Abstract
The Victorians have always already been virtual. They are constructed out of our narratives of historical change, out of our interpretation and interpellation of their material artifacts, and out of the cultural residue—ideas, tropes, and images—that still circulates today, making them both oddly familiar and familiarly strange. New Historicism and post-structuralism reminded us that we can never reach the Victorians themselves (or their texts as they knew them); instead we can only access representations, filtered and processed into a flickering simulacrum of historical actuality. This virtual Victorian reality is generated by our canons, syllabi, and library collections—engines that enable us individually, and collectively as a profession, to create what seems to be a fully realized literary-historical understanding. Its terrain is limited in scope and resolution by the data (texts, images, objects) ingested by the hermeneutic process. If you have read only five Victorian novels in an undergraduate course, your personal virtual Victorian reality will be less detailed, less fully realized, than that of a well-read specialist. This is obvious. But as the collective virtual Victorian reality created and used by scholars, archivists, and curators becomes an ever-better simulacrum, it is easy to lose sight of the mechanisms that generate it.
N.B. The images associated with this chapter are housed in the digital annex at www.virtualvictorians.org .
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Notes
Katherine Bode, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 7–26.
Natalie M. Houston, “Toward a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (2014): 498–510.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 231.
See Gisèle Shapiro, “Autonomy Revisited: The Question of Mediations and Its Methodological Implications,” Paragraph 35, no. 1 (2012): 37. doi: 10.3366/para.2012.004037.
Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 12–13.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 31.
Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, “Introduction,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 3.
Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19.
John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1977), v, 2–3.
Frederick W. Gibbs and Daniel J. Cohen, “A Conversation with Data: Prospecting Victorian Words and Ideas,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 70.
See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 124–27.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993), 33.
Gitelman and Jackson, “Introduction” 8. The ambiguity in current English usage of the plural noun data, which is used with both singular and plural verbs, reflects its etymological and cultural history. See Daniel Rosenberg, “Data before the Fact,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 15–40.
The entity-relationship model of the 1998 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) constructs an ontology of work, expression, manifestation, and item that can be used to merge the display of records to meet the needs of some users. Such collapsing of distinctions may not be appropriate for all forms of research. See IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records, Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records: final report, IFLA Series on Bibliographic Control 19 (Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1998), http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records.
Helen Gibson, Joe Faith, and Paul Vickers, “A Survey of Two-Dimensional Graph Layout Techniques for Information Visualisation,” Information Visualization 12, no. 3–4 (2012): 325. doi: 10.1177/1473871612455749.
This visualization was created in Gephi with Yifan Hu’s force-directed algorithm, with an optimal distance of 50 and initial step size of five. See Yifan Hu, “Efficient, High-Quality Force-Directed Graph Drawing,” Mathematica Journal 10, no. 1 (2005): 37–71.
Not all records from the earlier National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints series are yet available through OCLC. See Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: A Follow-Up to the Beall/Kafadar Study,” College & Research Libraries 69, no. 5 (2008): 401–06.
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 2.
Missing or unordered pages are generally considered exceptional and worthy of attention in specialized cases made evident to us through descriptive bibliography, itself a technology for transforming the material codex book into sets of data. See Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographic Description (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949).
Thematic or strictly chronological organization is more rare, as seen in Francis Turner Palgrave, ed., The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861)
or Jerome J. McGann, ed., The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993).
This visualization was created in Gephi with the Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed algorithm, which works well for networks with fewer than 50 nodes. See Thomas M. J. Fruchterman and Edward M. Reingold, “Graph Drawing by Force-Directed Placement,” Software: Practice and Experience 21, no. 11 (1991): 1129–64.
This graph was created in Gephi using the Force Atlas force-directed algorithm, which is optimized for community detection. See Mathieu Bastian, Sebastien Heymann, and Mathieu Jacomy, “Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks,” ICWSM 8 (2009): 361–62.
Bourdieu’s analyses of the structures of the literary field in nineteenthcentury France, for example, use multiple correspondence analysis, which distributes categorical features in Euclidean space to illuminate the underlying structures in complex data. See Wouter De Nooy, “Fields and Networks: Correspondence Analysis and Social Network Analysis in the Framework of Field Theory,” Poetics 31, no. 5 (2003): 305–27.
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© 2015 Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer
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Houston, N.M. (2015). Visualizing the Cultural Field of Victorian Poetry. In: Alfano, V., Stauffer, A. (eds) Virtual Victorians. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137393296_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137393296_7
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