication” from its older meaning of physical transfer to its modern association with transmitting messages across time and space.¹⁸ These nineteenth-century communication technologies amount to “the introduction of new media” for Marvin, establishing the social framework for the later reception of computers: “All debates about electronic media in the twentieth century begin here.”¹⁹ John Guillory hypothesizes that late nineteenth-century technologies of communication and recording help generate the concept of “media” itself.²⁰

I rehearse just a few of these arguments to suggest how strongly the nineteenth-century’s “age of transition” resonates with scholars—especially those guided by a constellation of terms including information, communication, technology, and media. They also reveal a desire to recognize nineteenth-century developments as precursors to our own, as if the Victorian age transitions directly to the present. For example, in Rethinking Media Transition, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins also use Mill’s “age of transition” quote to introduce their entire book: “Set aside the nineteenth-century tonalities, and this passage could belong to our own era. Its apocalyptic rhetoric and its self-conscious awareness of change closely mirror the discourse of the so-called digital revolution.”²¹ Perhaps we all wish to see ourselves in the past. But the nineteenth-century’s technological shifts seem especially seductive for recognizing digital media in the Victorian mirror. Such comparisons have popular and counterintuitive appeal, as in Tom Standage’s book Victorian Internet, or articles that trace AI facial recognition to 1880s forensic photography, or claims that quirky Victorian technologies like the electrophone were the precursors of live streaming.²² As “veterans of unprecedented media change,” the Victorians help us grapple with our analogous era, as Alfano and Stauffer argue.²³ In a similar spirit, Bowser and Croxall trace the early 2000s surge of interest in Victorian steampunk to “our experiences of, unease with, and desires for technology in the present.”²⁴ Steampunk allows a backward glance at the stirrings of digitality and the posthuman—perhaps even representing what Roger Whitson calls nineteenth-century digital humanities.²⁵ Fans and scholars alike are reclaiming the Victorian era in the present, as it helps stabilize or decode the disruptions of digital culture. As Maurice Lee argues, “debates over the fate of literature in our information age . . . are powerfully conditioned by the nineteenth century, which encountered its own information revolution with wonder and anxiety.”²⁶

If Victorian technologies, media, and information culture share features with the digital present, they also reveal how we conceptualize that present like Victorians. Consider a few phrases from the previous paragraph: “our information age,” “our own era,” “our own age.” When exactly is the “present,” anyway? And whose age or era does “ours” claim to be? Invoking a broad category like the “digital age” doesn’t clarify much about specific technologies or whom they impact. Announcing “new media” doesn’t necessarily help either, as it has been declaring itself new for decades.²⁷ Charles Acland complains that “few phrases have been evacuated of meaning, and have outlived their critical usefulness, faster than ‘new media.’”²⁸ However, if these phrases lack precision, they accurately name the critical self-awareness about the moment of change they occasion. New media throws us into an unsettled relationship to history that we call “the present,” which happens time and again. In this book, I am as interested to study this sense of the digital present as its potential origins in the Victorian past. Both are historical conditions defined significantly by media in transition, whose “newness” has less to do with technological invention and more to do with social, cultural, and professional structures in flux.

In When Old Technologies Were New, Marvin established how “new media” opens a window onto such shifts: “the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media . . . are reexamined, challenged, and defended.”²⁹New media provoke the scrutiny of the concepts and historical conditions they unsettle. This makes the “history of old new media” especially interesting to study, as its meanings, social protocols, and relations of power get renegotiated.³⁰ The “novelty years” of a new medium stir up crises that reveal the linkages between information, communication, or technology and their adjacent social and cultural domains.³¹ The Victorians witnessed such new mediums in parade, from electric communication to techniques of the mass image to the capture and broadcast of sound. Yet, as Marvin and others have shown, the history of technology is social history, which is never a series of “novelty” inventions or artifacts but a discursive contest that understands itself as new, and in which writing and literature are very much involved. Victorian representations of these technologies—as in astonished journalism, telegraphic romances, stories of typewriter operators, or the fictional incorporation of recorded sound or photographs—all became part of how these technologies worked.³²

In this sense, the nineteenth century does not just generate the media concept or deliver technologies that uncannily resemble our own. It sets the pattern for what Liu calls the “new media encounter.”³³ This encounter imagines the collision of old and new and exaggerates the uniqueness of its own moment. If the Victorians understood theirs as an age of transition, they continually described it in the terms of epochal media change. That contemporary scholars, journalists, and even steampunk cosplayers have followed suit is, in many ways, evidence of the nineteenth century’s own imaginative success. Narratives of such encounters are everywhere in its writing about communications technologies—and feature extensively in the chapters to come. As in the opening excerpt from the Westminster Review, the Victorians envisioned the annihilation of space and time, the technological transformation of agency, the transfer of writing and picture-making to machines and electric mediums, the possibility of extrahuman senses. That rhetoric sometimes supported the Victorians’ larger narrative about modernization and its economic imperatives—just as claims of “innovation” and “disruption” and more recently “artificial intelligence” have driven the financial speculations of a new media economy. Yet the new media encounter can also generate what Liu calls “whole imaginative environments,” which can unsettle and promote “the scholarly and cultural potential of new media.”³⁴ This book ranges across selected essays, illustrated journalism, novels, stories, and science writing in which the Victorians imagined a new media condition to interpret their era’s significant sociotechnical changes.

The nineteenth century’s imaginative environments expand the discursive reckoning with new media and thereby encourage all sorts of productive interdisciplinary exchanges among literary studies, media studies, and the history of science, communication, and technology. In my own field, scholars have used media history to theorize the role of writing and literature in setting media’s conceptual horizons. What Alison Byerly calls “Victorian media studies” looks at the constitutive role of Victorian writing in the apprehension, representation, and developing protocols of historical mediums.³⁵ As Amy Wong argues, literary studies brings different perspectives to communication history by showing the “the historical many-sidedness of nineteenth-century media” and the “messy alternate histories” that it might generate.³⁶ Other critics have taken inspiration from media archaeology with its interest in “dead media” and technologies that never survived, but whose aspects reveal forgotten historical configurations or trajectories untaken. For instance, the “pianotype” machine for composing moveable type with a piano keyboard: invented in the 1840s, it never took off, but nonetheless reveals the embedding of gender and aesthetic composition into ideas about media production.³⁷ Relatedly, media scholars’ attention to materiality and platforms has helped to reinvigorate “media-specific analysis” in literary scholarship.³⁸ Although textual scholarship and bibliography have long histories in the discipline, they too have been galvanized by media studies to take broader, more critical forms. For example, Richard Menke has demonstrated how thoroughly Victorian literature registers the changing conditions of telecommunications networks and material infrastructures. Gissing’s novel New Grub Street knew very well how the “new” marketplace for mass print depended on fragile resource extraction for its paper.³⁹

I understand my own work within this recent trajectory of Victorian media studies. However, though such cross-disciplinary conversations have been generative, the periodization and geographical focus of literary scholarship (“Victorian studies”) does not neatly align with media history. As a consequence, researchers of the Romantic era or the eighteenth century or the early modern period or medieval and even classical contexts have all variously claimed that modern aspects of media have even earlier origins.⁴⁰ “New media, it turns out, is a very old tale,” Liu says.⁴¹ As much as anything, these competing claims may reflect the professional incentives of our own field distinctions, reinscribing the “new” in an ever-retreating mise en abyme. Some media historians have been more open to a gradual narrative, understanding new media through continuities rather than revolutions.⁴² Scholars in media archaeology have also proposed some very different chronologies. For example, Wolfgang Ernst offers the concept of “time criticality” to emphasize media’s infinitesimal processes as well as enduring, slow operations—neither quite corresponding to the chronology humans (or humanists) perceive or use to understand the past.⁴³ Similarly, Jussi Parrika has proposed a “geological” approach that traces the mineral histories of new media’s components to the long timelines of earth science.⁴⁴ Certain approaches to “media ecology” and “environmental media” have also stretched media’s history and communicative functions beyond the familiar dimensions of literary periods.⁴⁵

For these reasons and more, literary scholars need to take care in claiming media studies under our auspice, or assuming the literary provides evidence for other disciplines. The digital age has encouraged much cross-fertilization and comparative work among scholars interested in media, book history, and text technologies. Yet, as Whitney Trettien cautions, the conceptual vocabulary of media studies has its own distinct disciplinary origins and does not always translate.⁴⁶ Kathleen Fitzpatrick has warned English departments in particular against a “colonialist approach to interdisciplinary studies: incorporating the texts and methodologies studied in other fields, but only insofar as they shed light on the still narrowly defined category of the literary.”⁴⁷ This seems especially hazardous for the field of Victorian studies, given the colonial legacy of its namesake, and the field’s very ambitions, announced in the first issue of its eponymous journal, of “openness to critical and scholarly studies from all the relevant disciplines.”⁴⁸ Even with the best intentions, we can risk what Catherine Gallagher calls “being interdisciplinary all by ourselves.”⁴⁹ As a sometime Victorianist in an English department, I take the point. Interdisciplinary work should start with a clear understanding of one’s own disciplinary contribution, then interface with—rather than claim and capture—the language, ideas, and citations of media studies in common. Yet my own employment has always been in other fields: working in new media before grad school, then variously hired to teach the history of text technologies, digital media, and digital humanities. I have tried to devise Digital Victorians with critical openness to these fields, informed by our shared subjects and interests, while also committed to what literary studies might uniquely contribute.

When opened to these interdisciplinary conversations, Victorian studies has a great deal to offer to media history and theory. Before the modern distinctions that enclosed academic fields—itself a nineteenth-century phenomenon—the discourse of media was active across a predisciplinary culture of nineteenth-century writing. During the novelty years of emerging mediums, writers were scrutinizing the changing communicative, professional, and imaginative environments of their own work and the mediums in which it circulated. As a result, narratives of new media encounter in nineteenth-century literature offer what Liu calls an “elementary form of media theory” or a “meta-discourse about media” at its origins.⁵⁰ In a related sense, Menke claims that late Victorian writers articulate a “vernacular media theory” that twentieth-century scholars would inherit and formally define.⁵¹ Following on these insights, this book identifies another metadiscourse emerging in the nineteenth century’s media vernacular, articulated across a spectrum of imaginative and nonfictional writing. But, as I will argue, the implications would not fully emerge until the early twenty-first, when a related metadiscourse formed around something newly called the “digital humanities.”

The Digital Humanities Moment

Digital humanities was invented in 2004. Or perhaps in 2000. Or in the 1970s. Or in the 1950s. Or—if my own book is to be believed—in the 1840s. The history of DH has a lot of competing claims about its origins. It is conventionally accepted that the 2004 publication of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities first announced the phrase to the public.⁵² That may have originated, in turn, from a master’s program that John Unsworth (one of the Companion’s editors) attempted to propose in 2000 at the University of Virginia.⁵³ The editors wanted a phrase more expansive than “humanities computing,” in parlance for several decades, but which no longer accounted for the broadening mediums and methodological experiments that “DH” would index. Susan Hockey’s well-known “History of Humanities Computing” (published in the 2004 Companion to DH) noted that the journal Computers and the Humanities began in 1966, with regular conferences on literary and linguistic computing beginning in the 1970s. Hockey also gave the field a birthday and a founding father: “Unlike many other interdisciplinary experiments, humanities computing has a very well-known beginning” with the punch-card concordance experiments of the Italian Jesuit priest Father Roberto Busa.⁵⁴ Busa’s example offered the field a durable “creation myth,” but this popular origin story has been disputed if not debunked.⁵⁵ Rachel Buurma, Laura Heffernan, and Brad Pasanek have all highlighted the earlier (and unacknowledged) experiments in computational literary stylistics in the 1950s by UCLA English professor Josephine Miles.⁵⁶ Other scholars have traced the genealogy further back, for instance, to quantitative methodologies of reading, writing, and interpretation present in the practical criticism of I. A. Richards in the 1920s, to the turn-of-the-century work of Gertrude Stein and Vernon Lee, or to social scientists like Thomas Mendenhall who were publishing about stylometry in the 1880s.⁵⁷

The history of DH is justly disputed, but its historiography shows a clearer timeline. Digital humanities does have a “well-known beginning,” though not necessarily in the guise of any breakthrough practitioner or the invention of certain methodologies. Rather, DH symbolically announces its birth during a “naming moment,” which Scott Weingart finds roughly in the years 1997–2005.⁵⁸ Nominated “digital humanities” by the Blackwell Companion, it comes to public consciousness shortly thereafter, famously declared as the “next big thing” for the humanities by William Pannapacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2 009.⁵⁹ This was followed by Matthew Kirschenbaum’s important field delineation in 2010, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Each of these subsequently received so much skepticism and pushback that, in 2014, Kirschenbaum published a companion piece: “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?”⁶⁰ As DH emerged as such in the early 2010s, it was characterized by grand proclamations and fierce reactions, so much so that Matthew Gold inaugurated an influential book series with the University of Minnesota Press in 2012 simply called Debates in Digital Humanities. Gold titled his introduction to the first volume “The Digital Humanities Moment.” In it, he acknowledges the surge of attention that DH has received and explains how its debates, perhaps “more than most fields,” have focused much larger conversations about the institutional transformation of the academy. By contrasting innovation with tradition, the “digital” provokes unusually public conversations about changes in humanities work and produces an “introspective and self-reflexive” discourse about scholarly materials, methods, and professional practice.⁶¹ As Élika Ortega later claimed in a special issue of PMLA on “Varieties of Digital Humanities,” its “collection of practices and approaches . . . can be viewed as a scene of media encounter” just as Liu had characterized.⁶² In short, DH is the academy’s new media encounter.

After being named, the novelty years of DH saw a number of attempts to refine its definition: some boosterish, some quite critical, but all marked by the narrative characteristics of a new media encounter. For example, the 2012 volume Digital_Humanities begins this way: “Confronting the massive transformation of knowledge, society, and culture that is underway in the digital age, this book takes stock of this new world.”⁶³ Regardless of how old DH might arguably be, such pronouncements emphasize the difference of the “digital age” as a transition to a “new world.” That rhetoric reappears in a 2015 book Between the Humanities and the Digital, which “reveals that a new turn—perhaps a new temporal chapter—has emerged in the relational engagement between humanities and the digital.”⁶⁴ Other notable contributors in the volume echo the point: “we are now . . . in the first phase of a digital revolution in higher education,” write Liu and Thomas.⁶⁵ Making a grander gesture, N. Katherine Hayles claims that “there is reason to think that human being[s] may be entering a new era.”⁶⁶ This sense of a “new temporal chapter” represents its before and after as “digital” versus “traditional humanities,” marked by their contrasting conditions of media.⁶⁷ Along these lines, Jonathan Sterne juxtaposes digital humanities with “analog humanities”: “a nexus of methodological, technological, and institutional conditions across the humanities that have only come into clear focus in retrospect.” What brings them into focus is not digital media per se, but the sense of historical transition it helps us to imagine. As these examples suggest, defining DH is largely about distinguishing a moment in time—“the ‘digital era’ as our present moment”—in which to scrutinize academic practices and institutional configurations.⁶⁸

In this sense, DH has invited scholars into a moment of media in transition, defined less by new technologies than by wide-ranging contests over their uses, significance, and social organization. As Liu attempted to explain in “The Meaning of Digital Humanities,” “the underlying issue is the disciplinary identity not of the digital humanities but of the humanities themselves.”⁶⁹ Of course, the disciplinary identity of “the humanities” has never been so stable and has certainly never lacked for enabling crises. Yet DH has framed big debates about the politics, pedagogy, and professional implications of digital change in the academy. It has provoked what Julia Flanders calls “productive unease” about institutional and disciplinary norms.⁷⁰ Or it imports “alien paradigms” that require our reorientation to the humanities.⁷¹ Or, as Kirschenbaum argued elsewhere, DH functions as a “tactical term” for the redistribution of material and institutional resources—and similarly becomes a “discursive construct” for those objecting to such reallocations writ large.⁷² Or, as Moya Bailey and Kim Gallon suggest, DH redraws the “human” within the humanities, often exclusive of ways minoritized communities address digital media.⁷³ All these responses—and there are so many more—show scholars negotiating the newly declared “digital” on the alien, uneasy, and contested terrain of its significance for their fields and professions. It makes sense that “What is DH?” is an endlessly asked and unanswerable question. The question is its own answer, as DH is a metadiscourse that has prompted the humanities to vigorously reassess its purview.

The references noted here will already be familiar to DHers, and they hardly sketch the extent of definitions, debates, and alternative visions that follow DH into its maturity or its increasingly global and postcolonial reach. I have selected a few that help to underscore how I am defining DH historically and describing its self-awareness in terms of a new media encounter. Its definitions tend to reference “our present moment,” roughly corresponding to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In some ways, this period of transition shadows the crisis moments of Kuhn’s scientific revolution when disputes over “normal” and emergent paradigms remain unsettled.⁷⁴ Bracketing this “digital era” in time has the advantage of seeing its constructedness, making it comparable to other historical moments, and envisioning its possible futures in the interchange. Scholars have already noted some of these parallels in defining DH. For example, Cathy Davidson claimed that the digital transformation and remediations of “Humanities 2.0” is happening at “a scale unequaled since the late nineteenth century, a comparable era of technological transformation.”⁷⁵ Similarly, in a landmark article about DH in the New York Times in 2010, Tom Scheinfeldt compared its “methodological moment” as “similar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when scholars were preoccupied with collating and cataloging the flood of new information brought about by revolutions in communication, transportation and science.”⁷⁶ Rising to this challenge, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the “big humanities,” as Chad Wellmon argues, which stirred familiar anxieties about the organization and ethics of scholarly work.⁷⁷ Digital humanities may be having the nineteenth century’s new media moment all over again.

Those historical correspondences will preoccupy the rest of this book. Connecting them yields some important perspectives about each. First, it helps resist the technological determinism implicit in the naming of these phenomena, including the “digital age” or “digital humanities.” In a similar way, it addresses the historical amnesia of new media with its progressivist rhetoric of innovation, disruption, and replacement. Historical contrasts also invite some productive unease into our own naturalized relationships with media, whose success depends on our “inattention or ‘blindness’ to the media technologies themselves.”⁷⁸ Second, such comparisons can expose the constructedness of each moment. Especially when attentive to the differences and noncorrespondences of historical contrasts, or the unsuccessful inventions or possible historical trajectories that media did not take. As Gitelman argues, “technologies that succeed exert a teleological tug,” but a careful media history shows “technology as plural, decentered, indeterminate, as the reciprocal product of textual practices” rather than as a deterministic agent of change, or a necessary step towards the present.⁷⁹ Comparative media histories can decenter specific technologies, unsettle the dominant narratives by which the present understands itself, and potentially make space for alternatives. For these reasons, Gitelman has called for “a deeper history of sorts (there must be other such histories) for the digital humanities.”⁸⁰Digital Victorians endeavors to provide one.

This project joins such efforts already underway in media studies, literary studies, and DH itself. For example, Lee’s book Overwhelmed explores the nineteenth-century’s unsettled relationships between American literature and information “to expand our historical understanding of DH and the debates that surround it today.”⁸¹ Ongoing work by Mark Turner and Clare Pettitt tries to articulate a genealogy of the digital in nineteenth-century concepts of miscellaneity and seriality.⁸² Yet even a “deeper history” may not go far enough to redress the disciplinary biases and contemporary exclusions that many suggest DH has helped institutionalize. Scholars stretching DH back to the nineteenth century—myself included—need to realize the risks of perpetuating the historical prejudices of that time frame into the digital “new world.”⁸³ As Roopika Risam explains, such pronouncements can overlook “the histories and traditions of humanities knowledge production that have been deeply implicated in both colonialism and neocolonialism.”⁸⁴ Pursuing “an expanded genealogy for the digital humanities,” Adeline Koh and Dorothy Kim have published Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, which challenges not only its histories but who gets to frame them, and from what embodied, political, and institutional position.⁸⁵ Their volume collects important perspectives about Black, queer, global, multilingual, and indigenous versions of (or visions for) DH. The unease of the “digital humanities moment” includes debates about who writes its histories. I want to acknowledge these alternatives and, while not claiming them for my own, hope they have informed the arguments to follow. While I am using the Victorians to defamiliarize the digital present, this book also uses the present against that past, critiquing the Victorians’ problematic yet persistent legacies, and noting how certain roads untaken might help expand DH as a field. To facilitate these transhistorical conversations, I turn to the strategic potential of anachronism.

Notes

1. John Stuart Mill, Mill: Texts, Commentaries, ed. Alan Ryan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 5.

2. Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

3. W., “Art VII. Political Retrospect, 1830–1841,” Westminster Review 37, no. 2 (1842): 427.

4. John Guillory, “The Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 321–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/648528.

5. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

6. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 23.

7. Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

8. For example, James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011); Toni Weller, The Victorians and Information: A Social and Cultural History (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verl. Dr. Müller, 2009); Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Centuryʼs Online Pioneers (New York: Walker, 1998).

9. Benjamin Morgan, “Critical Empathy: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics and the Origins of Close Reading,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 52; Yohei Igarashi, “Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading,” New Literary History 46, no. 3 (2015): 485–504, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2015.0023.

10. Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8.

11. Richard Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Maurice S. Lee, Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

12. Linda Hughes, “SIDEWAYS!—Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture,” North American Victorian Studies Association, University of Victoria, BC, October 11, 2007.

13. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michèle Martin, “Hello Central?”: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

14. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 56.

15. Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10.

16. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1; see also Gleick, The Information, 413. Extending this analogy, librarians have described recent decades as a period of “digital incunabula”; see Gregory Crane et al., “Beyond Digital Incunabula: Modeling the Next Generation of Digital Libraries,” in Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ed. Julio Gonzalo et al., Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 353–66, https://doi.org/10.1007/11863878_30.

17. Toni Weller, “An Information History Decade: A Review of the Literature and Concepts, 2000–2009,” Library and Information History 26, no. 1 (2010): 94. See also Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, 103–38; Gleick, The Information; James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Aileen Fyfe, “The Information Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI, 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 567–94.

18. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.

19. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 4.

20. Guillory, “Genesis,” 321.

21. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds., Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 1.

22. Standage, The Victorian Internet; Shaun Raviv, “The Secret History of Facial Recognition,” WIRED, January 21, 2020, www.wired.com/story/secret-history-facial-recognition/; Natasha Kitcher, “Electrophone: The Victorian-Era Gadget That Was a Precursor to Live-Streaming,” The Conversation (blog), accessed January 11, 2021, http://theconversation.com/electrophone-the-victorian-era-gadget-that-w….

23. Veronica Alfano and Andrew M. Stauffer, eds., Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2.

24. Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall, “Introduction: Industrial Evolution,” Neo-Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 16.

25. Roger Whitson, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories (New York: Routledge, 2017).

26. Lee, Overwhelmed, 4.

27. For a good overview of differences in how new media have been defined, see Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 16–31.

28. Charles R. Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xix.

29. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 4; see also Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

30. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, eds., Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011), 10.

31. Gitelman and Pingree, New Media, xii.

32. Christopher Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 3 (1997): 401–26; Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies; Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

33. Liu, “Imagining.”

34. Liu.

35. Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 4.

36. Amy R. Wong, “Victorian Media Studies, History, and Theory,” Literature Compass 15, no. 3 (2018): 5, 6, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12438.

37. Melissa Score, “Interred in Printing House Vaults: Pianotype Composing Machines of the 1840s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 49, no. 4 (2016): 578–97, https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2016.0040.

38. N. Katherine Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (2004): 67–90.

39. Richard Menke, “New Grub Street’s Ecologies of Paper,” Victorian Studies 61, no. 1 (2018): 60–82.

40. A partial list: Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239–62; Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.2307/2652433; Paul Duguid, “The Ageing of Information: From Particular to Particulate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 3 (2015): 347–68; Katherine E. Ellison, Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006); David W. Park, Nick Jankowski, and Steve Jones, eds., The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, “Mediating Information, 1450–1800,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 139–63; Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007); Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First Two Thousand Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

41. Liu, “Imagining.” See also Simone Natale, “There Are No Old Media,” Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (2016): 585–603, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12235.

42. Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998); Acland, Residual Media; Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

43. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

44. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

45. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Peters, Marvelous Clouds.

46. Whitney Trettien, “Substrate, Platform, Interface, Format,” Textual Cultures 16, no. 1 (2023): 293.

47. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Media Studies and Literary Studies,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick (blog), February 13, 2009, https://kfitz.info/media-studies-and-literary-studies/.

48. “Prefatory Note,” Victorian Studies 1, no. 1 (1957): 3.

49. Catherine Gallagher, “Theoretical Answers to Interdisciplinary Questions or Interdisciplinary Answers to Theoretical Questions?” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 254.

50. Liu, “Imagining.”

51. Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 21.

52. Ray Siemens, John Unsworth, and Susan Schreibman, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

53. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Scott Weingart, “A Look Backwards through the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences,” The Digital Humanities Long View, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, April 17, 2021.

54. Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing,” in Siemens et al., eds., Companion to Digital Humanities. For related versions of this origin story, see William G. Thomas II, “Computing and the Historical Imagination,” in Siemens et al., eds., Companion to Digital Humanities; Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

55. Weingart, “A Look Backwards.” See also Arun Jacob, “Punching Holes in the International Busa Machine Narrative,” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), 2020, https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.d7d097c2; Steven E. Jones, Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jamie Skye Bianco, “This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

56. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 (2018); Brad Pasanek, “Extreme Reading: Josephine Miles and the Scale of the Pre-Digital Digital Humanities,” ELH 86, no. 2 (2019): 355–85.

57. Morgan, “Critical Empathy”; Igarashi, “Statistical Analysis”; Natalia Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein,” ELH 82 (2015): 281–315.

58. Weingart, “A Look Backwards.”

59. William Pannapacker, “The MLA and the Digital Humanities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 28, 2009.

60. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” ADE Bulletin, 2010; Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?,” Differences 25, no. 1 (2014).

61. Matthew K. Gold, “The Digital Humanities Moment,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/2. Similarly, when the Journal of Cultural Analytics launched in 2016, in an editorial statement Andrew Piper emphasized the “act of mirroring” and “new recursivity” within DH praxis. Andrew Piper, “There Will Be Numbers,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 1, no. 1 (2016): 7–8, https://doi.org/10.22148/16.006.

62. Élika Ortega, “Media and Cultural Hybridity in the Digital Humanities,” PMLA 135, no. 1 (2020): 162, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.159.

63. Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1.

64. David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson, eds., Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 4.

65. Alan Liu and William G. Thomas II, “Humanities in the Digital Age,” in Goldberg and Svensson, Between Humanities and the Digital, 35.

66. N. Katherine Hayles, “Final Commentary: A Provocation,” in Goldberg and Svensson, Between Humanities and the Digital, 504.

67. Goldberg and Svensson, Between Humanities and the Digital, 5.

68. Jonathan Sterne, “The Example: Some Historical Considerations,” in Goldberg and Svensson, Between Humanities and the Digital, 19.

69. Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): 410, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.2.409.

70. Julia Flanders, “The Productive Unease of 21st-Century Digital Scholarship,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009), http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055.html.

71. Alan Liu, “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” English Language Notes 47, no. 1 (2009): 17–35.

72. Kirschenbaum, “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?”

73. Moya Z. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are…; Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

74. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

75. Cathy N. Davidson, “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 708, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.707. John Walsh claims that “the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century is the closest analog to the rapid technological and social change of the digital age. John A. Walsh, “Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies,” in Siemens and Schreibman, A Companion to Digital Literary Studies.

76. Patricia Cohen, “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” New York Times, November 16, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html.

77. Chad Wellmon, “Loyal Workers and Distinguished Scholars: Big Humanities and the Ethics of Knowledge,” Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 1 (2019): 87–126.

78. Gitelman, Always Already New, 6.

79. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 5, 2.

80. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 56.

81. Lee, Overwhelmed, 11.

82. Mark W. Turner, “Seriality, Miscellaneity, and Compression in Nineteenth-Century Print,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 2 (2020): 283–94; Clare Pettitt, Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

83. Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities, 4.

84. Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 4.

85. Adeline Koh, “Niceness, Building, and Opening the Genealogy of the Digital Humanities: Beyond the Social Contract of Humanities Computing,” Differences 25, no. 1 (2014): 93–106, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391–2420015; Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, eds., Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities (Punctum Books, 2021).