Virtual Victorians

Networks, Connections, Technologies

Veronica Alfano, Andrew Stauffer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137393296
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring how scholars use digital resources to reconstruct the 19th century, this volume probes key issues in the intersection of digital humanities and history. Part I examines the potential of online research tools for literary scholarship while Part II outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms.

Part I

Navigating Networks

Chapter 1

How We Search Now: New and Old Ways of Digging Up Wolfe’s “Sir John Moore”

Catherine Robson

I begin not with the Victorian period but with our own millennium—with, in fact, the Millennium trilogy, the phenomenally successful series by Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson, the first of which, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was published posthumously in 2005.¹ Let me be more precise: I begin with the 2009 film adaptation of this novel, directed by Niels Arden Oblev, a movie that enjoyed widespread critical and commercial success and was later remade into an extremely faithful 2011 American version. Even if you have not read the books or seen the films, you have probably heard something about them, most likely something about their central figure, Lisbeth Salander, who has been hailed as both a postmodern heroine and a striking alternative icon for our times; certainly Noomi Rapace’s performance in this role in Oblev’s film creates an unforgettably powerful image. Salander is introduced to viewers as an unnervingly gifted isolate, a multiply-pierced and tattooed loner who is preternaturally skilled at penetrating the complex network of encrypted information systems in which she makes her living as a private investigator. In the movie’s establishing phases, Salander’s connection to her laptop is her most important relationship; her primary identity is that of a punk cyberhacker who exists most comfortably in webs of digitized data. To make this clear, Oblev presents numerous images of the top half of Rapace’s face reflected in her computer screen. Lines of digital text run across her eyes and forehead, as if to illustrate that her visual and cognitive capacities are entirely merged with those of her Mac; the central processing units of brain and computer, we are to infer, work as one.

Later on we become all too aware of Salander’s vulnerable corporeality. In a scene that viewers invariably find the most disturbing of the film’s many violent sequences, she is the victim of a brutal anal rape by her state-appointed guardian. But instead of taking us to the dark interior of that abuser’s bedroom, I move now to another badly lighted space, a location to which Salander is led by another older male figure in the film’s denouement. On this occasion the man is an archivist and the place is an archive, the holding space of a large Swedish business conglomerate’s records. To pursue her research into a series of murders and disappearances half a century earlier, Salander must walk through floor-to-ceiling stacks of cardboard files and handwritten ledgers, and lug box after box of documents to a little desk set amid the gloom. Poring over these papers, Salander starts to figure out the answer to the mystery but finds that there are more materials she needs to examine. When she returns to the chronologically ordered shelves to find the boxes for 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954, Oblev repeats the visual strategy he employed earlier with Rapace’s eyes and forehead. This time, however, he superimposes the green rectangular spines of the numbered files across the top half of her face. Back at the desk with its growing pile of faded receipts and reports, Salander opens her MacBook to cross-reference a photograph of the suspected murderer in an old company magazine with one stored on her hard drive. The verification is made, and the killer’s identity is revealed.

This is the film’s big “aha!” moment, but I do not draw attention to the scene because of any particular interest in the solution it presents. Rather, I am concerned here with method—with the ways in which the film takes pains to establish that the answer is found only because of Salander’s ability to search and think in both new and old modes. Oblev underscores this point most obviously with those two composite visions of his heroine’s face; via this pair of images, he shows that Salander’s consciousness can merge with the protocols of digital and print media. Modernity may offer the skilled analyst incredibly sophisticated tools for gathering and interpreting information, but to make sense of the past’s continued grip upon the present, a heroine for our times must also be able to engage with historical records in a more traditional fashion.

As it is with Salander, so it is with literary scholars today. This essay foregrounds the following fact: even with all our search engines and our Web proficiencies, our digitized media and our handheld electronic devices, sometimes we, like Salander, can only find out the truth—or what passes for truth in the world in which we operate—by looking closely at the box file, the handwritten ledger, and that assemblage of pieces of paper, the book. Most of us, I believe, thus spend much of our time operating as Salanderian double agents—that is to say, we conduct our research in both newfangled and oldfangled ways. These truths may seem self-evident, but I state them here so that I can proceed to the following question: what insights might be gained if we took conscious account of the hybrid nature of our current working methods? In our zeal to attain other, seemingly more urgent, goals, we may not comment on this hybridity in our published writings, but I suspect that many of us think about it a great deal and are aware of how it skews—or in some way affects—not only our findings but also what we say about them. The following pages represent an attempt to be candid about the use of different research methodologies and archives in my own scholarship, and to reflect upon some of the things I learned when I switched between them.

I should make it clear straightaway that I am not moving toward a simple valorization of the old at the expense of the new. This piece will not, for instance, feature a celebration of the romance or the erotics of the old-style archive, topoi that have found frequent representation in both academic studies and books and movies for wider audiences.² And neither shall I proceed in the other direction, which is to say, toward a wholehearted embrace of the actualities or potentialities of the digital humanities as currently practiced or imagined. While this essay supports the insistence on “bout[s] of methodological self-consciousness” that is both expressed and illustrated in one of the pamphlets produced by Stanford’s Literary Laboratory, it makes no overtures to digital engagements of any complexity, such as those that make possible the modes of quantitative analysis practiced by Franco Moretti and his crew.³ Indeed, rather than going “Beyond Search” (as part of the name of an earlier iteration of the Literary Lab has it), it stays with “search” for the simple reason that this is the command I assume the majority of us use most frequently with digitized materials. So, seductive though fantasies of revivification in the dust of special collections or the white heat of new technologies may be, my desires here are relatively restrained. In his review essay for NINES, “Digital Scholarly Resources for the Study of Victorian Literature and Culture,” Andrew Stauffer urges us to consider “what relationship critical inquiry has to the archive of study.”⁴ I take this prompt as an invitation to ask what it means for our scholarship that our two distinct modes of searching link us to different archives, require different reading and analytical practices, and produce markedly different results.

The questions I am raising could be construed in various ways and worked out across very broad or extremely narrow issues. I give them specificity here by exploring them in the context of my own scholarly practices over the last decade or so, a period in which I was working on a book about nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry memorization and pedagogical recitation. Much of this project, now published as Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, organizes itself around the reception histories of three short poems. To be perfectly frank, these portions relied to a considerable degree upon a stunningly banal research methodology: I spent a great deal of time putting lines or phrases from my chosen works into search engines and seeing where my hits would take me. This study, then, is fully a product of the “Age of Google.” It would not have been possible for me as a single individual to have found quotations from such a wide and varied set of texts as I eventually cited without the benefit of digitized media and the means to search them. Given the exponential increase in digitization projects over the past ten years, it is also a book that would turn out rather differently if I started it today. At the time of writing this essay, I can see that many of my once hard-to-find, must-visit-the-specialized-library texts are now available at the touch of a few buttons. This strikes me both as an exciting development, when I consider it from the vantage point of future prospects for our discipline, and a rather depressing one, if I think about it in relation to the labors of my earlier self.

I was perhaps most conscious of the effects of my frequent oscillations between old and new modes of searching in 2004, when I was investigating the reception of Charles Wolfe’s once widely memorized, but now largely forgotten, work of 1817, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” I decided to make this poem about the rushed Spanish interment of a British hero of the Napoleonic Wars the subject of a case study because of an experience in the old British Library newspaper archive in Colindale in 1996. (This “outdated warehouse,” to quote the BL website, was closed down at the end of 2013.) Back then I was curious about the backstory of Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge,” quite a different literary composition about a dead soldier from a later British war; I was combing through the columns of the Dorset County Chronicle, the Dorset an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Virtual Victorians
• Part I Navigating Networks
• Part II Virtual Imaginings
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index