Nineteenth Century Serials Edition

Project start date: 2005-01

Project end date: 2008-03

A three year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, ncse seeks to achieve two key objectives: First the ncse project responds to the pressing need to republish these fragile printed items in ways which maintain their integrity. As physical collections are often incomplete, and deteriorating quality hampers access, electronic editions offer new opportunities to re-present such material in a way that is, for the first time online, comprehensive and freely available meaning that the material can be used in entirely novel ways. ncse will create a resource which both preserves what is gained in readers’ experiences of engaging with periodicals as historical material objects, and concurrently exploit the potential of the digital format in the access and use of these objects. The project will establish a unique full-text digital edition of six diverse nineteenth-century serials and make this freely available via the web. The titles we have chosen represent individually significant but still under-researched publications. Edited together as a cluster they exemplify the complex interactions of periodical text both in and across titles. Unconventionally, the coherence of the edition does not rely on a single title, author, subject/theme, or period as its organizing principle. Instead, the premise of our edition is that the nature of public discourse and communication networks is open-ended, allowing for unexpected connections. The range of titles, unusually combining newspapers and periodicals, includes significant weeklies and monthlies, and a variety of subjects and readerships: Northern Star (mid-century; working-class); Monthly Repository and its supplement the Unitarian Chronicle (radical, middle-class, Unitarian); Leader (progressive, liberal, secular); English Woman’s Journal (mid-century, feminist); Tomahawk (satirical); Publishers’ Circular (print trade). By conceiving of multiple titles across the century as a single edition, we hope to extend the logic of serials – dynamic, shifting, overlapping – to our research framework. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology will enable users to search the full text of the whole edition whilst viewing readable facsimile images of the pages on which their highlighted search strings appear, or to simply browse the edition wholly or by page, issue, volume or title. Second, ncse aims to formulate and implement new ways of realising our current scholarly conceptualisation of these materials in electronic form, allowing users not only to engage with extra-textual elements of these objects, but to use those elements to delineate different types of content in searching and browsing. In order to achieve this end ncse is engaged in planning its ‘ideal edition’: producing models which express our current scholarly conceptualisation of the material’s content, physical features and semasiology. These models can then be drawn upon to design the information architecture of the resource. See our work in progress page for examples. ncse is a collaborative venture, including scholars in nineteenth-century serials and in new digital technologies for the humanities from Birkbeck College (University of London); King’s College London (University of London); the British Library and Olive Software. It has been funded through the support of an Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Resource Enhancement’ grant. Transformation of text-mining output into Lucene index Generation of XHTML from TEI XML and Lucene indices via Apache Cocoon Transformation of PDF files into segmented images delivered in XHTML via Olive ViewPoint application server