Digital Victorians : From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities / Paul Fyfe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fyfe, Paul (Paul Camm), author.

Series:

Text technologies.

Stanford Text Technologies Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Digital humanities--History.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Literature and technology--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Technology in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 282 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more-telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

How the Internet lost (and found) its body : the dream of disintermediation from the mail coach to transoceanic cables

Data ethics from realism to the right to be forgotten

Henry James, counting words, and machine reading

Jekyll, Hyde, and the dark side of digital humanities

The archaeology of Victorian new media

Afterword : the digital Victorian frame of mind, 1957-2020.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

Other Format:

Print version: Fyfe, Paul Digital Victorians

ISBN:

9781503640955

1503640957

OCLC:

1455128107