Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017) is a digital project by Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. In concept, it seeks to capture news, prose, poems, anecdotes, and other texts widely shared between different newspapers in the 19th century and map the path by which they were shared.

The project is quite comprehensive and detailed, including a collection of most widely-shared poems, a number of network graphs allowing users to see which newspapers shared items with which other newspapers, and a list of publications resulting from the work. The centerpiece and most interesting aspect of the work by far is the interactive exhibit “a Love Letter to Viral Texts,” where the authors have taken an oft-reprinted humorous love letter—in this instance lifted from the November 4th, 1868 front page of The Raftsman’s Journal, a newspaper from Clearfield, Pennsylvania—and linked various terms, quotations, and concepts from the text to bits and pieces of other newsprint, either viral texts themselves or simply contextual knowledge drawn from the Journal or other newspapers of the time. For example, a link from the phrase “a sea of glory” leads to notes on uses of that same phrase in a Shakespeare parody and an 1819 hymn repurposed as an anti-slavery anthem. “Under a glass tumbler” gives you an 1834 tarriff on the import of German glassware, a satirical report on the theft of a ridiculous list of items (including said tumbler), and a travelogue mentioning what now seems a whimsical idea: capturing fireflies in Jamaica underneath a glass tumbler and reading by their light. Each of these connected texts comes from some other newspaper, some also from Pennsylvania but some from as far afield as Vermont, Illinois, or Washington. 

Viral Texts serves as a kind of expanded historical bibliography, attempting to give a modern reader a picture not only of what a pre-Civil War Pennsylvanian might be reading in the newspaper, but also the context in which they might be reading it. By emphasizing the “virality” and spread of these texts, and providing them side by side with similar texts that mention the same content, the project makes the implicit argument that a reader in Clearfield in 1868 might have the same comparative context that the site offers the user in 2020. With texts shared between geographically disparate newspapers, it’s likely that readers in Ohio might read an almost identical copy of the love letter in question, and, having already come across the “sea of glory” in their Anti-Slavery Bugle, enter into a new understanding of the use of the phrase as it sits here in the midst of satire. If that same understanding is not quite conveyed to the reader of the site in 2020 (clearly there are other contextual and cultural knowledges not shared between the two readers other than what they have read in newspapers), it is at least a step closer to commonality than if the front page of the Journal had been carefully unfolded, alone, in a Pennsylvania archive.

However, despite the clear value of work like this to historical bibliography, the site itself has clear issues with reproducibility and preservation, as with a lot of interactive digital archives—ironically, as they often attempt to their content more transparent and accessible to a larger audience and, presumably, for a longer time than their physical counterparts. The “data” link in the About page is broken, as are several links in the interactive exhibit, making it difficult to go deeper than a surface level into the academic work being done here, verify that the information presented is accurate, or build upon the work here for related projects.

Considering the About page describes two phases of work, from 2014-2015 and from 2015-2016 (and the suggested citation lists the publication date of the project as 2017), it’s likely that the NEH and ACLS grants by which they are funded simply no longer provide support for a team to continue to maintain the website, or increase accessibility for larger audiences. This is a larger problem than just this project; the structure of grant funding for digital archives and the transitory nature of academics often leaves this work stranded, half-complete, or slowly deteriorating as links break and resources are lost.

On a less practical (and less depressing) note, the comparison to “viral” images and texts as the word is used now, while compelling, obscures (at least) one major disconnect between widely-shared content then and now that I think is worth mentioning: who, in fact, is sharing the texts. The editorial hand behind these newspapers is most clearly seen on the site in the list of “Fugitive Verses,” or viral poems, many of which were sent in anonymously (or from anonymous authors, or both) and contain editorial notes acknowledging such. But editors are the entire engine behind the virality of these texts. As the project explains, newspaper editors would subscribe to editions from other cities and even states, and crib content from their colleagues and competitors. Poems, jokes, and interesting factoids provided useful buffer to fill odd spaces in page layouts, which contributed to their “virality,” and it doesn’t seem a stretch to assume that some off these small odds and ends of text were shared more widely than others due to the particular tastes of specific editors. In modern parlance, whether or not it should be, “virality” is often equated to pure popularity, because the machine behind the spread of memes, tweets, and videos is individuals—a certain subset of individuals, to be sure (those on twitter, those with internet access, those with a certain sense of humor) but certainly a larger and less homogenous subset of individuals than “newspaper editors in 19th century America.”

I raise this last not as a criticism of this archive, necessarily, but as something to consider in evaluating the larger project of creating digital archives out of physical ones: there is curation that happens in the creation of a digital project, but first there is curation that happens in a Clearfield, Pennsylvania newsroom in late October of 1868, and part of the work of the second must be to acknowledge and understand the workings of the first.

In ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions,’ Ken Price highlights an interesting editorial choice from Wright American Fiction, a digital expansion on Lyle Wright’s 1975 American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography. Both Wright himself and the editors of the digital project include Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as part of of their overview of fictional works, but we now know what Wright presumably didn’t: that Jacobs’ work is narrative nonfiction. Price claims that its inclusion here means that Wright American Fiction is “a major contribution to scholarship without being a scholarly edition per se,” as a more “scholarly” choice would be to “take a stand”—presumably by disqualifying the work from the expanded bibliography.

It seems to me, though, that the question is not what qualifies as “scholarly” editing, but what the purpose of the project is, and—drawing on Abbott & Williams—what kind of editing they’re engaging in. The choice to keep Jacobs’ work is a documentary choice: it appears in the original, so it appears in the expanded and digitized version, and also one that plays into a kind of meta-historical-bibliography work. Wright’s inclusion of Jacobs’ work tells us that at the time he was writing it was believed to be fiction, and that it was originally published as such; we could then infer that those reading it when it was new also read it as such. If the goal behind Wright American Fiction is to accurately capture what Wright considered to be the important fictional works published between 1851-1875, then can it be considered less “scholarly” to include an incorrect entry? 

An editing decision based in textual criticism, then, and one allowed by the more flexible boundaries of online publication, would be to include the citation and full text, but annotated to include the expertise that the editors possess: that the text was long believed to be a fictional account written by white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, but was in fact a nonfictional account of Jacobs’ own life. This would serve a third purpose other than either documentary—including the work without comment—or “correcting” Wright by excising it, highlighting issues of race and recognition, as well as potentially giving citation and credit to the scholar who discovered the real authorship of the work (Jean Fagan Yellin).

As I read Francesca Petronio’s thesis Raised on TV: A Queer Teen’s Guide to Syndicated Sexualities in light of the readings for this week and the interplay between form and content, I found myself wishing it played a little more with format. The introduction describes it as “a play on the by-now retrograde concept of a TV Guide”, but other than a more conversational tone (“these kids just love to clap,” she remarks in a discussion of a satirically queer-positive community in Faking It) it hews pretty close to a traditional academic thesis. The introduction is followed by chapters on the three television shows she’s chosen as her focus, interspersed with captioned screencaps. There’s a title page, an acknowledgments section, etc., exactly as you would expect from any other graduate thesis.

I can’t help but wonder what the thesis might be able to say through juxtaposition and visuals were it to mimic a TV Guide in other ways. Petronio uses a three-pronged Media Content Analysis approach that she attributes to Caitlin Campisini, examining her subjects in regard to the political economy of the networks creating them, the content of the shows themselves, and the reaction of news media and online fandom. But she works through those linearly, and all in the same manner: summarizing, with citations, then analyzing. What might it look like to place news headlines or (screencapped or otherwise captured) twitter threads about queer content in these shows across from the summaries of the event, mimicking advertisements in a retro TV guide? What would it do to Petronio’s analysis if it were read in the linear-yet-simultaneous way that Nick Sousanis highlights in his talk on dissertations and academic work in comics form? How would that change the decisions she made about what to place with what on which page or two-page spread?

Or, to break out of the TV Guide conceit, what would the same dissertation look like in video form? The screencaps in Petronio’s thesis are attempting to show understated or subtextual chemistry, a kind of casual queerness outside of specific or “known” indicators. But the very stillness of her images is pinning that down to a specific moment, ready to be made into a new, knowable sign. Presenting the same work in video format could preserve the original fluidity of motion, emotion, and interaction, and through it, the fluidity of identity that Petronio is examining and advocating for.

Millennials and the generation now coming to be known as “gen z” are sometimes referred to as “digital natives.” The usefulness of the term is arguable, as there are many factors other than age that play into whether one grows up with access to computers/devices and thus the online world we are supposedly the natives of, but there are still marked differences in the way many young adults today interact with technology compared to members of previous generations. Generally rhetoric around this concept centers on phones or social media, but today’s readings made me consider it in terms of a foundational aspect of home computing (even typing the phrase sounds so quaint) that I and maybe many of my generation take for granted: word-processing.

“It was like having a chronic pain, a debilitating brain disease, or insufferable stress banished forever. I could begin with what interested me, have fun with it, and continue to have fun until I was finished.” The way Barry B. Longyear describes the advent of word-processing into a life restricted to type-writing resonated with me. The second half of this quote is exactly how I write everything, from academic work to personal essays to fiction—even writing this reading response, I began by transcribing the quote itself, then considered where I wanted to start in framing it, moved slightly up in my Google doc, and began. Doubtless I will pause, rework things, delete others, before I am done. (And here I am, adding and changing even after cutting/pasting from Google docs to WordPress.)

But even though I didn’t have much access to computers or word processors for most of my middle school and high school education (I attended a Waldorf school, whose philosophical underpinnings recommend restricting access to technology, and anyway I am right on the cusp of the age when high school students began regularly submitting their work printed rather than handwritten), I have never felt the crushing weight that Longyear describes in the first half of the above quote. The use of word processing feels second-nature, the idea that you can begin wherever you find the joy and fascination in a written piece obvious. The words on the page appear in straight lines, one after another, yet the idea that composition must be actually linear feels deeply alien to me. When I do write by hand, the pages are always a mess of arrows pointing to blocks at the side of the page, sentences or phrases written sideways to be inserted before other sentences and phrases, stars and symbols leading to the backs of the previous page, whole paragraphs circled and marked so I know to move them later in the piece when I do, inevitably, type it up. I always believed this would be true of me no matter the era, and I’m sure that the linearity of type-writing did not mean that every writer thought linearly—if they had, type-writing would not have been such a terrible burden, as they would have lined their sentences up neatly as they occurred to them and never had to produce more than one draft. However, I wonder to what degree the knowledge that nothing is ever set in stone (on the side of a sphinx, for example, to touch on Robinson) has affected the way ideas occur, the way my brain—and the brains of my contemporaries—sorts through them.

I was especially interested in the discussion in Keith about attempts to create movable type printing in China, and the combination of factors—ink viscosity, paper-making methods/materials, a much larger and thus exorbitantly more expensive number of characters needed—that prevented it from taking off in the same way that Gutenberg’s press did, despite attempts being made up to 4000 earlier. The Stephen Fry documentary also pointed out that Gutenberg grew up among vineyards, where he would have been familiar with wine-presses, on which he may have based his prototype printing press. He was funded by “proto-venture-capitalists” like Fust, but it was his winning-over of the Catholic church through the printing of mass-produced indulgence letters and eventually his full Bible that really convinced anyone of the viability of his invention.

Because we currently live in an age where everything under the sun appears in print, we tend to think of the invention of printing as value-neutral and all-encompassing, but what the readings this week show is that it was actually a very particular and context-specific process, and that the fact that it happened in the way it did—in German wine country, printing books in the Roman alphabet, printing leaves between covers at all as opposed to more flexible, rollable broadsheets or scrolls—wasn’t inevitable, but a product of Gutenberg having access to the appropriate methods and materials and leveraging the right connections. 

Mass-market printing is seen as a democratization of knowledge, and to some degree it definitely was, but the physical form that knowledge is conveyed in is inextricably linked to the content of the knowledge itself. In the Gutenberg documentary Stephen Fry calls books “the building blocks of civilization” and Gutenberg’s press “the most revolutionary advance in technology since the wheel.” But it’s interesting to examine what kind of civilization is built with those blocks, what that wheel advances, and what could have been otherwise if other cultures had had the material and linguistic advantages that Gutenberg did.